OK, now that looks like sort of a bad day for somebody. I learned in OOD school you can get so fixated on formation steaming that you forget there’s a real ocean out there. With lumps in it.
One is that the local current had been knocked out of whack by the Great Tokyo Earthquake that had occurred the week before, causing the ships' navigators to think they were further south than they actually were.
Another theory, which I have read in several sources, is that the navigator on the lead destroyer accidentally turned one lighthouse early and that all of the other ships simply played follow the leader.