No matter what the forecast was when they left JAX, this one it pretty tough to fathom... Perhaps not the equal of sailing the BOUNTY straight for Hurricane Sandy, but pretty close, I'd say...

One weird thing about this storm, because of its lack of forward motion typical of most hurricanes, the normal 'rules' regarding Dangerous Quadrants/Semicircles didn't necessarily apply - the entire periphery of the storm is gonna be about the same, seems to me...

But once they proceeded past the Atlantic entrance of the NE Providence Channel, their fate was pretty much sealed, they were gonna be attempting to thread the needle between Joaquin and one of the most dangerous lee shores in the world... The windward shores of islands like Eleuthera and Cat Islands have been collecting shipwrecks since the time of Columbus, and other than attempting to run and hide into Exuma Sound, there was no escape for them until the Crooked Island Passage...

The discussion on the gCaptain has been pretty informative, lots of professional merchant mariners there, a few of whom are familiar with EL FARO... One doesn't have to read too much between the lines to get the impression that TOTE ran a pretty "tight ship", in budgetary terms... Again, I'm shocked at presence of the open-top, gravity-lowered lifeboats on EL FARO, I would not have even thought they would be permitted in this day and age on an American-registered ship...

There have been numerous references to this possibly being sort of a repeat of the loss of the MARINE ELECTRIC off the Virginia coast 30 years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Marine_Electric

Still, in the end, it is passage plan that will always be the mystery with this one...