Into the Raging Sea. Rachel Slade

Jack stood at the steering wheel, watching for shrimp boats, pleasure boats, anything the huge ship could crush as it slowly made its way downriver.

      In his resonant baritone, perfect for late-night jazz radio, Eric would occasionally call out a command, anticipating current changes ahead to keep the vessel on course. “Left 10.”

      “Left 10,” Jack Jackson repeated from behind the wheel and turned accordingly, causing the ship’s massive rudder far below to swing ten degrees to port. The heavily loaded El Faro heeled over slightly with each turn. She was tender, sensitive, slow to right herself, but not unpleasant. That’s how this class of ship moved.

      As usual, there was very little chatter among the people on the bridge, just another trip on a calm autumn evening down the coast of Florida. Mariners are comfortable standing in silence for hours at a time, staring out at the sea. It’s part of the job. Jack and Davidson talked a little about the weather with Eric. Something was brewing out there, but El Faro was a fast ship. Davidson said that the storm would cut north and they would shoot down under it.

      Eric could hear Second Mate Danielle Randolph on the two-way radio overseeing the men securing the deck and organizing lines at the stern of the ship. She’d spent the whole afternoon directing stevedores and checking cargo. Soon she’d head back to her room to catch a few more hours of sleep before coming up on the bridge for her midnight watch.

      “Dead slow ahead,” Eric said as they approached land’s end. When they reached St. Johns Point, just past Mayport Naval base, the coastline peeled back as El Faro moved into open waters. So far above it all, Eric could feel the thrum of the twenty-five-foot propeller turned by the ship’s steam turbine whenever they put on the rudder. By the time the ship reached the mouth of the river, stars were out. The vessel and her cargo were a black silhouette against the dusky sea and sky.

      About seven miles out, just before ten o’clock, Eric retrieved his GPS antenna from the bridge wing, packed his bag, and shook the captain’s hand. Chief Mate Steve Shultz walked him down to the main deck. Eric looked over the side and saw his pilot boat pulling up alongside. He gingerly climbed down the rope ladder, made it safely to his ride, gripped the handrail of his boat and looked up. From the top of the ladder, Shultz smiled and waved. The pilot boat pulled away from El Faro and headed back toward the lights of Jacksonville.

Chapter 3

       Tropical Storm Joaquin

      29.07°N -79.16°W

      El Faro steamed south throughout the night hugging Florida’s Atlantic coast.

      Two hours before dawn on September 30, Captain Davidson and Chief Mate Shultz met on the ship’s bridge. Since leaving Jacksonville the night before they’d traveled 147 nautical miles, putting them eighty miles east of Daytona Beach. Now they needed to make a decision: continue on their direct route to Puerto Rico or take a southerly detour along the west side of the Bahamas.

      Above them, the night sky was clear. A handful of Tropical Cyclone Advisories had come in from the National Hurricane Center (NHC) overnight. Each time they did, a dot-matrix printer above the satellite-fed computer would automatically type out the message. The latest was advisory number 10:

      TROPICAL STORM JOAQUIN FORECAST/ADVISORY NUMBER 10: 0900 UTC [5:00 a.m.] WED SEP 30 2015: TROPICAL STORM CENTER LOCATED NEAR 25.4N 72.5W AT 30/0900Z. PRESENT MOVEMENT TOWARD THE WEST-SOUTHWEST AT 5 KT. MAX SUSTAINED WINDS 60 KT WITH GUSTS TO 75 KT.

      In the silence, darkness, and coolness of the final hour before dawn, Davidson used his chief mate as a sounding board as he tried to determine whether Joaquin posed a threat.

      Shultz was taller and softer than Davidson, and a year older. His thin brown mustache and sparse goatee obscured a smattering of acne scars. As chief mate, he was responsible for the loading and securing of cargo and overseeing the unlicensed crew. Although weather routing was the second mate’s job, Shultz was flattered that Davidson had opted to consult with him that morning.

      “This NHC report puts the storm further south than last night,” Shultz observed, studying the newest message out of Miami.

      Davidson didn’t like Tropical Storm Joaquin’s slow, lumbering movements. It was traveling at about four knots. And the newest NHC assessment of the storm—that it was heading southwest—contradicted the ship’s forecasting software, which had the storm turning north. “Look, remember how we saw this storm out here the other day? It’s just festering,” he said to Shultz. “I’m anxious to see the newest BVS report.”

      El Faro was equipped with a third-party weather forecasting software package called Bon Voyage System (BVS). Its interface is lush, much more visually inviting than the all-caps text advisories coming from NOAA, which need to be plotted out by hand on the ship’s paper charts.

      On BVS, weather comes preplotted on a pastel-hued digital map. The tiny islands of the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos appear as beige strands in a light blue sea. Mariners can plug in their ship’s course and fast-forward through time to watch how weather systems are predicted to behave as they sail to their destination. Click and it’s tomorrow. Here’s your ship (based on your projected speed and course) and here’s the weather. Click again and it’s two days from now. You’ve moved, the weather moved. Click, click, click. It’s five days in the future, and there you are, safely in port. It all looks so clear, so real. Solid and dependable.

      Nearly all people glean more information faster from data visualizations rather than alphanumeric code. That’s just how our brains work. Davidson, whose elegant handwriting reveals a man with a strong aesthetic sense, preferred to get his weather from the highly graphic BVS software. It put all the information—ship and storm location, plus their projected courses over time—on a single chart. On the bridge, this information was recorded on separate paper maps, one for the ship’s course, one for the storm, requiring a mental workout for an officer to precisely understand their relative positions. “I’m connecting now,” Davidson told Shultz and retreated downstairs to his stateroom to download the 5:00 a.m. BVS update via satellite.

      It took a minute for his desktop to get the information and process it, but once it did, a small red circle with two helical wings represented Joaquin. It hovered far east of the Bahamas. Around the storm was a series of wavy concentric circles—bands of color depicting predicted wind speed from dangerous orange to so-so yellow to benign light green, then darker cobalt, and finally, the neutral baby blue of a calm sea. A dark scarlet line showed Joaquin’s predicted path.

      The storm would move a little farther southwest, BVS told Davidson, then cut north toward South Carolina. El Faro could easily skirt below the system, as long as she kept up her speed. The captain clicked the forward arrow and saw the future: tomorrow, the ship would be halfway to San Juan and Joaquin would be nearing the US coast. As he clicked forward in time, El Faro moved along its expected route, and Joaquin inched farther and farther north, away from the islands. They’d be fine.

      What Davidson didn’t know was that due to a clerical error, the 5 a.m. BVS forecast he’d downloaded that morning was identical to the one sent six hours prior. Because BVS took several hours to process NHC data before issuing a report, that error meant the weather forecast Davidson was looking at was based on raw data nearly eighteen hours old. The report depicted Joaquin as a northbound tropical storm when, in fact, by dawn on September 30, most forecasters, including the NHC, recognized the system as a slow-moving, full-blown Category 3 hurricane that might not budge from its southwesterly track.

      According to Davidson’s BVS report, they’d see some weather—winds and waves, maybe twelve to fifteen feet—the aftershocks of the storm. He sent the update to the computer terminal on the bridge for the other officers to see. “This doesn’t look too bad,” Shultz said, examining the projection when the captain joined him. “The ship can handle it.”

      “We’ll see what the schedule looks like,”