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

by Sebastian Junger

  The farther you work from shore, the less smug you can afford to be. Any weekend boater knows the Coast Guard will pluck him out of whatever idiocy he gets himself into, but sword boats don’t have that option. They’re working four or five hundred miles from shore, way beyond helicopter range. So Billy—any bluewater fisherman—has a tremendous respect for the big wet fist. When Billy receives the weather chart off the fax machine, he undoubtedly tells the crew that there’s something very heavy on the way. There are specific things you can do to survive a storm at sea and whether the crew does them, and how well they do them, depends on how jaded they all are. Billy has fished his whole life. Maybe he thinks nothing can sink him; or maybe the sea is every nightmare he’s ever had.

  A good, worried crew starts by dogging down every hatch, porthole, and watertight door on the boat. That keeps breaking waves from busting things open and flooding the hold. They check the hatches on the lazarette, where the steering mechanism is housed, and make sure they’re secure. A lot of boats founder when the lazarette floods. They check the bilge pump filters and fish out any debris floating in the bilgewater. They clear everything off the deck—fishing gear, gaff pikes, oil slickers, boots—and put them down the fishhole. They remove the scupper plates so the boat can clear her decks. They tighten the anchor fastenings. They double-lash the fuel and water barrels on the whaleback. They shut off the gas cocks on the propane stove. They lash down anything in the engine room that might break loose and cause damage. They press down the fuel tanks so that some are empty and others are as full as possible. That reduces something called free surface effect—liquid sloshing around in tanks, changing the center of gravity.

  Some boats pay one crew member a bit extra to oversee the engine, but the Andrea Gail doesn’t have such a position; Billy takes care of it himself. He climbs down the engine room companionway and runs through the checklist: engine oil, hydraulics, batteries, fuel lines, air intakes, injectors. He makes sure the fire and high-water alarms are on and the bilge pumps are working. He tests the backup generator. He hands out seasick pills. If one of the steel birds is out of the water, he puts it back in. He fixes his position on the chart and calculates how the weather will affect his drift. He reckons their course in his head in case a wave takes out their electronics. He checks the emergency lighting. He checks the survival suits. He checks the photos of his daughters. And then he settles down to wait.

  So far the weather has been overcast but calm, light winds out of the northwest and a little bit of sea. Before the Portland Gale of 1898, one captain reported that it was “the greasiest evening you ever saw,” and a few hours later 450 people were dead. It’s not quite that calm, but almost. The wind hovers around ten knots and a six-foot swell rolls lazily under the boat. The Andrea Gail passes just north of Albert Johnston during the night, and by dawn they’ve almost made the western edge of the Banks, around 52 degrees west. They’re halfway home. Dawn creeps in with a few shreds of salmon-pink sky, and the wind starts to inch into the southeast. That’s called a backing wind; it goes counterclockwise around the compass and usually means bad weather is coming. A backing wind is an ill wind; it’s the first distant touch of a low-pressure system going into its cyclonic spin.

  Then another weather fax comes in:

  HURRICANE GRACE MOVING WILL TURN NE AND ACCELERATE. DEVELOPING DANGEROUS STORM MOVING E 35 KTS WILL TURN SE AND SLOW BY 12 HOURS. FORECAST WINDS 50 TO 65 KTS AND SEAS 22 TO 32 FEET WITHIN 400 NM SEMICIRCLE.

  It reads like an inventory of things fishermen don’t want to hear. An accompanying chart shows Hurricane Grace as a huge swirl around Bermuda, and the developing storm as a tightly jammed set of barometric lines just north of Sable Island. Every boat in the swordfish fleet receives this information. Albert Johnston, south of the Tail, decides to head northwest into the cold water of the Labrador Current. Cold water is heavier, he says, and seems to lay better in the wind; it doesn’t produce such volatile seas. The rest of the sword fleet stays far to the east, waiting to see what the storm does. They couldn’t make it into port in time anyway. The Contship Holland, a hundred miles south of Billy, heads straight into the teeth of the thing. Two hundred miles east, another containership, the Liberian-registered Zarah, also heads for New York. Ray Leonard on the sloop Satori has decided not to head for port; he holds to a southerly course for Bermuda. The Laurie Dawn 8 keeps plowing out to the fishing grounds and the Eishin Maru 78, 150 miles due south of Sable Island, makes for Halifax harbor to the northeast. Billy can either waste several days trying to get out of the way, or he can stay on-course for home. The fact that he has a hold full of fish, and not enough ice, must figure into his decision.

  “He did what ninety percent of us would’ve done—he battened down the hatches and hung on,” says Tommy Barrie, captain of the Allison. “He’d been gone well over a month. He probably just said, ‘Screw it, we’ve had enough of this shit,’ and kept heading home.”

  THE Boston office of the National Weather Service occupies the ground floor of a low brick building along a gritty access road in back of Logan Airport. Heavy glass windows allow a tinted view of the USAir shuttle terminal and a wasteland of gravel piles and rebar. Weather Service meteorologists can look up from their radar screens and watch USAir jets taxi back and forth behind a grey jet-blast barrier. Only their stabilizers stick up above it; they cruise like silver sharks across a concrete sea.

  Weather generally moves west-to-east across the country with the jet stream. In a very crude sense, forecasting simply means calling up someone to the west of you and asking them to look out their window. In the early days—just after the Civil War—the National Weather Service was under the auspices of the War Department, because that was the only agency that had the discipline and technology to relay information eastward faster than the weather moved. After the novelty of telegraph wore off, the Weather Service was shifted over to the Department of Agriculture, and it ultimately wound up in the Department of Commerce, which oversees aviation and interstate trucking. Regional Weather Service offices tend to be in very grim places, like industrial parks bordering metropolitan airfields. They have sealed windows and central air-conditioning. Very little of the air being studied actually gets inside.

  October 28 is a sharp, sunny day in Boston, temperatures in the fifties with a stiff wind blowing off the ocean. A senior meteorologist named Bob Case is crisscrossing the carpeted room, consulting with the various meteorologists on duty that day. Most of them are seated at heavy blue consoles staring resolutely at columns of numbers—barometric pressure, dewpoint, visibility—scrolling down computer screens. Behind the aviation desk is a bank of hotline phones: State Emergency Management, Regional Circuit, and Hurricane. Twice a day the State Emergency Management phone rings and someone in the office sprints to pick it up. It’s the state testing its ability to warn people of a nuclear strike.

  Case is a fit, balding man in his mid-fifties. A satellite photo of a hurricane about to clobber the coast of Maryland hangs in his office. He is responsible for issuing regional forecasts based on satellite imagery and a nationwide system called the Limited Fine Mesh, a grid superimposed on a map of the country where the corners represent data-collection points. Twice a day hundreds of LFM weather balloons are released to measure temperature, dewpoint, barometric pressure, and windspeed, and relay the information back by theodolite. The balloons rise to 60,000 feet and then burst, allowing the instruments to float back to earth on parachutes. When people find them, they mail them back to the Weather Service. The data from the LFM, plus input from a thousand or so other ground sites around the country, is fed into huge Cray computers at the National Meteorological Center in Camp Springs, Maryland. The computers run numerical models of the atmosphere and then spit forecasts back out to regional offices, where they are amended by local meteorologists. Humans still “add value” to a forecast, as meteorologists say. There is an intuitive element to forecasting that even the most powerful computers cannot duplicate.

/>   Since early the previous day, Case has been watching something called a “short-wave trough aloft” slide eastward from the Great Lakes. On satellite photos it looks like an S-curve in the line of clear dry air moving south from Canada. Cold air is denser than warm air, and huge, slow undulations develop along the boundary between them and roll eastward—on their side, as it were—much like an ocean swell. The undulation gets more and more pronounced until the “crest” gets separated from the rest of the warm front and just starts to spin around itself. This is called a cutoff low, or an occluded front. Air gets sucked in toward the center, the system spins faster and faster, and within hours you have a storm.

  The mechanics of a hurricane are fundamentally the same as a cutoff low, but their origins differ: hurricanes brew in the lukewarm waters around the equator. When the sun hits the equator it hits it dead-on, a square-foot beam of light heating up exactly one square foot of water. The farther north or south you are, the lower the angle of the sun and the more water a square-foot of sunlight must heat up; as a result the water doesn’t heat up as much. The equatorial sea cooks all summer and evaporates huge amounts of water into the air. Evaporated water is unstable and contains energy in the same way that a boulder on top of a hill does—one small push unleashes a huge destructive force. Likewise, a drop in air temperature causes water vapor to precipitate out as rain and release its latent energy back into the atmosphere. The air above one square-foot of equatorial water contains enough latent energy to drive a car two miles. A single thunderstorm could supply four days’ worth of the electrical power needed by the United States.

  Warm air is less dense than cool air; it rises off the surface of the ocean, cools in the upper atmosphere, and then dumps its moisture before rushing back to earth. Huge cumulus clouds develop over the zones of rising air, with thunder, lightning, and terrifically strong rain. As long as there’s a supply of warm water, the thunderstorm sustains itself, converting moisture into sheeting rain and downdraft winds. Other thunderclouds might line up along the leading edge of a cold front into a “squall line,” a towering convective engine that stretches from horizon to horizon.

  Hurricanes start when a slight kink—a disturbance in the trade winds, a dust storm blowing out to sea off the Sahara—develops in the upper-level air. The squall line starts to rotate around the kink, drawing in warm, volatile air and sending it up the gathering vortex at its center. The more air that gets drawn in, the faster it spins, and the more water is evaporated off the ocean. The water vapor rises up the core of the system and releases rain and latent heat. Eventually the system starts spinning so fast that inward-spiralling air can no longer overcome the centrifugal force and make it into the center. The eye of the storm has formed, a column of dry air surrounded by a solid wall of wind. Tropical birds get trapped inside and cannot escape. A week later, after the system has fallen apart, frigate birds and egrets might find themselves over Newfoundland, say, or New Jersey.

  A mature hurricane is by far the most powerful event on earth; the combined nuclear arsenals of the United States and the former Soviet Union don’t contain enough energy to keep a hurricane going for one day. A typical hurricane encompasses a million cubic miles of atmosphere and could provide all the electric power needed by the United States for three or four years. During the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, winds surpassed 200 miles an hour and people caught outside were sandblasted to death. Rescue workers found nothing but their shoes and belt buckles. So much rain can fall during a hurricane—up to five inches an hour—that the soil liquefies. Hillsides slump into valleys and birds drown in flight, unable to shield their upward-facing nostrils. In 1970, a hurricane drowned half a million people in what is now Bangladesh. In 1938, a hurricane put downtown Providence, Rhode Island, under ten feet of ocean. The waves generated by that storm were so huge that they literally shook the earth; seismographs in Alaska picked up their impact five thousand miles away.

  A lesser version of that is heading toward the Grand Banks: Hurricane Grace, a late-season fluke that still contains enough energy to crank another storm system off the chart. Ordinarily, Grace would come ashore somewhere in the Carolinas, but the same cold front that spawned the short-wave trough aloft also blocks her path on shore. (Cold air is very dense, and warm weather systems tend to bounce off them like beach balls off a brick wall.) According to atmospheric models generated by the Cray computers in Maryland, Grace will collide with the cold front and be forced northward, straight into the path of the short-wave trough. Wind is simply air rushing from an area of high pressure to an area of low; the greater the pressure difference, the faster it blows. An Arctic cold front bordering a hurricane-fortified low will create a pressure gradient that meteorologists may not see in their lifetime.

  Ultimately, the engine behind all of this activity is the jet stream, a river of cold upper-level air that screams around the globe at thirty or forty thousand feet. Storms, cold fronts, short-wave troughs—they’re all dragged eastward sooner or later by upper-level winds. The jet stream is not steady; it convulses like a loose firehose, careening off mountains, veering across plains. These irregularities create continent-sized eddies that come ballooning out of the Arctic as deep cold fronts. They are called anticyclones because the cold air in them flows outwards and clockwise, the opposite of a low. It is along the leading edge of these anticyclones that low-pressure waves sometimes develop; occasionally, one of these waves will intensify into a major storm. Why, and when, is still beyond the powers of science to predict. It typically happens over areas where a leg of the jet stream collides with subtropical air—the Great Lakes, the Gulf Stream off Hatteras, the southern Appalachians. Since air flows counterclockwise around these storms, the winds come out of the northeast as they move offshore. For that reason they’re known as “nor’easters.” Meteorologists have another name for them. They call them “bombs.”

  The first sign of the storm comes late on October 26, when satellite images reveal a slight bend in the leading edge of the cold front over western Indiana. The bend is a pocket of low barometric pressure—a short-wave trough—imbedded in the wall of the cold front at around 20,000 feet. It’s the embryo of a storm. The trough moves east at forty miles an hour, strengthening as it goes. It follows the Canadian border to Montreal, cuts east across northern Maine, crosses the Bay of Fundy, and traverses Nova Scotia throughout the early hours of October 28th. By dawn an all-out gale is raging north of Sable Island. The upper-level trough has disintegrated, to be replaced by a sea-level low, and warm air is rising out the top of the system faster than it can be sucked in at the bottom. That is the definition of a strengthening storm. The barometric pressure is dropping more than a millibar an hour, and the Sable Island storm is sliding away fast to the southeast with 65-knot winds and thirty-foot seas. It’s a tightly packed low that Billy Tyne, two hundred miles away, can’t even feel yet.

  The Canadian Government maintains a data buoy seventy miles east of Sable Island, at 43.8 north and 57.4 west, just short of Billy’s position. It is simply known as buoy #44139; there are eight others like it between Boston and the Grand Banks. They relay oceanographic information back to shore on an hourly basis. Throughout the day of October 28th, buoy #44139 records almost no activity whatsoever—dinghy-sailing weather on the high seas. At two o’clock the needle jumps, though: suddenly the seas are twelve feet and the winds are gusting to fifteen knots. That in itself is nothing, but Billy must know he has just seen the first stirrings of the storm. The wind calms down again and the seas gradually subside, but a few hours later another weather report creaks out of the radiofax:

  WARNINGS. HURRICANE GRACE MOVING E 5 KTS MXIMUM WINDS 65 KTS GUSTING TO 80 NEAR CENTER. FORECAST DANGEROUS STORM WINDS 50 TO 75 KTS AND SEAS 25 TO 35 FT.

  Billy’s at 44 north, 56 west and heading straight into the mouth of meteorological hell. For the next hour the sea is calm, horribly so. The only sign of what’s coming is the wind direction; it shifts restlessly from quadrant to quadrant
all afternoon. At four o’clock it’s out of the southeast. An hour later it’s out of the south-southwest. An hour after that it’s backed around to due north. It stays that way for the next hour, and then right around seven o’clock it starts creeping into the northeast. And then it hits.

  It’s a sheer change; the Andrea Gail enters the Sable Island storm the way one might step into a room. The wind is instantly forty knots and parting through the rigging with an unnerving scream. Fishermen say they can gauge how fast the wind is—and how worried they should be—by the sound it makes against the wire stays and outrigger cables. A scream means the wind is around Force 9 on the Beaufort Scale, forty or fifty knots. Force 10 is a shriek. Force 11 is a moan. Over Force 11 is something fishermen don’t want to hear. Linda Greenlaw, captain of the Hannah Boden, was in a storm where the wind registered a hundred miles an hour before it tore the anemometer off the boat. The wind, she says, made a sound she’d never heard before, a deep tonal vibration like a church organ. There was no melody, though; it was a church organ played by a child.

  By eight o’clock the barometric pressure has dropped to 996 millibars and shows no sign of levelling off. That means the storm is continuing to strengthen and create an even greater vacuum at its center. Nature, as everyone knows, abhors a vacuum, and will try to fill it as fast as possible. The waves catch up with the wind speed around 8 PM and begin increasing exponentially; they double in size every hour. After nine o’clock every graph line from data buoy 44139 starts climbing almost vertically. Maximum wave heights peak at forty-five feet, drop briefly, and then nearly double to seventy. The wind climbs to fifty knots by 9 PM and gradually keeps increasing until it peaks at 58 knots. The waves are so large that they block the anemometer, and gusts are probably reaching ninety knots. That’s 104 miles an hour—Gale Force 12 on the Beaufort Scale. The cables are moaning.