I can guess what led up to this. The skipper set sail, knowing there was a storm out there in his way, but it was just a routine tropical depression and would no doubt break up, or move N and E as the forecasts predicted. So the fast route was chosen.

Just a few hours later, the storm had unexpectedly gotten bigger, and refused to move out of the way. There was still time to turn around and take the safer, more expensive route, but that would have cost time, money, and a colossal foul up in PR. There were people and companies expecting their vehicles and merchandise to arrive on time. A change in plans would be a major headache, and although the Captain’s word is law, Captains who don’t deliver cargoes on schedule too often have a way of not being Captain any more.

Still, It was only a matter of time before the storm got deflected by that trough, it had to happen, and there was still plenty of time.

By morning, the weather was deteriorating by the hour, and doing a 180 was out of the question, they were already too far along and the storm was picking up speed, it could outrun any ship. Going W into the Bahama archipelago was too dangerous; shallow waters, reefs, narrow channels, a thousand islands, shoal water, and finding yourself there at night would be disastrous if your GPS was knocked out. Changing course to the E would only send him deeper into the dangerous quarter of the cyclone, it was finally starting to make its turn to the NE.

Its like passing a semi on a curve, there comes a point where you are committed to going right into those oncoming headlights and all you can hope for is you will get there before they do.

*I’ve published this here before, but here it is again…

…Emilio invited me to attend the hearing that was investigating the grounding that had led to the oil spill. EPA was asked by the Coast Guard to attend, and he brought me along as an advisor because of my maritime experience. It may have been a Coast Guard hearing, but it was dominated by a strutting platoon of Puerto Rican lawyers and politicians who seemed determined to base their entire careers on this incident. The only problem was that the ship’s Greek skipper claimed to speak neither English nor Spanish, and the only person on the island who could be located to translate was a young woman who Emilio swore was a hooker he recognized from the Black Angus Lounge. Needless to say, translating logs and nautical terminology were outside the lady’s experience and the hearing, with it’s three way translations and totally befuddled defendant, was more like a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta than a sober legal proceeding. During a recess, I had an opportunity to take a good look at the ship’s charts and I could see exactly what had happened. The captain had been navigating by radar fixes, they leave distinctly unique marks on the chart when plotted. The coastal plain there is very flat, and the contours of the land run parallel to the shore, and mimic it’s shape. What he thought was the beach were radar echoes from higher ground further inland, and he was actually much closer to shore than he thought he was. He ran directly into a clearly charted reef, and then pumped some oil out to try and lighten ship and meet his schedule. I will be the last to judge another seaman’s mistakes, I’ve made too many of my own, but this man was lying. He had testified earlier that his radar had been down since he left Venezuela. When I pointed this out to the Coast Guard officer in charge, he simply shrugged his shoulders. It was pretty obvious that he had interpreted the charts correctly as well, but as Emilio pointed out, politics demanded that this case be settled by the local officials. An official cause for the grounding was never determined.

I’m sure each decision by the captain made sense at the time. May not have been the best, but was defensible. And when weather conditions required that he have power to his vessel, the engines go. When he needed perfect conditions on his ship, he didn’t have them. And then he was at the mercy of the storm.

Reminds me of a bug attempting to elude a spider. Bug enters the web, spider waits. Bug gets stuck, spider strikes. Everything the bug did made sense to him and getting stuck fouled things up.