Run the Storm

by George Michelsen Foy

  No one mentions it at the time, perhaps because this seems self-evident to any navigating officer, but the strategy of staying on the left-hand side of a typical cyclone’s course in the northern hemisphere makes sense for three reasons: first (and for this it’s helpful to visualize the circle of a storm spinning counterclockwise, with directional indications all taken from the storm’s point of view), because winds on the right-hand curve of an advancing cyclone will tend to scoop a ship toward the hurricane’s center; second, because winds in the right-hand quadrant, blowing roughly in the direction of its advance, will be stronger by the speed of the hurricane’s motion; third, because hurricanes approaching the North American continent typically veer rightward, to the north, at or shortly after this stage of their development, and thus away from a ship on its left-hand side.

  Dead reckoning now puts El Faro off Elbow Cay, the southeastern corner of Abaco Island in the central Bahamas. A big stone lighthouse is built on the cay, easy for radar to spot, and it shows on the ship’s long-range screen, twenty-five miles to the right, or starboard, and a little behind the ship.

  Davidson returns to the bridge. “That’s a pretty healthy swell building there, Chief Mate,” he says.

  “Not totally unexpected,” Shultz replies. “It’s on the port quarter [the back, left side of the ship].”

  “As expected. I like the period of the swell, too. Ride nicer. We are really comfortable actually.”

  The “comfortable” nature of a ride is not just a matter of physical ease for the crew. Rough rides mean, almost inevitably, some cargo damage.

  Both men now look at the charts and forecasts for the return trip, which the captain says, if Joaquin does what’s predicted, will mean a miserable ride northbound (“Watch this thing morph like on the third, fourth, and fifth. It then explo-o-o-des,” he says a little later). And once more he reiterates the pitch he made to the company for going north up the Old Bahama Channel route he decided against for this run south: “What I’d like to do is get away from all this. Let this do what it does. [He’s talking about the return trip, up the Old Bahama Channel.] . . . I would expect anyone in the office would say, ‘Absolutely, you’re the only one, you’re the one here.’ Yeah, but you know I’m extending them a professional courtesy,” he continues, “and saying, ‘Hey man—you know—these are some of my thoughts and you got any objection to that?’ ”

  “So what did you say?” Able Seaman Hamm breaks in shortly afterward. “There could be a chance we’ll turn around?”

  “Oh, no, no, no. We’re not gonna turn around,” Davidson replies firmly.

  Around 4:21 p.m. the captain leaves. Presumably he consults his emails and finds Fisker-Andersen’s reply, for he comes back a few minutes later, announcing to Shultz, “We can go Old Bahamas Channel comin’ home.” They remind each other to tell Randolph when she comes back from supper, presumably so she can get charts ready, and then Davidson, clearly relieved, exclaims, “Old Bahamas—northbound!” and Hamm joins in happily, “Woo-ooh!”

  The second mate, coming back to relieve Shultz and Davidson so they can eat dinner, sorts through the paper charts that the ship will use to go through the Old Bahama Channel. And then the 5:00 p.m. SAT-C forecast chatters in. Randolph examines it intently. “Looks like the hurricane is right over our track here. Our old trackline . . . so, two in the morning . . . it should be right here.” She starts chuckling. “Looks like this storm’s coming right for us. Aah, you gotta be kidding me.”

  Her chuckles swell to outright laughter, and this might be a measure of real worry on Randolph’s part. Her roommate at Maine Maritime, Claire Lewis, now captain of a seagoing tug with Crowley Maritime in Alaska, says later, “[Danielle] used her sense of humor as a way to deal with situations she either didn’t like or was uncomfortable with. I clearly remember her stressing about a paper due in one of our classes . . . and how she wasn’t going to get it done on time. Instead of freaking out about it, she instead was laughing. Laughing and joking about how, if she botched this paper, it would be the first step on her road to ruin.”

  “Max winds eighty-five—gusts to one hundred and five knots,” Randolph reads now.

  “We’re gonna get our ass ripped,” says Larry Davis, who has just come up to the bridge to relieve Hamm.

  “We are gonna go right through the fuckin’ eye.”

  “Kiss those containers good-bye.”

  “Gonna get to sleep fast tonight,” Randolph adds, “ ’cause I think you and I are gonna be the lucky ones—we’re gonna get the brunt of the storm during our normal . . . watch hours.”

  Later, when the regular watch standers return to the bridge, Randolph and Davis head for their cabins. Able Seaman Frank Hamm is still nervous. “Doesn’t look pretty,” he tells Shultz. They both are looking at the SAT-C forecast, each adjusting his glasses to read. Davidson is currently in his office, looking for the BVS package, which comes in as a Microsoft Outlook attachment to an email sent via Inmarsat to the office computer; if it’s visible on the bridge, that’s because the captain forwarded it there. This is one of the little quirks of El Faro’s system, not very important in itself, but even the small delay it causes might affect decisions under the pressure of time, on the bridge in later hours. And it prevents mates from reading BVS forecasts if the skipper neglects to send them. “That don’t look too good right there,” Hamm continues. “That red . . . I don’t like that.”

  Hamm mentions the CDs, of R&B and house music, that he mixes and sells to crew members; he doesn’t want his stock-in-trade flying around in rough weather.

  Shultz points to his coffee mug. “See, this here is my favorite coffee cup. It’s goin’ in the sock drawer. I’m not gonna let it sit out on my deck.” As if it were the same topic, which it is in a sense, Shultz adds, “I’ve seen water chest deep on Second Deck . . . it’s no joke.” Clearly the image of water flooding 2nd Deck triggers another image in the mate’s mind, of what might happen if seawater found access from 2nd Deck, the lowest semi-open deck in the hull, to the supposedly watertight areas below. “Yeah, when I said you know those scuttles need to be dogged—not just flipped down—they need to be spun and sealed.”

  Hamm has a similar nightmare running. “I mean—I’ve been on ships . . . ya get your sea legs—and we was like, ‘Whoa, whoa,’ you know what I’m sayin’? And it’s cra-a-azy, spray came all the way like basically over the top . . . of the trailers like this, like when waves and spray just come back.

  “I ain’t never seen—these containers with chains—dropping, destroyed,” he continues. “Know what I’m sayin’? Just, I ain’t never been in nothin’ like that before. Knock on wood, I won’t be part of nothin’ like that.”

  Then Davidson’s back on the bridge. Shultz looks at him and clears his throat, probably wondering, because of how firm the captain’s been about not giving too much ground to Joaquin, if he should bring up the idea of diverting farther. Finally he does.

  “Umm, would . . . would you consider goin’ the other side of San Salvador?”

  But if Shultz is worried about the captain’s reaction to such relative prudence, Davidson surprises him: “Yeah, I thought about that.”

  The two men move to the chartroom, to a big desk on which the paper chart of the Central Bahamas is laid out; a function, perhaps, of El Faro’s lack of an operational electronic-chart display,XII but also because a paper chart, typically three and a half feet wide by three deep, affords a physically more generous view of the waters they travel in; given their need to take in the big picture, it makes sense. The captain and mate discuss the details of leaving El Faro’s current track, which skirts the Bahamas chain to the northeast and doesn’t break through, in order to cut inside: dip behind the island of San Salvador, through a channel between San Salvador and Rum Cay, and then out to open ocean again.

  They work out the changes the detour would entail, where the ship will alter course to steer her half circle around the island, dodging behind land in on
e of the few places there’s enough deep water to do so.

  “That’s what I was aiming for,” Shultz says, “lots and lots of deep water.” And later: “We’ll stay well clear of that shallow spot.”

  The dodge is a step in the right direction given that El Faro should be in position to veer southwest behind the island, taking advantage of its protection, at the very time they are due to be close to Joaquin’s projected track. It’s not a big detour, just a tactical dogleg that soon brings them back to their previous track line and will add less than twenty miles to their overall route: a quick duck in, duck out. But if the storm stays far enough northeast it will give the ship a crucial respite from the roundhouse swings of the hurricane’s wind and waves.

  Even so, the mate urges Davidson to prolong the detour by a few miles around the next island to the southeast, a glorified sandbar named Samana Cay. “If you agree—well—we’ll stay south of this island as well before we come back out . . . in this area here.”

  “I don’t think we’ll need to,” Davidson says.

  Possibly emboldened by Davidson’s ready agreement to the San Salvador detour, Shultz proposes extending it through a channel that would take El Faro even farther south, from the San Salvador channel to another skirting Crooked and Acklins Islands, and onward through what’s known as Crooked Island Passage, which finally rejoins the lower portion of the Old Bahama Channel off the eastern end of Cuba. Then they could continue eastward to Puerto Rico.

  “No,” Davidson replies curtly.

  The two men plug course changes and waypoints into the ship’s GPS, and in the midst of navigating, perhaps because Davidson finally got his reply from Fisker-Andersen, their dialogue veers to head office and scheduling, and from there to the opinion both believe their corporate superiors at Tote have of them.

  “When they lay this up [in shipyard], they’re not gonna take us back,” Shultz says.

  “No, I know.”

  “. . . I hear what you’re sayin’, Captain. I’m in line for the chopping block.”

  “Yeah, same here.”

  “I’m waitin’ to get screwed,” Shultz says, and “Same here,” Davidson says again.

  One can imagine the two men staring forward out the bridge windows as they talk, looking into what they see as overcast, even stormbound career paths; observing the sea, always, for they are mariners. Even with the bridge’s air-conditioning the air is dense with humidity the hurricane is pushing ahead of itself, vapor drags at the men’s clothes and weighs down their lungs a bit. It is almost 7:00 p.m., and the sun setting behind and to the right of El Faro stabs blades of light, sharp and sparkling as a killer’s knife, between the thick ribs of clouds, bloodying the sky above, the dance of whitecaps below.

  9

  Back in the engine room, Schoenly and Thomas are on watch this evening, their rounds not limited to the second engineer’s sphere; they cover the system entire. The gauges at the control station show the different working pressures of water and steam, tracking the change of state as water turns to vapor to superheated steam, then cools back to water again. The gauges show the various temperatures of fuel and lube oil, pumps and bearings; the wellness of the electrical circuit, the rpm of gears and shaft. Glass bull’s-eyes through which the golden fuel, the darker lubricating oil, can be observed show no evidence of movement, which paradoxically means the oil, the heavy fuel, are in fact flowing well, without visible interruption or air bubbles. Everything is okay, no one has to call the bridge to report problems, as the chief would certainly do if necessary; personal issues, such as not getting along too well with Davidson, are irrelevant to a guy who does things as conscientiously and by the book as Pusatere does.

  Schoenly might not be interested in the bureaucracy of higher rank, but that doesn’t mean he’s uninterested in his duties as second engineer, his experience having given him the sense of balance all good engineers must have, of how any one component of the plant depends on the rest, of how malfunction in one part can weaken or bring another down. Therefore he more than likely pays particular attention to the reduction gear, which has been vibrating more than usual of late. He looks closely, as well, at the gauges monitoring lube-oil flow in three areas: the main turbine’s forward “journal” bearing (a circle of ball bearings surrounding a shaft), which is running six degrees hotter than normal; the strut bearings in the propeller-shaft tube; and the sump under the reduction gears. Much as a doctor sends patients’ blood and urine samples to Quest, samples of lube oil from different parts of the machinery are sent at regular intervals to a shoreside laboratory for testing. The strut bearing is a stout steel appendage under the ship’s stern through which the propeller shaft runs, spinning on those oiled bearings, and the results for that area came back with an “alert” score for high levels of tin, indicating the metal there was breaking down. All of these items have been scheduled for inspection at the Bahamas shipyard.

  The oil lubricating the turbines themselves, as dripped down and collected in the engine’s lowest sump, deep aft under the reduction gear, tested fine; and the electrically powered oil pumps, two DeLaval-Imo screw-type machines each big as a full-grown man, whine smoothly, powerfully moving the pure, viscous fluid through a spiderweb of yellow-colored pipes. The pumps’ operating principle, supposedly invented by Archimedes in the third century BCE, is as reliable as it is ancient, one or more screws (or helices) driven by a shaft that scoops up, at one end, liquid that is carried along on a screw’s continually winding thread to the other end. In these machines the oil is sucked into a pipe that hangs ten inches over, and twenty-two inches to starboard of, the sump’s base in the lowest part of the gear housing. The oil is then “screwed” upward, splurting over the pump’s innards as well as up and over the turbines. Like the turbines and boilers these pumps are part of the original plant; but with few moving parts, and all of them self-lubricating, they usually cause no trouble. The seal on the forward pump is due for replacement, and this is standard maintenance. The aft pump is running 3 psi lower than normal, which calls for a complete rebuild. But even if trouble were to occur in one pump, setting off multiple alarms at the control console, the second would kick in and take over; and if for some reason both pumps went off-line at the same time, the backup, gravity-fed tank would dump its load of oil into the turbine, giving engineers between two and ten minutes to shut down the turbine before it seized up.XIII

  Still, an unexplained leak occurred in one of the pumps several months ago, with a significant quantity of oil lost, lowering the level of oil in the sump to twenty-two inches. The incident, according to a Tote manager, was probably due to malfunction of a seal or gasket. Reporting it to the Coast Guard would not have been required. But history such as this causes an engineer to gaze carefully and long at the machinery responsible, feeling under it for leakage, resting his hand almost sensually on the casing to check for arrhythmia. Like any engineer he thinks his way inside the pump, imagining its guts, from the suction pipe that dips into the sump, siphoning oil, to the whirling helix that drags the thick fluid to spray over the hot spinning machines. As he works he might well discuss what he’s doing with Mitch Kuflik, come down from the gym a little early for his eight-to-twelve watch to see how everything’s going and lend a hand if needed. Kuflik’s sense of involvement, of responsibility, is strong; like Davidson, Kuflik’s normal schedule should have taken him off El Faro this trip, but he opted to stay on because Dylan Meklin was joining the ship. Training a greenhorn third takes a lot of time, and Kuflik didn’t want to saddle Mitch Holland, the other third engineer, with extra work.

  Mathias, too, has a strong sense of responsibility and doesn’t mind extra work. Anyway, it could be that the headaches of maintaining an old plant, like keeping used farm machinery running, give him pleasure; at any rate he rarely complains about them. The oilers are sometimes less reticent. Eddie Pittman, a former oiler on El Faro, said of the ship’s engine room, “The question was not what wasn’t working, the question was wh
at was working.” He describes part of his job as standing at the console to keep an eye on the gauges, then making rounds to see what problems are surfacing up close and personal. “Anomalies all the time; if the vacuum pump’s gauge goes down, if a feed pump leaks, you go to see what’s happening.” But the complaints rarely go beyond the griping stage. “You don’t want to be, ‘Why’m I doing this?’ If it’s working, I’m not going to be a nuisance about it, anyway I didn’t feel it was that much of a danger. . . . It’s a steam culture, everyone knows what to do.”

  Below the pumps and the deck plates under the engine room’s nether level is the dark underworld into which oiler Shawn Thomas sometimes peers to check for telltale leaks from engine systems or from the hull itself. Some oilers do not much trust the hull. They have found water in the bilges, over and above what one might expect from condensation or wash-down pumps or from spray that somehow made its way through the vent openings on 2nd Deck all the way down to the Tank Top. El Faro is strongly built compared to some modern ships, but even in deepest steel her age shows: last January, a classification society inspection revealed holed and wasted steel in a transverse bulkhead in the forepeak. And a 2015 hull survey found that fillet welds—joins burned into the trough between two angled slabs of steel—had fractured over a length of several feet in a portside ballast tank, causing the tank to crack away from two supporting frames. These flaws are due to be repaired in shipyard.

  Also, El Faro was lengthened. That extra section of hull, 90.9 feet in length and 92 feet wide, was constructed in 1993 at the Bender Yard, in Mobile, Alabama. El Faro (or Northern Lights, as she was called at the time) was then dry-docked next door and sliced clean in two at the forward bulkhead of 3-hold, between frames 134 and 135. The two halves were dragged apart and the new section rolled into place and welded, front and back, to the corresponding sections of the ship.