>>1954731No it's not normal, you can skirt the edges but sailing directly into the eye of a cat 4 in a old rustbucket was sucide. Nobody will ever be 100% sure of why the captain did certain things but based on the investigation it appears the captain was acting on out of date weather information supplied by a 3rd party rather than the NHC. Hurricane Joaquin took a somewhat unusual track that the NHC failed to correctly predict, this meant the old advisory data was dangerously wrong. Having read the entire audio transcript it seems the captain was under the impression that they would pass to the south of storm and that it was still only a tropical storm when in reality the storm was moving directly in front of them and had already reached cat 3.
Crew were vaguely aware of this and at first they assumed the captain knew what he was doing. However as it got dark out it became impossible to see what was happening only that the weather seemed to be getting worse. The ships anemometer wasn't working making it hard to judge their relative position to the storm. Eventually the crew tried to persuade the captain to use an alternate route but he only agreed to alter the course by a couple of degrees and then left the bridge for the night. The crew weren't aware just how badly the captain's judgement was impaired by the bad info and didn't challenge him further.
Reading through all of it there's an almost surreal aspect to it in that the crew seemed so blissfuly unaware of the danger. As if they were in denial of what was unfolding despite what the satellite weather reports were telling them what was going to happen. So accustomed to a sense of normalcy nobody said anything other than occasional comment that they should take a different route. IIRC at around 4am the weather got really noticeably bad and they tried to call the captain to the bridge. IMO this was the point of no return, he doomed them all by staying in his cabin when there was still time to escape the storm.