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

by Sebastian Junger

  If the men on the Andrea Gail had simply died, and their bodies were lying in state somewhere, their loved ones could make their goodbyes and get on with their lives. But they didn’t die, they disappeared off the face of the earth and, strictly speaking, it’s just a matter of faith that these men will never return. Such faith takes work, it takes effort. The people of Gloucester must willfully extract these men from their lives and banish them to another world.

  “The night before I found out about the boat, I had this dream,” says Debra Murphy, Murph’s ex-wife. “Murph was supposed to be home for my birthday, and in my dream—I don’t know if he’s standing there or if he’s calling me—he says, ‘I’m sorry, I’m not going to make it this time.’ Then I wake up, and the phone call comes. It’s from Billy’s new girlfriend, who says there was a big storm out there and the Andrea Gail hasn’t been heard from in a couple of days.”

  The first thing Debra does is drive over to Murph’s parents’ house to give them the bad news. They’ve never liked his fishing much—his father’s in real estate, they live a quiet suburban life—and they sit there in shock while Debra tells them the boat is missing. She doesn’t know much more than that one fact, and when she calls Bob Brown, all he can tell her is that the boat was last heard from on the 28th and that a search has been launched. Brown refuses to return her calls after that, so she starts talking to the Coast Guard every day asking how many flights went out, whether they see anything, what they plan to do next. Finally, after ten days of hell, Debra sits her three-year-old son, Dale Jr., down and explains that his father’s not coming back. Her son doesn’t understand, and wants to know where he is.

  He’s fishing, honey, she answers. He’s fishing in heaven.

  Dale knows his father fishes lots of places—Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Massachusetts. Heaven must be just another place where his father fishes. Well, when’s he coming back from fishing in heaven? he asks.

  A couple of months later, as far as young Dale is concerned, his father does come back from fishing in heaven. Dale wakes up screaming in the middle of the night, and Debra rushes into his room, panicked. What’s wrong, honey, what’s wrong? she says.

  Daddy’s in the room, Dale answers. Daddy was just here.

  What do you mean, Daddy was just here? Debra asks.

  Daddy was here and told me what happened on the boat.

  Three-year-old Dale, stumbling over the language, goes on to repeat what his father told him. The boat rolled over and caught his father on a “hook” (one of the gaff hooks for grabbing fish). The hook snagged his shirt and Murph wasn’t able to free himself in time. He got dragged under, and that was it.

  “My son has a lot of anger in him from losing his father,” says Debra. “There’ll be days where he’ll just be really depressed and I’ll say, ‘What’s the matter, Dale?’ And he’ll say, ‘Nothin’, Mom, I’m just thinking about my dad.’ Oh, God, he’ll look at me with these big brown eyes, the tears running down his cheeks and it kills me because there’s nothing I can do. Not one thing.”

  Others, too, are visited. Murph’s mother looks out the bedroom window one day and sees Murph ambling down their street in huge deck boots. Someone else spots him in traffic in downtown Bradenton. From time to time Debra dreams that she sees him and runs up and says, “Dale, where’ve you been?” And he won’t answer, and she’ll wake up in a cold sweat, remembering.

  Back in Gloucester, Chris Cotter has a similar dream. Bobby appears before her, all smiles, and she says to him, “Hey, Bobby, where you been?” He doesn’t tell her, he just keeps smiling and says, “Remember, Christina, I’ll always love you,” and then he fades away. “He’s always happy when he goes and so I know he’s okay,” says Chris. “He’s absolutely okay.”

  Chris, however, is not okay. Some nights she finds herself down at the State Fish Pier, waiting for the Andrea Gail to come in; other times she tells her friends, “Bobby’s coming home tonight, I know it.” She dates other men, she continues with her life, but she cannot accept that he is gone. They never find a body, they never find a piece of the boat, and she holds on to these things as proof that maybe the whole crew is safe on an island somewhere, drinking margaritas and watching the sun go down. Once Chris dreams that Bobby is living below the sea with a beautiful blond woman. The woman is a mermaid, and Bobby’s with her, now. Chris wakes up and heads back to the Crow’s Nest.

  WITHIN weeks of the tragedy, families of the dead men get a letter from Bob Brown asking them to exonerate him from responsibility. The letter is polite and to the point, saying that the Andrea Gail was “tight, strong, fully manned, equipped and supplied, and in all respects seaworthy and fit for the service in which she was engaged.” Unfortunately, she was also overwhelmed by the sea. For several of the bereaved—Jodi Tyne, Debra Murphy—this is the only letter they get from Bob Brown. He doesn’t write a sympathy card, he doesn’t offer financial help; he just sends a letter protecting himself from future legalities. It’s possible that he’s too shy, or embarrassed, to deal intimately with the bereaved, but they don’t see it that way. They see Bob “Suicide” Brown as a businessman who has made hundreds of thousands of dollars off men like their husbands. To a woman, they decide to sue.

  The deaths of the six Andrea Gail crew fall under the Death on the High Seas Act, a law passed by Congress in the early 1970s and then amended by the Supreme Court in 1990. A suit involving wrongful death on the high seas is limited to “pecuniary” loss, meaning the amount of money the deceased was earning for his dependents. Bobby Shatford, for example, was paying $325 a month in child support. Under the High Seas Act his ex-wife could—and does—sue Bob Brown for that money, but Ethel Shatford cannot sue. She has lost a son, not a legal provider, and has suffered no pecuniary loss.

  The High Seas Act is a vestige of the hard-nosed English Common Law, which saw death at sea as an act of God that shipowners couldn’t possibly be held liable for. Where would it end? How could they possibly do business? Had these men died in a logging accident, say, the family members could sue their employer for the loss of a loved one. But not on the high seas. On the high seas—defined as more than a marine league, or three miles, from shore—anything goes. The only way for Ethel Shatford to be compensated for the loss of her son would be to prove that Bobby’s death had been exceptionally agonizing, or that Bob Brown had been negligent in his upkeep of the boat. Suffering, of course, is impossible to prove on a boat that disappears without a trace, but negligence is not. Negligence can be proven through repair records, expert witnesses, and the testimony of former crew.

  Several weeks after the loss of the Andrea Gail, a Boston attorney named David Ansel agrees to represent the estates of Murphy, Moran, and Pierre in a wrongful death suit against Bob Brown. The other cases—including a wrongful death suit filed by Ethel Shatford—are handled by a Boston attorney who also specializes in maritime law. Brown’s name is already known to Ansel: Ten years earlier, Ansel’s law firm represented the widow of the man washed out of the Sea Fever on Georges Bank. Now Ansel has to prove Brown negligent once again. The fact that Brown acted like every other boat owner in the sword fleet—eyeballing structural changes, overloading the whaleback, failing to carry out stability tests—isn’t necessarily enough to clinch the case. Ansel packs his bags and heads to St. Augustine, Florida, where, five years earlier, Bob Brown altered the lines of the Andrea Gail.

  The shipyard, St. Augustine Trawlers, has been closed and sold by the I.R.S., but Ansel tracks down a former manager named Don Capo and asks him to give a deposition. Capo agrees. In the presence of a notary public and Bob Brown’s attorney, David Ansel questions Capo about the alterations to the Andrea Gail:

  To your knowledge, sir, was there a marine architect on board the vessel in Mr. Brown’s employ?

  I don’t recall any.

  Were there any measurements or tests or evaluations done to determine the amount of weight being added to the vessel?

  No, sir.

  Wer
e there stability tests performed, either hydraulic or reclining?

  No, sir.

  So far, Capo’s testimony has been damning. Brown altered the vessel without consulting a marine architect and then launched her without a single stability test. To anyone but a swordfisherman or a marine welder this would seem unusual—negligent, in fact—but it’s not. In the fishing industry, it’s as common as drunks in bars.

  How would you characterize the Andrea Gail compared to other vessels? Ansel finally asks, hoping to put the last nail in the coffin. Capo doesn’t hesitate.

  Oh, top of the line.

  Ansel’s line of attack has been blunted, but he has other avenues. For starters he can talk to Doug Kosco, who walked off the boat with six hours to go because he got a bad feeling. What did Kosco know? Had anything happened on the previous trip? Kosco works for the A.P. Bell Fish Company in Cortez, Florida, and when he’s not at sea he’s usually crashing at one friend’s apartment or another. He’s a hard man to find. “It’s—how can I put it—a nomadic existence,” says Ansel. “These guys don’t come home for dinner at five o’clock. They’re gone three or four months at a time.”

  Ansel finally tracks Kosco down to his parents’ house in Bradenton, but Kosco is uncooperative to the point of belligerence. He says that when he heard about the Andrea Gail he went into a three-month depression that cost him his job and nearly put him in the hospital. At one point Dale Murphy’s parents invited him over to dinner but he couldn’t deal with it; he never went. He’d known Murph as well as Bugsy and Billy, and all he could think was: That was supposed to have been me. Had Kosco gone on the trip, it’s possible that he would’ve spent his last few moments pleading for his life—for this life, the one he’s now leading. His wish was granted, in a sense, and it destroys him.

  Ansel’s case is fraying at the edges. He can’t use Kosco’s testimony because the man’s too much of a mess; the Coast Guard says the EPIRB tested perfectly—although they won’t release the report—and there’s no hard evidence that the Andrea Gail was unstable. By the standards of the industry she was a seaworthy boat, fit for her task, and sank due to an act of God rather than any negligence on Bob Brown’s part. The alterations to her hull may have helped her rollover, but they didn’t cause it. She rolled over because she was in the middle of the Storm of the Century, and no judge is going to see it otherwise. Ansel’s clients know that and decide to settle out of court. They probably won’t get much—eighty or ninety thousand—but they won’t run the risk of having Bob Brown completely exonerated.

  Ansel starts negotiating a settlement, and the other suits are also settled in private. The relative stability of the Andrea Gail will never be debated in court.

  ABOUT a year after the boat goes down, a man who looks exactly like Bobby Shatford walks into the Crow’s Nest and orders a beer. The entire lineup of regulars at the bartop turn and stare. One of the bartenders is too shocked to speak. Ethel, who’s just gotten off her shift, has seen the man before, in town, and explains to him why everyone’s staring. You look just like my son who died last year, she says. There’s a photo of him on the wall.

  The man goes over and studies it. The photo shows Bobby in a t-shirt, hat, and sunglasses down on Fisherman’s Wharf. His arms are folded, he’s leaning a little to one side and smiling at the camera. It was taken on a day that he was walking around town with Chris, and he looks very happy. Three months later he’d be dead.

  Jesus, if I sent this photo home to my mother she’d think it was me, the man says. She’d never know the difference.

  Luckily the man is a carpenter, not a fisherman. If he were a fisherman, he’d drain his beer and settle onto a barstool and think things over a bit. People who work on boats have a hard time resisting the idea that certain ones among them are marked, and that they will be reclaimed by the sea. The spitting image of a man who drowned is a good candidate for that; so are all his shipmates. Jonah, of course, was marked, and his shipmates knew it. Murph was marked and told his mother so. Adam Randall was marked but had no idea; as far as he was concerned, he just had a couple of close calls. After the Andrea Gail went down he told his girlfriend, Chris Hansen, that while he was walking around on board he felt a cold wind on his skin and realized that no one on the crew was coming back. He didn’t say anything to them, though, because on the waterfront that isn’t done—you don’t just tell six men you think they’re going to drown. Everyone takes their chances, and either you drown or you don’t.

  And then there are the nearly-dead. Kosco, Hazard, Reeves—these people are leading lives that, but for the merest of circumstances, should have already ended. Anyone who has been through a severe storm at sea has, to one degree or another, almost died, and that fact will continue to alter them long after the winds have stopped blowing and the waves have died down. Like a war or a great fire, the effects of a storm go rippling outward through webs of people for years, even generations. It breaches lives like coastlines and nothing is ever again the same.

  “My boss took me to a hotel and the first thing I did was have three shots of vodka straight up,” says Judith Reeves, after she got off the Eishin Maru 78 in Halifax on October 31st. (The engineer had rigged up some cables in the hold that, manually, turned the rudder. The captain shouted commands down to him from the bridge, he pulled the cables, and that was how they weathered the storm.) “I called my mom and then my roommate and I didn’t sleep that whole first night because the hotel room wasn’t rocking. Next morning I did ‘Midday,’ the CBS news show here, and then I went to the CBC studios for another interview, and that was the first time that I got scared. I started smoking and drinking and by the time I went to the third interview I was quite hammered. They wanted to do it live and I said, ‘Are you sure about that?’ I was in such demand by the media for two or three weeks, I mean the whole country was praying for me, it was kind of a high. But then I went home in December to see my mom and dad and as soon as I got back here I fell into a depression. I lost a lot of weight and started going on these long crying jags. You can only sustain that high level for so long before you break down; you finally become an ordinary person again.”

  Reeves keeps working as a fisheries observer and eventually meets, and marries, a Russian fisherman from one of her boats. Karen Stimpson, who also spent several days at sea thinking she was going to die, breaks down more quickly than Reeves but not as badly. After the rescue she stays at a friend’s apartment in Boston, avoiding reporters, and the next day she decides to go out and get a cappuccino. She walks into a cafe around the corner, orders, and then pulls a roll of bills out of her pocket to pay. The bills are wet with seawater. The man at the cash register looks from her face to the wet bills to her face again and says, I know you! You’re the woman they saved off that boat!

  Stimson is horrified; she pushes the money at him, but he just waves her away. No, no, it’s on us. Just thank God you’re alive.

  Thank God you’re alive… She’d hadn’t thought about it like that but, yes, she could well be swirling around in the freezing black depths off Georges right now. She grabs her coffee and runs out the door, sobbing.

  TWO weeks after the search for Rick Smith has been called off, Marianne gets a telephone call from a man named John Monte of Westhampton Beach, Long Island, who says that he’s a psychic and that Rick Smith is still alive. He tells her that he talked to Suffolk Airbase and that they want to resume searching for him.

  Marianne’s heart sinks. It’s taken her two weeks to accept the fact that her husband is dead, and now she’s supposed to start hoping all over again. There’s no way Rick could still be alive, but she’s afraid of what people might think if she discourages a search, so she gives her okay. The PJs at the base are worried about the same thing—what Marianne will think—so they give their okay as well. Monte gets a local lawyer named John Jiras interested in the case, and Jiras drafts a letter to New York State Representative George Hochbrueckner demanding that the search be resumed. Hochbrueckner pa
sses the letter along to Admiral Bill Kime, Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, and the case filters through the command structure back to D1 Comcen in Boston. A response is drawn up explaining how thorough the search was and how unlikely it would be that a man could survive twenty-six days at sea, and that is sent back up the ladder to Kime. Meanwhile, Monte gives Marianne a list of press contacts to call to publicize the case—and himself. “It’s the only time in my life I thought I was going crazy,” she says. “I finally told him to get lost. I couldn’t take it anymore.”

  After almost a month, Marianne Smith is able to start absorbing the loss of her husband. As long as the planes are going out she holds on to some shred of hope, and that keeps her in a ghastly kind of limbo. Several weeks after Rick’s death, she dreams that he comes up to her with a sad look on his face and says, I’m sorry, and then gives her a hug. It’s the only dream she ever has of him, and it constitutes a goodbye of sorts. Marianne takes her children to a memorial service in Rick’s hometown in Pennsylvania, but not to the one on Long Island, because she knows there are going to be a lot of television cameras there. (“Children don’t grieve in front of crowds—they grieve in bed saying, ‘I want Daddy to read me a book,’” she says.) George Bush sends her a letter of sympathy, as does Governor Mario Cuomo. Marianne discovers that, as a widow, she makes people extremely uncomfortable; either they avoid her or treat her like a cripple. Marianne Smith, who started out as an avionics technician for an F-16 squadron, decides to face her widowhood by going to law school and becoming a lawyer.

  John Spillane gets a job as a New York City fireman, in addition to his PJ status. One night he’s half awakened by the station alarm, and for some reason the room lights don’t go on. He’s terrified. He finds himself by the exit pole thinking, “It’s okay, you’ve been through this before, just keep your head.” All he knows is that it’s dark, there’s not much time and he’s got to go downward—exactly the same situation as in the helicopter. By the time he finally understands where he is, he’s put on all his fire-fighting clothes. He’s fully cocked and ready to go.