Three years ago today, the cargo ship the El Faro sank off the coast of the Bahamas. The vessel had set off from Jacksonville, Florida on the night of September 29th on a routine run to Puerto Rico. The El Faro ran into Hurricane Joaquin and went down with all 33 of the ship's crew, many from New England, lost. The El Faro's crew and its captain, Michael Davidson, were seasoned, but the ship headed straight into the storm. Many wonder why. Author Rachel Slade has been looking for answers. Her book "Into the Raging Sea" explores the sinking of the El Faro. It includes portions of 26 hours of audio transcripts. Slade and Jenn Mathias of Kingston, Massachusetts spoke with WGBH's All Things Considered host Barbara Howard. Mathias' husband Jeff Mathias was chief engineer on the El Faro when it sank. The following transcript has been edited for clarity.

Barbara Howard: Rachel, I'll start with you. In this day and age, with sophisticated weather prognostications, how could they not have seen this?

Rachel Slade: In this case, we had a storm that was acting erratically from the very beginning. It was supposed to dissipate as soon as it formed. It did not. It was supposed to travel north and west. It did not. And the intensity kicked up very, very quickly.

Howard: You're hearing trouble from the start of those 26 hours of tape. What happens next?

Slade: The captain and chief mate debate what to do, and ultimately, the captain makes a decision that the storm is going to track north and they're going to be fine. So they continue on that route. And that is ultimately the route that the captain pretty much cleaves to the entire voyage.

Howard: So conditions worsen overnight, in the hours between September 30th and October 1st. And Captain Michael Davidson he's below deck, he's asleep. And I understand the second mate, Danielle Randolph, pushed for him to adopt a new course.

Slade: The ship was really being brutalized by the winds and the waves. Randolph finally called down to Captain Davidson, and she did wake him up and she said "I've plotted another course because I'm very concerned about what I'm seeing here in the weather forecast." That was the point of no return. And instead of approving her plan, he actually turned them closer into the hurricane.

Howard: Do you have any reason why that would happen?

Slade: We know that he did not look at the weather forecasts when she woke him up. We know that he did not download the latest information that was actually available to him at that time. Why did he do that, I don't know.

Howard: So things take a really dire turn in the early morning hours of October 1st. Tell us about that.

Slade: So around 6:30 in the morning, they lost propulsion, and now they were adrift. And that is the most dangerous situation for a ship in a storm. The water came rushing in, thousands of gallons of water per minute. They had bilge pumps which they were running, but they couldn't keep up with the influx of water, and the ship slowly listed further and further, and took on more more water.

Howard: At one point, they tried to contact shore?

Slade: At 7:07 a.m., around 20 minutes from when they lost communication, Captain Davidson did call shore side. Davidson was very calm and explained what was happening, that they had a list. But he assured that they had the situation under control, and that they were not abandoning ship at that time.

Howard: So he's called in the alarm. It's just minutes before the ship actually goes down. Tell me what happens then.

Slade: So you have the engineers eleven stories below the bridge, manically running their pumps, trying to clear these holds of thousands of gallons of water. And eventually, the captain calls abandon ship, and everybody leaves the bridge except for the captain and his helmsman, Frank Hamm. We don't know where everybody else is, but I assume that everybody mustered and they were supposed to get on to a life raft. That was never going to happen in that storm. There were such high winds and waves, there would be no way to deploy a life raft. But we know what the captain and Frank Hamm did in those final moments. The ship was listing so dramatically that Frank Hamm, who was a heavy man and he was diabetic, was pinned between the floor and the wall in the corner. And the captain was on the high side of the bridge, and the captain was calling to Frank to try to make it up to the higher side of the bridge, because the ship was sinking, it was going down. And Frank couldn't do it. And the captain encouraged him. He tried, he tried, "Come this way. Come Frank, come this way." And then the audio cuts out.

Howard: And then you wrote that hydrophones picked up the next thing. Those are microphones in the water.

Slade: The U.S. Navy has been tracking ocean sounds deep in the Atlantic since the Cold War, and I have been told that they picked up the sound of the El Faro colliding with the ocean floor, 15,000 feet down.

Howard: Okay. I'm going to turn now to Jenn Mathias, of Kingston. Jenn was the wife of Jeff Mathias, the chief engineer on board the El Faro. Were you in touch with your husband on the day that the ship went down?

Mathias: No. So the last communication we had, we talked. I do remember he wanted to Skype the children, but it was late and so I said no, they were in bed. I said maybe when you get to Puerto Rico. And I woke up the next morning to a text from him saying "sorry, it took longer than I thought. I will call you later." That was the last text I had from him.

Howard: How did you find out what happened?

Mathias: It wasn't until that afternoon. My children were already home from school. I can remember they were watching TV and I was running upstairs, and my cell phone rang, and I answered it, and I'm like "hello." It was Melissa Clark, who worked for TOTE [the El Faro's owner], and she said to me in a very calm voice that they had lost communication with the ship, but the last message they had from the captain was everyone was safe, and everything was okay.

Howard: At what point did you realize?

Mathias: I think I held out hope until they called off the search.

Howard: How do you explain that to your children?

Mathias: So I actually did break it into two parts, which I think might have helped. So on the day that they announced that the ship had sunk, we as a family got together. I mean we were all there, everybody, just to kind of show this family support system to my kids. And we told them that the ship was missing, the Coast Guard is out there searching, and we left it at that. Then two days later, when they called off the search, I did tell my children that they were unable to find daddy and the other crew members, and that the ship is at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean and that daddy had died.

Howard: And they were what age?

Mathias: My son was three and a half, and my daughters were 5 and 7.

Howard: How has it been since then?

Mathias: We have our moments. I think raising children, grieving children, there's always that question about, "Is this normal childhood behavior or is this because of grief?" My son, who now is 6, talks about him all the time. He says he wishes he could build a time machine and he'd go back and tell daddy not to get on that ship. They play games, they build ships, imagine ways of rescuing the El Faro and things like that, which I've heard is you great coping strategies for children to come to terms with the loss of a parent.

Howard: So now you are without your husband. How's that for you?

Mathias: It's tough. I think one of the things is, you get up every day and because you put your clothes on and you can smile, it looks like you're okay on the outside. But on the inside, you're a mess sometimes.

Howard: I'm so sorry for your loss.

Mathias: Thank you.

Howard: That's Jenn Mathias. Her husband Jeff Mathias was chief engineer on the El Faro. He was a graduate of the Mass. Maritime Academy, and one of several New Englanders on board that ship when it sank three years ago today. She joined us along with Rachel Slade, author of "Into the Raging Sea," a book about the El Faro's sinking. This is WGBH's All Things Considered.