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

by Sebastian Junger

  When the Contship Holland finally limped into port several days later, one of her officers stepped off and swore he’d never set foot on another ship again. She’d lost 36 land/sea containers over the side, and the ship’s owners promptly hired an American meteorological consultant to help defend them against lawsuits. “The storm resulted in large-scale destruction of offshore shipping and coastal installations from Nova Scotia to Florida,” wrote Bob Raguso of Weather-news New York. “It was called an extreme nor’easter by U.S. scientists and ranked as one of the five most intense storms from 1899-1991. It had the highest significant wave heights either arrived at by measurement or calculation. Some scientists termed it the hundred year storm.”

  The Andrea Gail is at the epicenter of this storm and almost on top of the Sable Island shoals. It’s very likely she has lost her antennas, or Billy would have radioed Tommy Barrie that things looked bad—and definitely don’t fish any gear that night. On the other hand, it’s debatable whether the sea state could have overwhelmed Billy’s boat that early in the evening; the 55-foot Fair Wind didn’t flip until winds hit a hundred knots and the waves were running seventy feet. A more likely scenario is that Billy manages to get through the ten o’clock spike in weather conditions but takes a real beating—the windows are out, the electronics are dead, and the crew is terrified.

  For the first time they are completely, irrevocably on their own.

  Cape Ann lighthouse on a tranquil day.

  A wave crashing onto Gloucester’s Stacy Boulevard during the storm of October 1991.

  Swordfisher Linda Greenlaw poses in May 1999.

  A map of Hurricane Grace’s path on November 1, 1991.

  Ethel Shatford working at the Crow’s Nest.

  Rose Marine as seen from Boddy Shatford’s room at the Crow’s Nest.

  A Gloucester house shown before and after the storm.

  Captain Billy Tyne (right) and two of his crew members, Michael “Bugsy” Moran (center) and Dale “Murph” Murphy.

  Bobby Shatford

  David Sullivan

  The ill-fated Andrea Gail (with the Crow’s Nest in the background).

  A memorial service at St. Ann Church for Gloucester’s three lost fisherman: Billy Tyne, David Sullivan and Bobby Shatford.

  Gloucester fisherman’s memorial.

  United States Coast Guard Lt. William Moeller poses in front of the USS Tamaroa. Moeller was aboard the Tamaroa during its 1991 rescue of the five Air National Guard airmen who ditched their helicopter while attempting to rescue the Andrea Gail.

  GRAVEYARD OF THE ATLANTIC

  In a few days the El Dorado expedition went into the patient wilderness, that closed upon it like the sea closes over a diver. Long afterwards the news came back that all the donkeys were dead.

  —JOSEPH CONRAD, Heart of Darkness

  ALBERT JOHNSTON:

  I was the first one to know how bad it was really gonna be. Halifax called for twenty meter seas and when we heard that we thought, Oh boy. You don’t really have time to run to land so we tried to get into the coldest water we could find. The colder the water, the denser it is and the waves don’t get as big. Also, I knew we’d get a northeast-northwest wind. I wanted to make as much headway as possible ’cause the Gulf Stream was down south and that’s where the warm water and fast current are.

  There was an awful lot of electrical noise along the leading edge of this thing, there was so much noise you couldn’t hear anything on the radio. I was up in the wheelhouse, when it’s bad like that I usually stay up there. If it looks like it’s settlin’ down a bit and I can grab a little sleep, then I will. The crew just racks out and watches videos. Everybody acknowledged this was the worst storm they’d ever been in—you can tell by the size of the waves, the motion of the boat, the noise, the crashing. There’s always a point when you realize that you’re in the middle of the ocean and if anything goes wrong, that’s it. You see so much bad weather that you kind of get used to it. But then you see really bad weather. And that, you never get used to.

  They had ship reports of thirty meter seas. That’s ninety feet. I would imagine—truthfully, in retrospect—that if the whole U.S. swordfish fleet had been caught in the center of that thing, everybody would’ve gone down. We only saw, I don’t know, maybe fifty foot waves, max. We went into it until it started to get dark, and then we turned around and went with it. You can’t see those rogue waves in the dark and you don’t want to get blasted and knock your wheelhouse off. We got the RPM tuned in just right to be in synch with the waves; too fast and we’d start surfing, too slow and the waves would just blast right over the whole boat. The boat was heavy and loaded with fish, very stable. It made for an amazingly good ride.

  JOHNSTON had finished his last haul late in the afternoon of the 28th: nineteen swordfish, twenty bigeye, twenty-two yellowfin, and two mako. He immediately started steaming north and by morning he was approaching the Tail of the Banks, winds out of the northeast at 100 knots and seas twenty to thirty feet. Several hundred miles to the west, though, conditions have gone off the chart. The Beaufort Wind Scale defines a Force 12 storm as having 73-mile-an-hour winds and 45-foot seas. Due south of Sable Island, data buoy 44137 starts notching 75-foot waves on the afternoon of the 29th and stays up there for the next seventeen hours. Significant wave height—the average of the top third, also known as HSig—tops fifty feet. The first hundred-foot wave spikes the graph at 8 PM, and the second one spikes it at midnight. For the next two hours, peak wave heights stay at a hundred feet and winds hit eighty miles an hour. The waves are blocking the data buoy readings, though, and the wind is probably hitting 120 or so. Eighty-mile-an-hour wind can suck fish right out of bait barrels. Hundred-foot waves are fifty percent higher than the most extreme sizes predicted by computer models. They are the largest waves ever recorded on the Scotian Shelf. They are among the very highest waves measured anywhere in the world, ever.

  Scientists understand how waves work, but not exactly how huge ones work. There are rogue waves out there, in other words, that seem to exceed the forces generating them. For all practical purposes, though, heights of waves are a function of how hard the wind blows, how long it blows for, and how much sea room there is—“speed, duration, and fetch,” as it’s known. Force 12 winds over Lake Michigan would generate wave heights of 35 feet after ten hours or so, but the waves couldn’t get any bigger than that because the fetch—the amount of open water—isn’t great enough. The waves have reached what is called a “fully developed sea state.” Every wind speed has a minimum fetch and duration to reach a fully developed sea state; waves driven by a Force 12 wind reach their full potential in three or four days. A gale blowing across a thousand miles of ocean for sixty hours would generate significant wave heights of 97 feet; peak wave heights would be more than twice that. Waves that size have never been recorded, but they must be out there. It’s possible that they would destroy anything in a position to measure them.

  All waves, no matter how huge, start as rough spots—cats’ paws—on the surface of the water. The cats’ paws are filled with diamond-shaped ripples, called capillary waves, that are weaker than the surface tension of water and die out as soon as the wind stops. They give the wind some purchase on an otherwise glassy sea, and at winds over six knots, actual waves start to build. The harder the wind blows, the bigger the waves get and the more wind they are able to “catch.” It’s a feedback loop that has wave height rising exponentially with wind speed.

  Such waves are augmented by the wind but not dependent on it; were the wind to stop, the waves would continue to propagate by endlessly falling into the trough that precedes them. Such waves are called gravity waves, or swells; in cross-section they are symmetrical sine curves that undulate along the surface with almost no energy loss. A cork floating on the surface moves up and down but not laterally when a swell passes beneath it. The higher the swells, the farther apart the crests and the faster they move. Antarctic storms have generated swells that are
half a mile or more between crests and travel thirty or forty miles an hour; they hit the Hawaiian islands as breakers forty feet high.

  Unfortunately for mariners, the total amount of wave energy in a storm doesn’t rise linearly with wind speed, but to its fourth power. The seas generated by a forty-knot wind aren’t twice as violent as those from a twenty-knot wind, they’re seventeen times as violent. A ship’s crew watching the anemometer climb even ten knots could well be watching their death sentence. Moreover, high winds tend to shorten the distance between wave crests and steepen their faces. The waves are no longer symmetrical sine curves, they’re sharp peaks that rise farther above sea level than the troughs fall below it. If the height of the wave is more than one-seventh the distance between the crests—the “wavelength”—the waves become too steep to support themselves and start to break. In shallow water, waves break because the underwater turbulence drags on the bottom and slows the waves down, shortening the wavelength and changing the ratio of height to length. In open ocean the opposite happens: wind builds the waves up so fast that the distance between crests can’t keep up, and they collapse under their own mass. Now, instead of propagating with near-zero energy loss, the breaking wave is suddenly transporting a huge amount of water. It’s cashing in its chips, as it were, and converting all its potential and kinetic energy into water displacement.

  A general rule of fluid dynamics holds that an object in the water tends to do whatever the water it replaces would have done. In the case of a boat in a breaking wave, the boat will effectively become part of the curl. It will either be flipped end over end or shoved backward and broken on. Instantaneous pressures of up to six tons per square foot have been measured in breaking waves. Breaking waves have lifted a 2,700-ton breakwater, en masse, and deposited it inside the harbor at Wick, Scotland. They have blasted open a steel door 195 feet above sea level at Unst Light in the Shetland Islands. They have heaved a half-ton boulder 91 feet into the air at Tillamook Rock, Oregon.

  There is some evidence that average wave heights are slowly rising, and that freak waves of eighty or ninety feet are becoming more common. Wave heights off the coast of England have risen an average of 25 percent over the past couple of decades, which converts to a twenty-foot increase in the highest waves over the next half-century. One cause may be the tightening of environmental laws, which has reduced the amount of oil flushed into the oceans by oil tankers. Oil spreads across water in a film several molecules thick and inhibits the generation of capillary waves, which in turn prevent the wind from getting a “grip” on the sea. Plankton releases a chemical that has the same effect, and plankton levels in the North Atlantic have dropped dramatically. Another explanation is that the recent warming trend—some call it the greenhouse effect—has made storms more frequent and severe. Waves have destroyed docks and buildings in Newfoundland, for example, that haven’t been damaged for decades.

  As a result, stresses on ships have been rising. The standard practice is to build ships to withstand what is called a 25-year stress—the most violent condition the ship is likely to experience in 25 years. The wave that flooded the wheelhouse of the Queen Mary, ninety feet up, must have nearly exceeded her 25-year stress. North Sea oil platforms are built to accommodate a 111-foot wave beneath their decks, which is calculated to be a one-hundred-year stress. Unfortunately, the 25-year stress is just a statistical concept that offers no guarantee about what will happen next year, or next week. A ship could encounter several 25-year waves in a month or never encounter any at all. Naval architects simply decide what level of stress she’s likely to encounter in her lifetime and then hope for the best. It’s economically and structurally impractical to construct every boat to hundred-year specifications.

  Inevitably, then, ships encounter waves that exceed their stress rating. In the dry terminology of naval architecture, these are called “nonnegotiable waves.” Mariners call them “rogue waves” or “freak seas.” Typically they are very steep and have an equally steep trough in front of them—a “hole in the ocean” as some witnesses have described it. Ships cannot get their bows up fast enough, and the ensuing wave breaks their back. Maritime history is full of encounters with such waves. When Sir Ernest Shackleton was forced to cross the South Polar Sea in a 22-foot open life boat, he saw a wave so big that he mistook its foaming crest for a moonlit cloud. He only had time to yell, “Hang on, boys, it’s got us!” before the wave broke over his boat. Miraculously, they didn’t sink. In February 1883, the 320-foot steamship Glamorgan was swept bow-to-stern by an enormous wave that ripped the wheelhouse right off the deck, taking all the ship’s officers with it. She later sank. In 1966, the 44,000-ton Michelangelo, an Italian steamship carrying 775 passengers, encountered a single massive wave in an otherwise unremarkable sea. Her bow fell into a trough and the wave stove in her bow, flooded her wheelhouse, and killed a crewman and two passengers. In 1976, the oil tanker Cretan Star radioed, “…vessel was struck by a huge wave that went over the deck…” and was never heard from again. The only sign of her fate was a fourmile oil slick off Bombay.

  South Africa’s “wild coast,” between Durban and East London, is home to a disproportionate number of these monsters. The four-knot Agulhas Current runs along the continental shelf a few miles offshore and plays havoc with swells arriving from Antarctic gales. The current shortens their wavelengths, making the swells steeper and more dangerous, and bends them into the fastwater the way swells are bent along a beach. Wave energy gets concentrated in the center of the current and overwhelms ships that are there to catch a free ride. In 1973 the 12,000-ton cargo ship Bencruachan was cracked by an enormous wave off Durban and had to be towed into port, barely afloat. Several weeks later the 12,000-ton Neptune Sapphire broke in half on her maiden voyage after encountering a freak sea in the same area. The crew were hoisted off the stern section by helicopter. In 1974, the 132,000-ton Norwegian tanker Wilstar fell into a huge trough (“There was no sea in front of the ship, only a hole,” said one crew member) and then took an equally huge wave over her bow. The impact crumpled inch-thick steel plate like sheet-metal and twisted railroad-gauge I-beams into knots. The entire bow bulb was torn off.

  The biggest rogue on record was during a Pacific gale in 1933, when the 478-foot Navy tanker Ramapo was on her way from Manila to San Diego. She encountered a massive low-pressure system that blew up to 68 knots for a week straight and resulted in a fully developed sea that the Ramapo had no choice but to take on her stern. (Unlike today’s tankers, the Ramapo’s wheelhouse was slightly forward of amidships.) Early on the morning of February seventh, the watch officer glanced to stern and saw a freak wave rising up behind him that lined up perfectly with a crow’s nest above and behind the bridge. Simple geometry later showed the wave to be 112 feet high.

  Rogue waves such as that are thought to be several ordinary waves that happen to get “in step,” forming highly unstable piles of water. Others are waves that overlay long-distance swells from earlier storms. Such accumulations of energy can travel in threes—a phenonemon called “the three sisters”—and are so huge that they can be tracked by radar. There are cases of the three sisters crossing the Atlantic Ocean and starting to shoal along the 100-fathom curve off the coast of France. One hundred fathoms is six hundred feet, which means that freak waves are breaking over the continental shelf as if it were a shoreline sandbar. Most people don’t survive encounters with such waves, and so firsthand accounts are hard to come by, but they do exist. An Englishwoman named Beryl Smeeton was rounding Cape Horn with her husband in the 1960s when she saw a shoaling wave behind her that stretched away in a straight line as far as she could see. “The whole horizon was blotted out by a huge grey wall,” she writes in her journal. “It had no curling crest, just a thin white line along the whole length, and its face was unlike the sloping face of a normal wave. This was a wall of water with a completely vertical face, down which ran white ripples, like a waterfall.”

  The wave flipped the 46-foot boat
end over end, snapped Smeeton’s harness, and threw her overboard.

  Tommy Barrie had a similar experience off Georges Bank. He was laying-to in a storm when a wave clobbered him out of nowhere, imploding his windows. “There was this ‘boom’ and the Lexan window was blown right off,” he says. “The window hit the clutch and so the clutch was pinned and we couldn’t get her into gear. The boat’s over a bit, layin’ in a beam sea and shit flyin’ everywhere—things that have never moved on that boat before goin’ all over the place. The wave ripped the life raft off its mount and blew the front hatch open. It was dogged down, but there was so much water it blew it open anyway. I came up quick and radioed the Miss Millie: ‘Larry we took a hell of a wave, stand by, I’m here.’ I took the boat downsea and about ten minutes later the same wave hit him. His bird came out of the water and the hull took a big dent.”

  If a wave takes Billy’s windows out, it would be similar to the one experienced by Smeeton or Barrie—big, steep, and unexpected. It’s an awful scene to imagine: water knee-deep in the wheelhouse, men scrambling up the companionway, wind screaming through the blown-out window. If enough water gets in, it can make its way down to the engine room, soak the wiring, and take on an electric charge. The entire boat gets electrified; anyone standing in water gets electrocuted. A boat that loses her windows can start filling up with water in minutes, so two men tie safety lines to their waists and crawl out onto the whaleback deck with sheets of marine plywood. “The plywood acts like a kite, you have to man-handle the sonofabitch,” says Charlie Reed. “It’s a horrible thought, someone out there in that weather. As captain, it’s your worst fear, someone goin’ over the side.”