I guess they didn't read their Homer properly...

The whole thing about Homer's Odissey casts shadow on these young people lives. The very core of the Odissey is about Odisseyus trying to find his way back to Itaca to his wife and son. But during his journey he disrespected gods in many ocasions: Eol for instance, not to mention that he offended Poseidon, sea god.
In a way that is exactly what these guys did. They learned a few things about sailing, and they already felt like they are some experienced mariners. I cannot forget the scene where one of the boys said something like: "*beep* the Homer. We live that life". That was pure "hybris". Hybris is a term used in modern English to indicate overweening pride, superciliousness, or arrogance, often resulting in fatal retribution or Nemesis.
The word was also used to describe actions of those who challenged the gods or their laws, especially in Greek tragedy, resulting in the protagonist's downfall.
I know these are modern times and there are no gods here, but here we have something that is as close as possible to the Poseidon's rage. Boys denied Homer, they denied the power of the sea, they thought they mastered the tehnique in order to tame the sea, but every once and a while we are witnessing great storm so we can see how insignificant we are.
Homer is a bastion of the European, and the whole Western civilisation. To deny him is to deny all the previous expeirience ever known to a man. Also we can see that from the down of time people made the same mistakes: from Odisseyus to our boys.
They took sea for granted. Thy had to pay the ultimate price.