full speed ahead. Port labor is also pricey. Time and fuel—it was always a delicate balance.
There was pressure to save on both, and Davidson had blown it once. He wasn’t going to blow it twice in the same season.
Davidson knew that early on Friday morning, two days from now, stevedores and hundreds of trucks would be lined up at San Juan Port waiting to unload El Faro’s cargo. By Friday afternoon, supermarket shelves across the island would be fully stocked with the goods she carried. By Monday, provisions would be low, and the trucks would line up again for El Yunque, El Faro’s sister ship, to bring another haul. TOTE’s ships were Puerto Rico’s lifeline. Any delay in arrival would set off a costly chain of events.
Davidson couldn’t afford to screw up with TOTE again. In the cutthroat world of shipping, prudence didn’t always pay. As a master, you had to be willing to push your luck. He’d lost a good job once before for playing it too safe when he ordered a tugboat assist after one of his ships developed steering problems.
Davidson decided to take his chances with Joaquin. Atlantic hurricanes always cut north eventually, and the ship was fast. They could easily outrun this one.
He and Shultz marked a point on their map east of the Bahamas and set a course nine degrees more southerly than the normal route, a slight change which they hoped would keep them out of trouble. “I think that’s a good little plan, Chief Mate,” Davidson said after spending an hour hashing it out. “At least I think we got a little distance from the center. We’re gonna be further south of the eye, about 60 miles south of it. It should be fine. We are gonna be fine. Not should be—we are gonna be fine.”
He knew they’d probably feel the aftereffects of the storm and wanted the ship secured for heavy weather. “Take a hard look at some of that cargo down there,” he advised his chief mate. “Delegate the men to look at the lashings as you deem necessary.”
Davidson’s warning about the lashings made the chief mate reconsider what he’d witnessed the day before when the stevedores were loading the trailers and containers onto the ship. He didn’t think they’d secured them properly but didn’t make a big deal out of it. “The longshoreman was doing the lashing wrong and I was trying to help,” Shultz told Davidson. He was the new guy on the ship and felt awkward criticizing their work.
“Go right to the foreman—cut out the middleman,” Davidson advised him. “I do it all the time.”
“They just don’t do the lashing the way it outta be done,” Shultz repeated in frustration. It was his job to make sure loading was done right, but it had all happened so fast, and he hadn’t yet established solid relationships with the workers he was overseeing.
Shifting cargo doesn’t only cause damage, it can break loose and kill a man. It can go right over the deck or wreak havoc in the holds. It can set off a domino effect during heavy seas, throwing the ship over, causing a perilous list. Globally, ships lose an average of about six hundred containers each year to storms, collisions, and groundings. Now that they were at sea, Shultz worried whether they had enough chains to double- or triple-lash if they needed to. If he’d looked at the cargo-securing inventory, he’d know that the vessel was short 170 lashing rods and missing more than a thousand required turnbuckles and twistlocks. Even if he had the equipment on hand, though, trying to lash at sea was miserable—it’s nearly impossible to maneuver around a loaded ship like that to chain things down. The cargo is packed tight, and if something did come loose while you were trying to secure it, you could be crushed. They were too far gone. Hopefully, the chains would hold.
Shultz spent the next several minutes logging alternative routes and waypoints into the ship’s GPS system. He wasn’t completely sure he trusted Joaquin, and he wanted to give the other officers various options if they ran into trouble. The storm had proven an unpredictable and erratic foe; Shultz wanted to work out as many escape routes as he could.
Logging in all those new waypoints (which made a high-pitched beep with each entry), irritated Davidson.
“It’s a good little diversion,” he scoffed at Shultz. “Are you feelin’ comfortable with that, Chief Mate?”
“Better. Yes, sir.”
“You can’t run every single weather pattern,” Davidson barked. His chief mate was already rubbing him the wrong way, and they’d only been up for an hour.
Shultz didn’t want to piss off Davidson. He was brand-new to the ship, new to the captain, and relatively new to the Atlantic. He’d come from shipping for years in the Pacific Northwest and was happy to be on the Puerto Rican run, at least temporarily, closer to Florida where his petite native Brazilian wife and two teens lived. He was a dedicated husband who vigorously embraced his wife’s Catholicism.
Nothing was more sacred aboard a ship than respecting the chain of command. Though he had as much experience as Davidson, Shultz knew to defer to his captain in all things to ingratiate himself to his superior. If he thought that sixty miles from the eye of a major storm didn’t sound right, he kept it to himself. A challenge like that could be viewed as insubordination. Shultz had kids approaching college age. Like everyone else, he had expenses. He needed this job.
Outside in the wild Atlantic, however, there were ominous signs.
At 6:40 a.m., Davidson watched the rising sun set the eastern horizon aflame, reminding him of an old adage. “Look at that red sky over there,” he said to Shultz. “Red in the morning, sailors take warning. That is bright.”
For thousands of years, sailors have viewed crimson skies at dawn as a bad omen. Science backs this up: Red has the longest wavelength in the color spectrum—powerful enough to penetrate the dust and moisture kicked up by an atmospheric event, such as a major storm. Other colors in the rainbow get scattered by thick storm clouds, leaving the sky a blazing scarlet.
Dawn on September 30, 2015, was distorted by a terrific atmospheric event brewing dead ahead of El Faro.
28.42°N -78.47°W
Third Mate Jeremie Riehm arrived on the bridge shortly before his 8:00 a.m. shift and watched the tropical sun rise into an unctuous sky. Another steamy Caribbean day ahead. The air-conditioning had been cranking all night and now it was chilly on the bridge in spite of the stickiness of the morning outside.
The scorching sun would soon beat down on the metal roof of the wheelhouse, so Jeremie wore a T-shirt and shorts under a light jacket. His thick brown hair flopped into his eyes. He’d brusquely brush it up and back with his fingers giving it a permanent flip. Forty-six years old, he looked like a rugged, slightly stockier Brad Pitt.
“You hear about the storm?” Chief Mate Shultz asked Jeremie.
“Yes, I’m aware of it,” he answered. “Caught a little bit of it on the news. I heard it’s gonna be a hurricane tomorrow or later today according to the Weather Channel.”
Shultz took Jeremie over to the chart table to show the new course he and the captain—who was downstairs getting breakfast—had prepared earlier that day. The chief mate pointed to Joaquin’s projected course, drawn in wax pencil on a clear plexiglass panel laid over the paper nautical chart. Tiny numbers scattered
