to the contrary. During World War II, a rogue wave nearly sunk the Queen Mary ocean liner. The thousand-foot-long luxury passenger ship had been stripped down to carry American troops to Europe, and in December 1942, it was loaded with more than sixteen thousand American soldiers when a ninety-foot-high wave smacked her broadside, causing the ship to roll 52 degrees. There were plenty of witnesses to vouch for that one.
It wasn’t until modern equipment began recording rogue waves that scientists finally acknowledged their existence. On January 1, 1995, a laser aboard an oil rig in the North Sea recorded an eighty-four-foot-high wave. Since then sea buoys, satellites, mariners, and passengers have recorded these waves, confirming that indeed, they’re no myth.
Twenty-two minutes after Charlie texted him about Joaquin, Davidson texted back: “yup . . . thx for the heads up.”
Charlie sat on that sofa all day, watching the weather.
Monitoring the storm was the second mate’s job.
Danielle should’ve been obsessing about it just like him.
Charlie knew she wasn’t. He was fond of his fellow Mainer, a perky, freckled redhead half his age. He’d taken her under his wing like a little sister a decade ago when she joined the company while a cadet at Maine Maritime Academy. Back then, she was all energy, but ten years of shipping was wearing her down. Danielle recently found out she’d been passed over for a promotion to the new LNG ships. That killed what was left of her enthusiasm for her shipping career, and now he thought she was clocking in, clocking out.
Basic tasks seemed to elude her, like correctly plotting the ship’s location during her watch. She didn’t actively seek extra work to keep things running smoothly on the decrepit ship. Why bother? TOTE had kicked her to the curb after she’d sacrificed so much of her life to this career. Danielle started taking over-the-counter meds to fall asleep during her breaks and slamming caffeine to stay awake during her watch. These days, she went unusually quiet when her closest friends in Maine asked her about her life at sea.
And there was more. As Charlie was preparing to leave the ship to go home this last time, Danielle pulled him into her cabin and told him something about Captain Davidson he didn’t want to hear.
There was no way she was thinking about weather.
But Charlie was.
He couldn’t take it anymore. At 6:31 p.m., he texted Davidson again: “Whats your plan?”
“we’ll steam our normal direct route to SJP,” Davidson texted back a few minutes before 7:00. “no real weather to speak of until the evening of the 30th. all forecasted information indicates Joaquin will remain north of us and by the morning of the 01st we will be on the backside of her. we schedule to depart the dock at 20:00 tonight so everything is shaping up in our favor.”
“Cool if u have to we have routes thru mauagiez crooked isle or ne prov chnl,” Charlie reminded him. This was shorthand for the channels between the islands along the way deep enough that El Faro could use them as escape routes to the lee side if anything should brew up out there.
“Watchin sox presently up 1-0 over ny,” he wrote.
“2-0 sox,” Charlie added a few minutes later.
“go sox . . .” Davidson replied.
27.37°N -77.43°W
Just before noon, Second Mate Danielle took over Jeremie’s watch on the bridge. She’d worked from midnight to four o’clock a.m., gone to bed, showered, eaten, and was back up reporting for duty. Jeremie walked her through the new course Davidson had plotted. He showed her the hurricane’s position on the chart and warned her that it was moving southwest at a very lazy, very unusual five knots.
Danielle knew that getting close to any storm was plain stupid. Up on the bridge rolling in high seas, you were bound to get seasick sooner or later, regardless of how experienced a mariner you were. Danielle didn’t like her captain’s glibness, either, considering the seriousness of their situation. “He’s telling everybody down there, Oh, it’s not a bad storm. It’s not so bad. It’s not even that windy out. I’ve seen worse,” she told Jeremie.
He rolled his eyes and kept quiet. What else could he do? He was only third mate. He walked out to get lunch and unwind before his evening shift.
Danielle turned to her helmsman, Jackie Jones, a Jacksonville man in his late thirties with five children below age twenty, and continued her rant: “He’s saying, It’s nothing. It’s nothing! And here we are going way off course. If it’s nothing, then why the hell are we going on a different track line? I think he’s just trying to play it down because he realizes we shouldn’t have come this way. He’s saving face.”
Davidson showed up a few minutes later, disappointed that they weren’t moving as fast as he’d hoped. They were steaming at a healthy 18.9 knots. “Damn, we’re getting killed with this speed,” he said inexplicably.
“I think now it’s not a matter of speed,” Danielle warned him. “When we get there, we get there, as long as we arrive in one piece,” she added.
The prospect of sailing into a hurricane filled her with dread, which she tried her best to laugh off once she and Jackie were alone. Humor was Danielle’s way of dealing with things beyond her control. She turned on Sirius XM radio and sang along to contemporary hits, then switched over to Dr. Laura on Fox News.
“Two of the Polish guys were standing there when he said that,” she told Jackie, referring to the five extra hands hired to install heating coils on El Faro’s ramps and decks so that trailers wouldn’t slip and slide on the ice when the vessel returned to the Pacific Northwest. It wasn’t unusual to have extra workers fixing things while El Faro was at sea. A ship in port is a ship losing money. “I wanted to make sure they knew the word hurricane. One of them smiled and said, Hurricane! Yes!”
Danielle laughed. “They’re all excited about it. Ah, if they only knew. I remember going through a couple of storms on the El Morro. Shit was flying everywhere.”
At 12:24, Danielle saw a thick black line on the horizon—the bar of the storm. “There’s our weather,” she said ominously. “The storm gets really big on the third or the fifth of October,” she added, studying the forecast. “Warning in red for this weekend for rain—severe flooding and rain. They never mentioned Maine, though. They didn’t say, Two more days and then it’ll cover the entire state of Maine. Yeah, you know, some people live up there.”
Like Davidson, Danielle had grown up on the coast of Maine. Her parents were retired navy; her mother worked as a hairdresser, her dad as a handyman. Danielle’s grandmother and great-aunt had emigrated from France after World War II. The older women used to converse rapidly and loudly in French. Danielle understood what they were saying, but she never got the hang of speaking the language.
Danielle spent her childhood in Rockland, a small town on Penobscot Bay, but life wasn’t easy for her as a girl. She wanted to belong, wanted to feel a part of something, but her world felt fragmented. Her family’s foreignness added to Danielle’s feelings
