El Faro

Why did it head into Joaquin?

It does seem like poor judgment. Back in ’98, a month after Patricia and I took a cruise on it (and a couple months before she started a job in Puerto Rico), the Fantome went down in Hurricane Mitch, with all hands (though they’d dropped off non-essential crew in Belize City). It was kind of shocking, because we just had met many of them. They were trying to take the ship out to sea, to keep it from getting battered in the harbor. But hurricane tracking wasn’t as good back then. They thought it was going to head toward the Yucatan, and so they headed southeast, but the storm took a turn and they went right into the heart of it.

Ironically, a Honduran woman who was washed out to sea in the flooding was rescued, after she was found holding on to some floating debris by aircraft patrols looking for debris or survivors from the ship. If it hadn’t gone down she probably would have died.

[Monday-morning update]

Sad, but not surprising news. The Coast Guard is declaring the ship sunk. That’s pretty much a foregone conclusion when you’re in a major hurricane with no propulsion.

One thought on “El Faro”

  1. Why, indeed.

    The Fantome was effectively trapped in a triangular body of water, with land on two sides, Mitch on the third. Mitch kept changing course, and so did Fantome. Unfortunately, they ended up trapped, and had one last ditch gambit; try for the navigable quarter of the core. But Mitch was Cat5, there really wasn’t a way out.

    Faro, on the other hand, looks like it kept to a constant 150 heading. She wasn’t trying to run or dodge. The captain, clearly, was totally negligent. Even if the home office ordered that course, the safety of the vessel and all aboard are the captain’s prime responsibility.

    I can’t imagine that the rest of the crew was aware of the hurricane until too late, or surely, simply for survival, they would have mutinied? It would be the only sane response to that course.

    I’ve spent a lot of time at sea. I can’t imagine doing nothing while the captain follows a course for disaster.

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