LITMIR.BIZ

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acutely aware that in the world of big ships, complacency meant death. Now nearing sixty years old, he wanted to get out before his job killed him. Which it nearly did, twice.

      To bring ships into Jacksonville, Eric had to board them at sea. He rode in his pilot boat seven miles out to the vessel, at first invisible on the horizon, just a blip on the radar, then looming large as he and his driver pull alongside. Riding up next to the massive, impermeable steel hulls never ceased to give Eric a thrill. If the winds and seas were high, the ship could trace out a big, lazy circle in the water to create a temporary lee for the small pilot boat.

      Big ships rarely stop or drop anchor for pilots—they have so much momentum that they’d take miles to come to a halt, and even then, they’d drift with the winds and currents; instead, the pilot boat nestles up alongside like a pilot fish clinging to a whale shark, then tries to keep up with the ship, about 11 miles per hour. The two vessels aren’t ever tethered together.

      The small boat is outfitted with an external set of stairs leading to a platform, like a kitchen ladder that someone screwed onto its deck. Moored at the pilot association’s office, the stepladder steps off into the void. But alongside a thousand-foot-long ship, it’s the only way a pilot has any chance of climbing aboard.

      Once the boat is riding alongside the ship, a small door in the enormous hull opens, a friendly face pops out from the steel wall, and a hand drops down a rope ladder as the pilot boat’s driver tries to maintain the same speed and course as the ship. The pilot climbs his stepladder and then pauses, clinging to his platform, gauging the situation. The bottom rung of the huge ship’s rope ladder dangles a few feet away from the pilot’s shoes, but the two vessels are bobbing up and down at different rates. The pilot times his leap as the ship and pilot boat perform their version of synchronized swimming. He grabs hold of the rope ladder and scrambles up.

      I once took a piloting trip with Eric. I thought I was mentally prepared for that moment when you had to take that leap of faith. But when confronted with all this—the flimsy rope ladder, the wall of black steel, the deep water rushing below with nothing to catch me if I missed—I panicked. Freud says that those who are afraid of heights don’t trust their bodies not to jump. If my hands decided to let go, I would plummet between the two vessels and drown.

      “Grab on! Climb up,” Eric commanded. I reached out and gripped that rope ladder like my life depended on it, which it did. And then I scurried ten feet up the hull, ten steps straight up, holding my breath until I was safe on the deck, looking back down at Eric’s head as he followed me scaling the side of the ship.

      Pilots have missed that ladder. They’ve slipped and fallen into the sea where they were crushed between their boat and the ship. In October 2016, a pilot with more than a decade’s worth of experience died this way on the river Thames.

      Eric was once reaching for the ladder when his driver pulled away too soon, leaving him straddled between the two vessels. Eric was forced to make a split-second decision: jump for the ladder and risk missing it, or fall back into the pilot boat. He hurled himself toward the deck of his boat and saved his life but shattered his heel. He was out of work for months, and in immeasurable pain, but hated being on meds. His second accident was caused by his bag—caught on the pilot boat platform, it yanked him back, and when he fell onto the deck, he broke his back. He’s never fully recovered from that. But he’s alive.

      Pilots board a berthed container ship like anyone else—up the gangway or loading ramp.

      That’s how Eric got onto El Faro on the evening of September 29.

      He parked his car at Blount Island Marine Terminal at 7:30 and walked across the expanse of tarmac by the fading light to the ramp. As he approached El Faro, Eric regarded her dark blue steel hull. Like all massive ships, El Faro was a paean to modern engineering—a floating island capable of moving the weight of the Eiffel Tower through the ocean at 25 miles per hour. She was as long as the Golden Gate Bridge is high; it would take more than four minutes for a person to walk from bow to stern. Designed in the late 1960s, she was built for speed at a time when fuel was cheap and fast shipping fetched premium pricing. To reduce drag, she had a narrow beam that tapered steeply and evenly to her sharp keel.

      These days, the profit is in cargo. The more you take, the more money you make. So modern ships are bulkier and slower; megaships, like the 1,305-foot-long Benjamin Franklin, are fat all the way to their little nub of a keel and can carry up to eighteen thousand containers. (If you lined them up, they’d reach from Manhattan to Trenton, New Jersey.) These ships made El Faro look like a toy.

      Just about loaded up, El Faro sat low in the water, but Eric could still see her load line marks etched into her hull indicating she was safe to sail. Thick lines kept her tied to the dock as trucks and cars sped up her wide loading ramp, located at midships, in a fog of gas and diesel exhaust.

      Twelve stories above Eric, a crane operator labored in a glass-bottomed cab hanging from a track, hauling the final containers onto El Faro’s main deck.

      A working crane is like a massive version of the classic claw game, and watching it load ships is mesmerizing. On the dock below the crane, a longshoreman steers a flatbed truck into position next to the ship, then releases the clamps holding the container to the truck’s chassis. A typical container is forty feet long and can be as heavy as thirteen cars. The crane operator uses cables and winches to lower the “spreader” over the steel box—a steel frame that aligns with the container’s top four corners—and locks it in place like a tight-fitting lid. The spreader grips the container as the operator artfully swings it above El Faro’s deck, accommodating for the box’s languid movement, and just as momentum begins to pull it backward, he lowers it into its designated spot, using gravity’s pull to level it into place. Stevedores lash each box to the ship’s deck with steel fittings, tightened with turnbuckles. Stacks of containers are locked to one another like Legos.

      The frenzied choreography works most of the time but occasionally things happen—a container slips from the spreader’s grip and crashes back on the flatbed, or it lands misaligned and crushes a longshoreman’s hand as he’s leveling it into place, or a stevedore gets hit by one of the huge trailers being driven off the ship in a great rush.

      The huge loading cranes themselves also pose danger. They glide on two tracks that run parallel to the dock along its entire length, allowing the cranes to move from bow to stern and from ship to ship, stacking boxes. In 2008, a squall sent one 950-ton Jacksonville crane careening down the length of two football fields into the next, causing the steel constructs to twist and crumple into a heap of junk. It looked like spaghetti. It’s a rare event—the cranes come equipped with multiple brakes—but shows the kind of power packed in gale-force winds.

      Out of the din, Eric saw Jack Jackson coming down the ramp to greet him. Jack was the helmsman on the 8:00 to midnight watch that night; he’d stand at the ship’s wheel on the navigation bridge and take steering commands from Eric. When they reached the sea buoy, Eric would disembark, leaving the captain in charge.

      Sixty years old, sun-bleached yellow hair fading to white, ruddy face with a devilish grin, Jack had a wry sense of humor that could catch you off guard. He was the middle brother in a family of self-ascribed air force brats, mostly raised in New Orleans. Dad would show the kids pamphlets of the places they were moving next. Delaware! Beaches! Jack’s older sister, Jill, moved frequently; she was a restless soul. Younger brother, Glen, with his ginger hair and blue eyes, could’ve been Jack’s twin, but he was more a traveler of the mind.

      When Jack and Glen were boys in New Orleans in the 1960s, there were four major shipping companies keeping the port busy. They used to ride out to the big bend in the river to watch the ships. Two sunburned boys dreaming on the banks of the Mississippi. The boats were always going somewhere, just like their family, always moving. That’s where the fascination began, Glen says.

      Jack signed up with the merchant marine during the 1970s to explore the world, make some money, live free. He enjoyed the easy sea life delivering grain to Africa or going back and forth to Europe. In those days, ships would spend days or weeks in a port loading and unloading so he could get off and poke

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