The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

by Sebastian Junger

  Brown’s reputation is no concern of Billy’s, though. Brown’s not on the boat, he’s twelve hundred miles away in Gloucester, and if Billy doesn’t want him in his life, he just doesn’t pick up the radio mike. Furthermore, Billy’s making money hand over fist on his boat, and that makes Brown’s scruples—or his judgment—or his lack of empathy—all but irrelevant. All Billy needs is five men, a well-maintained boat, and enough fuel to get to and from the Flemish Cap.

  The first five sets of Johnston’s trip are on what’s called the “frontside” of the moon, the quarters leading up to full. Boats that fish the frontside tend to get small males on the line; boats that fish the backside get large females. Johnston’s record is twenty-seven consecutive hooks with a fish on each, mostly small males. On the day of the full moon the catch abruptly switches over to huge females and stays that way for a couple of weeks. “You might go from an average weight of seventy pounds, all males, to four or five 800-pounders, all females,” Johnston says. “They lose their heads on the full moon, they feed with reckless abandon.”

  The full moon is on October 23rd, and Johnston has timed his trip to straddle that date. There are captains who will cut a good trip short just to stay on the lunar cycle. The first four or five sets of Johnston’s trip are spare, but then he starts to get into the fish. By the 21st, he’s landing six or seven thousand pounds of bigeye a day, enough to make his trip in a week. The weather has been exceptionally good for the season, and Johnston gets on the VHF every night to give the rest of the fleet a quick update. As the westernmost boat, the fleet relies on him to decide how much gear to fish. They don’t want forty miles of line hanging out there with a storm coming on. On October 22nd, the Laurie Dawn 8, a converted oil boat captained by a quiet Texan named Larry Davis, leaves New Bedford for the Grand Banks. She’s the last boat of the season to head out to the fishing grounds. The same day a containership named the Contship Holland leaves the port of Le Havre, France, for New York City. Her voyage is a classic rhumbline course from the English Channel straight through the fishing grounds. Scattered south of the Flemish Cap are the Hannah Boden, the Allison, the Miss Millie, and the Seneca. The Mary T and the Mr. Simon are southwest of the Tail, right on the edge of the Gulf Stream, and Billy Tyne is nearly six hundred miles to the east.

  Billy’s been out through the dark of the moon, which may explain his bad luck, but things start to change around the 18th. The whole fleet, in fact, starts to get into a little more fish with the approach of the full moon. Tyne doesn’t tell anyone how much he’s catching, but he’s rapidly making up for three weeks of thin fishing. He’s probably pulling in swordfish at the same rate Johnston’s pulling in bigeye, five or six thousand pounds a day. By the end of the month he has 40,000 pounds of fish in his hold, worth around $160,000. “I talked with Billy on the 24th and he said he’d hatched his boat,” Johnston says. “He was headed in while the rest of us were just starting our trips. You could just tell he was happy.”

  Billy finishes up his last haul around noon on the 25th and—the crew still stowing their gear—turns his boat for home. They’ll be one of the only boats in port with a load of fish, which means a short market and a high price. Captains dream of bringing 40,000 pounds into a short market. The weather is clear, the blue sky brushed with cirrus and a solid northwest wind spackling the waves with white. A long heavy swell rolls under the boat from a storm that passed far off to the south. Billy has a failing ice machine and a twelve hundred mile drive ahead of him. He’ll be heading in while the rest of the fleet is still in mid-trip, and he’ll make port just as they’re finishing up. He’s two weeks out of synch. Ultimately, one could blame some invisible contortion of the Gulf Stream for this: The contortion disrupts the swordfish, which adds another week or two to the trip, which places the Andrea Gail on the Flemish Cap when she should already be heading in. The circumstances that place a boat at a certain place at a certain time are so random that they can’t even be catalogued, much less predicted, and a total of fifty or sixty more people—swordfishermen, mariners, sailors—are also converging on the storm grounds of the North Atlantic. Some of these people have been heading there, unavoidably, for months; others made a bad choice just a few days ago.

  IN EARLY September, a retired sailor named Ray Leonard started asking around Portland, Maine, for a crew to help him sail his 32-foot Westsail sloop to Bermuda. Portland is a big sailing town—people race J-boats in the summer, crew on in the Caribbean in the winter, squeeze in a little skiing between seasons—and Leonard was quickly introduced to Karen Stimpson, one of the most experienced sailors in the harbor. Stimpson, 42, started crewing on boats as a teenager, graduated from maritime academy in her thirties, and has crossed the ocean several times on oil tankers. Between sailing trips she and another woman, Sue Bylander, 38 years old, worked as graphic designers for a friend of Leonard’s. Leonard offered them both a place on his boat if they would fly themselves home from Bermuda, and their boss said that they were free to take the time off if they wanted. They accepted, and a departure date was set for the last weekend in October. One month later the sloop Satori cast off from the Great Bay Marina in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and motored slowly down the Piscataqua River toward open ocean.

  The weather was so warm that the crew were in t-shirts on deck and the sky was the watery blue of Indian summer. A light wind came in from the west, a backing wind. The Satori ran down the Piscataqua under power, rendezvoused with another boat, cleared Kittery Point, and then bore away to the east. The two boats were headed for the Great South Channel between Georges Bank and Cape Cod, and from there they would sail due south for Bermuda. Bylander stayed below to sort out the mountain of food and gear in the cabin while Stimpson and Leonard sat above deck and talked. Fog rolled in before they’d even cleared Isle of Shoals, and by dark the Satori was alone on a strangely quiet sea.

  When Bylander finished stowing the supplies, the crew squeezed around a small dinette table in the cabin and ate lasagna baked by Stimpson’s mother. Stimpson has straw-blonde hair and a sort of level, grey-eyed look that seems to assess a situation, run the odds, and make a decision all in the same moment. She’s no romantic—“if you’re looking for enlightenment it’s not going to happen on a oil tanker”—but she’s deeply in love with the ocean. She’s not married and has no children. She’s the perfect crew for a late-season run south.

  So, Ray, have you listened to a weather forecast lately? she asked at one point during dinner.

  Leonard nodded his head.

  Did you hear there’s a front coming through?

  It shouldn’t be a problem, he says. We can always cut into Buzzard’s Bay.

  Buzzard’s Bay is at the western end of the Cape Cod Canal. One could, if the weather were bad enough, go nearly all the way from Boston to New York City by protected waterways. It’s not particularly beautiful, but it’s safe. “Ray was used to sailing solo, so having me on board may have made him feel more invulnerable,” Stimpson says. “And there’s a point at which you’re so far out that you don’t want to turn back, you just run offshore. In the future I will listen to the weather forecast, I will decide, as crew, whether I’m willing to keep sailing. It will be immaterial to me the level of experience of the owner-captain.”

  The date was October 26. The lives of Stimpson, Bylander, and Leonard were about to converge with several dozen others off the New England coast.

  BILLY, like Leonard, has undoubtedly heard the forecast, but he’s even less inclined to do anything about it than Leonard is. The lead time for an accurate forecast is only two or three days, and it takes twice that long for a sword boat to make port. Weather reports are vitally important to the fishing, but not so much for heading home; when the end of the trip comes, captains generally just haul their gear and go.

  Because errors compound, the longer the trip, the more careful the captain has to be when he sets his initial heading for home. An error of just one degree puts a boat thirty miles off-course by th
e time she gets back to Gloucester; a captain could add a day to each trip with a month of such errors. When Billy Tyne starts for home, a bearing of 260 degrees would run him straight into Cape Ann, but it would also shave too close to Sable Island, which presents a ghastly hazard to shipping. (“I try to avoid it by at least forty or fifty miles,” says Charlie Reed.) The channel between Sable and Nova Scotia is blessed with a good, cold countercurrent that starts in Labrador and hugs the coast all the way down to Hatteras, but for some reason Billy decides not to take it. He decides to cross the Tail around 44 degrees north—his “waypoint”—and then, once clear of Sable, shoot a course almost due west for Gloucester.

  Fishing boats use a global positioning system for bluewater navigation. GPS, as it’s called, fixes a position relative to military satellites circling the earth and then converts it to longitude and latitude. It’s accurate to within fifteen feet. The Department of Defense intentionally distorts the signals because they’re worried about the misuse of such precise information, but the standards of accuracy on a sword boat are loose enough so that it doesn’t matter. Fishermen generally use GPS to back up a loran system, which works by measuring the time it takes for two separate low-frequency radio signals to reach the vessel from broadcasting stations on shore. Charts are printed with numbered lines radiating out from the signal sources, and a loran reading identifies which lines correspond to the vessels’s position.

  Even with two electronic systems, though, mistakes happen—iron-bearing landmass, electrical interference, all kinds of things skew the output. Furthermore, the plotter gives you a pure direction, as if you could slice right through the curvature of the earth, but boats must follow an arc from point to point—the “Great Circle” route. The Great Circle route requires a correction of about eleven degrees north between Gloucester and the Flemish Cap. On the night of October 24th, Billy Tyne punches in the loran coordinates for his waypoint on the Tail of the Banks and reads a bearing of 250 degrees on his video plotter. On a Great Circle route, the compass heading and the actual heading are identical at the start of a trip, gradually diverge until the halfway point, and then converge again as the boat nears its destination.

  Having determined his Great Circle route and plugged the heading into the autopilot, Tyne then goes over to the chart drawer and pulls out a ten-dollar nautical chart called INT 109. He lines up a course of 250 degrees to his waypoint on the Tail and then walks his way down the map with a set of hinged parallel rules. He rechecks the bearing at the compass rose at the bottom and then adjusts by 20 degrees for the local magnetic variation. (The earth’s magnetic field doesn’t line up exactly with the axis of the earth; in fact it doesn’t even come close.) That should bring him to his waypoint on the Tail in about three days. From there he’ll come up fourteen degrees and take another Great Circle route into Gloucester.

  INT 109 is one of the few charts that shows the full width and breadth of the summer swordfishing grounds, and is carried by every sword boat in the Banks. It has a scale of one to three-and-a-half-million; on a diagonal it stretches from New Jersey almost to Greenland. Land on 109 is depicted the way mariners must see it, a blank, featureless expanse with a scattering of towns along a minutely rendered coast. The lighthouses are marked by fat exclamation points and jut from every godforsaken headland between New York City and South Wolf Island, Labrador. Water depth is given in meters and shallow areas are shaded in blue. Georges Bank is clearly visible off Cape Cod, an irregular shape about the size of Long Island and rising to a depth of nine feet. To the west of Georges is the Great South Channel; beyond are the Nantucket Shoals and an area peppered with old ordnance: Submerged torpedo, Unexploded depth charges, Unexploded bombs. The Two Hundred Fathom line is the chart’s most prominent feature, echoing the coastline in broad strokes like a low-angle shadow. It swings north around Georges, skirts Nova Scotia a hundred miles offshore and then runs deep up the St. Lawrence Seaway. East of the Seaway are the old fishing grounds of Burgeo and St. Pierre Banks, and then the line makes an enormous seaward loop to the southeast. The Grand Banks.

  The Banks are a broad flat plateau that extend hundreds of miles southeast from Newfoundland before plunging off the continental shelf. A clump of terrors known as the Virgin Rocks lurk seventy miles east of St. Johns, but otherwise there are no true shoals to speak of. A sheet of cold water called the Labrador Current flows over the northern edge of the Banks, injecting the local food chain with plankton; and a sluggish warm-water flow called the North Atlantic Current creeps toward Europe east of the Flemish Cap. Bending around the Tail of the Banks is something called Slope Water, a cold half-knot current that feeds into the generally eastward movement of the area. Below Slope Water is the Gulf Stream, trundling across the Atlantic at speeds of up to three or four knots. Eddies sometimes detach themselves from the Gulf Stream and spin off into the North Atlantic, dragging entire ecosystems with them. These eddies are called warm core rings. When the cores fall apart, the ecosystems die.

  Billy wants to run a slot between the Gulf Stream to the south and Sable Island to the north. It’s a relatively straight shot that doesn’t buck the warm headcurrent or come too close in to Sable. Steaming around the clock, he’s looking at a one-week trip; maybe he even takes one bird out of the water to speed things up. The diesel engine has been throbbing relentlessly for a month now and, without the distraction of work, it suddenly seems hellishly loud. There’s no way to escape the noise—it gets inside your skull, shakes your stomach lining, makes your ears ring. If the crew weren’t so sleep-deprived it might even bother them; as it is they just wallow in their bunks and stand watch at the helm twice a day. After two-and-a-half days the Andrea Gail has covered about 450 miles, right to the edge of the continental shelf. The weather is fair and there’s a good rolling swell from the northeast. At 3:15 on the afternoon of October 27, Billy Tyne raises the Canadian Coast Guard on his single sideband to tell them he’s entering Canadian waters. This is the American fishing vessel Andrea Gail, WYC 6681, he says. We’re at 44.25 north, 49.05 west, bound for New England. All our fishing gear is stowed.

  The Canadian Coast Guard at St. Johns gives him the go-ahead to proceed. Most of the sword fleet is a couple of hundred miles to the east, and Albert Johnston is the same distance to the south. Sable Island is no longer in the way, so Billy comes up fourteen degrees and puts Gloucester right in his gunsights. They’re heading almost due west and running a Great Circle route on autopilot. Around nightfall a Canadian weather map creaks out of the satellite fax. There’s a hurricane off Bermuda, a cold front coming down off the Canadian Shield and a storm brewing over the Great Lakes. They’re all heading for the Grand Banks. A few minutes after the fax, Linda Greenlaw calls.

  Billy, you seen the chart? she asks.

  Yeah I saw it, he says.

  What do you think?

  Looks like it’s gonna be wicked.

  They agree to talk the next day so Billy can give her a list of supplies he’s going to need. He has no desire at all to talk to Bob Brown. They sign off, and then Billy hands the helm off to Murph and goes below for dinner. They’re in a big steel boat with 40,000 pounds of fish in the hold, plus ice. It takes a lot to sink a boat like that. Around nine o’clock, a half-moon emerges off their port quarter. The air is calm, the sky is full of stars. Two thousand miles away, weather systems are starting to collide.

  THE BARREL OF THE GUN

  The men could only look at each other through the falling snow, from land to sea, from sea to land, and realize how unimportant they all were.

  —SHIP ON THE ROCKS, NEWBURYPORT, MASSACHUSETTS, 1839, NO SURVIVORS. (SIDNEY PERLEY, Historic Storms of New England, 1891)

  THERE’S a certain amount of denial in swordfishing. The boats claw through a lot of bad weather, and the crews generally just batten down the hatches, turn on the VCR, and put their faith in the tensile strength of steel. Still, every man on a sword boat knows there are waves out there that can crack them open like a coconut. Oc
eanographers have calculated that the maximum theoretical height for wind-driven waves is 198 feet; a wave that size could put down a lot of oil tankers, not to mention a 72-foot sword boat.

  Once you’re in the denial business, though, it’s hard to know when to stop. Captains routinely overload their boats, ignore storm warnings, stow their life rafts in the wheelhouse, and disarm their emergency radio beacons. Coast Guard inspectors say that going down at sea is so unthinkable to many owner-captains that they don’t even take basic precautions. “We don’t need an EPIRB because we don’t plan on sinking,” is a sentence that Coast Guard inspectors hear a lot. One of the videos on file with the Portland Coast Guard—shown as often as possible to local fishermen—was shot from the wheelhouse of a commercial boat during a really bad blow. It shows the bow rising and falling, rising and falling over mammoth, white-streaked seas. At one point the captain says, a little smugly, “Yep, this is where you wanna be, right in your wheelhouse, your own little domain—.”

  At that moment a wall of water the size of a house fills the screen. It’s no bigger than the rest of the waves but it’s solid and foaming and absolutely vertical. It engulfs the bow, the foredeck, the wheelhouse, and then blows all the windows out. The last thing the camera sees is whitewater coming at it like a big wet fist.