Guest Blogger: John Hooper, author of the Kindle Single, "Fatal Voyage"
Fatal Voyage describes the terrifying tick-tock of the January sinking of the Costa Concordia cruise ship, and its deadly aftermath--with fresh new details reported by John Hooper, the Rome correspondent for The Guardian, who covered the disaster from the Tuscan island of Giglio.
Sometimes life can take you in a long, broad arc back to somewhere you thought you had long ago consigned to memory.
On my very earliest visit to Italy, at the age of 18, I was asked by an opera singer to skipper his powerboat. The first trip was to be around the island of Giglio. I botched it hopelessly, and was sacked on our return to Porto Ercole.
Scroll forward many years -- years I have mostly spent as a newspaper foreign correspondent -- to the morning of January 14th, 2012. I am in bed in Rome with a bout of flu when I am woken up to be told that there has been a shipwreck in the night. The flu has to be forgotten as I drive at breakneck, and doubtless illegal, speeds up the Via Aurelia to Porto Santo Stefano where the survivors are being brought ashore.
The next day, I manage to hitch a ride on a Coast Guard patrol boat to Giglio where the stricken liner, the Costa Concordia, has come to grief. Within an hour or so I am on the rocks by the ship watching from less than 100 meters away as the last of the survivors to be rescued alive is winched out on a stretcher.
Thus began my involvement with a story that brims with drama -- and still holds a number of mysteries.
In writing Fatal Voyage, I have had the benefit of access to material gathered by the prosecutors in their continuing investigation into the causes of the disaster. But, while I hope readers will find in the story new facts and original perspectives, my overriding aim has been to write a minute-by-minute narrative that brought to life the terrifying reality of what it was like to be trapped aboard a vast, capsizing ship.
To try to do that, I needed to interview someone who had been on the Costa Concordia throughout the various phases of the emergency: someone with good powers of description and, ideally, a knowledge of the sea. I found the perfect interviewee in Dean Ananias, a retired Californian schoolteacher who served in the US Navy during the Vietnam War.
For well over an hour, he talked me through his experiences and those of his wife and two daughters – heart-stoppingly frightening experiences that led them on four occasions to say their good-byes, believing their luck had run out and that they were about to die. By the time I finished speaking to Dean, my own pulse was racing and, when I put down my notebook, I let out a very long “Phew …”
I hope you’ll feel something of the same when you come to the end of Fatal Voyage.
--John Hooper
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