The Perfect Storm

by Sebastian Junger

  Back in 1983, a friend of Johnston’s ran into a fall gale in an eighty-seven-foot boat called the Canyon Explorer. Three lows merged off the coast and formed one massive storm that blew one hundred knots for a day and a half. The seas were so big that Johnston’s friend had to goose the throttle just to keep from sliding backward down their faces. The boat was forced sixty miles backward—despite driving full-steam ahead—because the whole surface of the ocean had been set in motion. At one point the captain glanced out the window and saw an enormous wave coming at them. Hey Charlie, look at this! he shouted to another crew member who was down below. Charlie sprinted up the companion-way but didn’t get to the wheelhouse in time; the wave bore down on them, slate-colored and foaming, and blew the wheelhouse windows out.

  That happened to be a particularly severe storm, and it devastated the rest of the fleet. A boat named the Lady Alice had her wheelhouse knocked in and a crew member paralyzed for life. The Tiffany Vance, which had just transferred fisheries observer Joseph Pelczarski to the Andrea Gail the week before, nearly went down with her sister ship, the Rush. The two boats were a mile apart when the storm hit, way out on the Flemish Cap, and both lost their portside stabilizing birds. The bird on the Tiffany Vance was hung from chain, and without 200 pounds of steel to keep it down, the chain started slamming against the boat. It had to be cut; Alex Bueno, the captain, stripped to his underwear, tied a rope around his waist, and waded out onto the deck with a welding torch. There was so much water coming over the deck that he had trouble keeping the torch lit. He finally managed to burn the chain free, and then he went back inside and waited for the boat to sink. “We didn’t even bother calling the Coast Guard, we were just too far out,” he says. “There’s really nothing to do but rely on the other guys around you.”

  Unfortunately, the Rush was in even more trouble than the Tiffany Vance. She had cable on her birds instead of chains, and the broken cable managed to wrap itself around the drive shaft and freeze the propeller. The boat went dead in the water and immediately turned side-to in the waves—in “a beam sea,” as it’s called. A boat in a beam sea can count her future in hours, maybe minutes. Wayne Rushmore, her captain, got on the radio and told Bueno he was going down and needed help, but Bueno radioed back that he was going down, too. The Rush’s crew went back out on deck and, taking extraordinary risks, managed to pull the cable free of the propeller. For the next several days the two boats rode the storm out side by side; at one point the sun came out, and Bueno noticed that the larger waves put his wheelhouse in shadow. They blocked out the sun.

  BY ALL reports, Billy’s having a terrible trip. After fourteen sets he only has about 20,000 pounds of fish in the hold, which is barely enough to cover expenses, much less compensate six men for a month of their life. When Linda Greenlaw arrives on the fishing grounds Billy tells her that he’s disgusted and is going to need more fuel if they want to make any money at all. Sword boats lend each other supplies all the time on the high seas, but Billy has a particular reputation for pushing things to the limit. This is not the first time Linda has bailed him out. The two boats rendezvous south of the Flemish Cap, and Linda drops a tow line and refuelling hose over the side. Billy comes up bow to stern and ties off the tow line, and the boats chug along, the Hannah Boden pulling the Andrea Gail, while the fuel gets pumped into Billy’s tanks. It’s a dangerous maneuver—with any other boat, Bob Brown would insist that Linda just tie floats to fuel drums and drop them over the side—but sister ships are a different matter. They’ll do almost anything to give themselves an edge over the rest of the fleet. When they’re finished, Linda hauls her lines back and the two crews wave goodbye as the boats draw apart. Half an hour later they’re just white squares on each other’s radar screens. The fuel is just the beginning of Billy’s problems, though.

  Throughout the trip he’s been having trouble getting the ice machine to work properly. Ordinarily it’s supposed to pump out three tons of ice a day, but the compressor is malfunctioning and cannot even handle half that. Day by day, in other words, the quality of the fish is starting to drop; a loss of just fifty cents a pound would mean $20,000 off the value of the catch. That could only be offset by catching more fish, which in turn means staying out even longer. It’s a classic cost-benefit dilemma that fishermen have agonized over for centuries.

  And then there’s the crew. They get ugly at about the same rate as badly iced fish. By the end of a long trip they may be picking fights with one another, hoarding food, ostracizing the new members—acting, in short, like men in prison, which in some ways they are. There are stories of sword boats coming into port with crew members manacled to their bunks or tied to the headstay with monofilament line. It’s a kind of Darwinism that keeps the boats stocked with rough, belligerent men who have already established themselves in the hierarchy. Billy would never permit that sort of viciousness on his boat—the crew are all friends, more or less, and he intends to keep it that way—but he knows you can lock six men together for only so long before someone gets crazy. They’ve been at sea three weeks and are looking at a minimum of two more. If they’re going to salvage anything from the trip, they’ve got to catch some fish in a hurry.

  Billy keeps talking with the other captains, studying surface temperature charts, analyzing the water column with his Doppler. He’s looking for that temperature discontinuity, that concentration of plankton, mackerel, and squid. In five good sets they could turn this trip around. He knows it. Ice or no ice, he’s not going back in until they do.

  BILLY TYNE has the only private room on the Andrea Gail, which is standard for the captain. On some boats the captain’s quarters are upstairs behind the bridge, but Billy’s is in a small room next to the head; it’s about the size of a private sleeper on an Amtrak train. There’s a seabag full of dirty clothes and a few photos taped to the wall. The photos are of his two daughters, Erica and Billie Jo. Seven years ago, when Billie Jo was born, Billy stayed home to take care of her while his wife worked. Billie Jo got used to having a father around and took it hard when he went back on the boat. Erica was born four years later and has never known anything different; as far as she’s concerned, fathers are men who go away for weeks at a time and come home smelling of fish.

  The rest of the crew are wedged into a dark little room across from the galley. The bunks are stacked along the inner wall and the starboard hull, and the floor is covered with the detritus that accumulates around young men—clothes, cassette tapes, beer cans, cigarettes, magazines. Along with the magazines are dozens of books, including a few ragged paperbacks by Dick Francis. Francis writes about horse racing, which seems to appeal to swordfishermen because it’s another way to win or lose huge amounts of money. The books get passed around the fleet “at about four hundred miles an hour,” as one swordfisherman put it, and they’ve probably been to the Grand Banks more times than the men themselves. Most fishermen tape photos of their girlfriends to the wall, alongside pages ripped from Penthouse and Playboy, and the crew of the Andrea Gail are undoubtedly no different.

  The galley is the largest room on the boat, other than the fish hold. At first glance it could almost be a kitchen in a house trailer: wood veneer, fluorescent panel lights, cheap wood cabinets. There’s a four-burner gas stove, an industrial stainless steel refrigerator, and a Formica table angled into the forward wall. A bench runs along the length of the port side, and there’s a single porthole above the bench. It’s too small for a man to wiggle out of. A door at the aft end of the galley exits into a small holding area and a companionway that goes down into the engine room. The companionway is protected by a watertight door that screws down securely with four steel dogs. The fo’c’sle and pilothouse doors are watertight as well; in theory, the entire forward end of the boat can be sealed off, with the crew inside.

  The engine, an eight-cylinder, 365-horsepower turbo-charged diesel, is slightly more powerful than the largest tractor-trailer rigs on the highway. The engine was refurbished in 1989 because
the boat flooded at dock after a discharge pipe froze, cracking the weld. The engine drives a propeller shaft that runs through a cutout in the aft bulkhead of the compartment and through the fish hold to the stern of the boat. Most boats have a gasket that seals the prop as it passes through the bulkhead, but the Andrea Gail does not. This is a weak point; flooding in the fish hold could conceivably slosh forward and kill the engine, crippling the boat.

  The machinery room sits just forward of the engine and is crammed with tools, spare parts, lumber, old clothes, a backup generator, and three bilge pumps. The job of the pumps is to lift water out of the hold faster than it comes in; in the old days crews would be at the hand pumps for days at a stretch, and ships went down when the storms outlasted the men. The tools are stored in metal lockboxes on the floor and include just about everything you’d need to rebuild the engine—vise grips, pry bar, hammer, crescent wrenches, pipe wrenches, socket wrenches, Allen wrenches, files, hacksaw, channel-lock pliers, bolt cutters, ball peen hammer. Spare parts are packed in cardboard boxes and stacked on wooden shelves: starter motor, cooling pump, alternator, hydraulic hoses and fittings, v-belts, jumper wires, fuses, hose clamps, gasket material, nuts and bolts, sheet metal, silicone rubber, plywood, screw gun, duct tape, lube oil, hydraulic oil, transmission oil, and fuel filters.

  Boats try at all costs to avoid going into Newfoundland for repairs. Not only does it waste valuable time, but it costs obscene amounts of money—one infamous repair bill amounted to $50,000 for what should’ve been a $3,500 job. (The machinists had reportedly run their lathes at 46 rpm rather than 400 in order to rack up overtime.) As a result, sword boat captains help each other out on the high seas whenever they can; they lend engine parts, offer technical advice, donate food or fuel. The competition between a dozen boats rushing a perishable commodity to market fortunately doesn’t kill an inherent sense of concern for each other. This may seem terrifically noble, but it’s not—or at least not entirely. It’s also self-interested. Each captain knows he may be the next one with the frozen injector or the leaking hydraulics.

  Diesel fuel on the Andrea Gail is carried in a pair of 2,000-gallon tanks along either side of the engine room, and in two 1,750-gallon tanks at the stern. There are also thirty plastic drums lashed to the whaleback with another 1,650 gallons of fuel. Each one has AG painted on them in white lettering. Two thousand gallons of fresh water are stored in two forepeak tanks, and another 500 gallons or so are stored in drums up on deck, along with the oil. There’s also a “water maker” that purifies saltwater by forcing it through a membrane at 800 pounds per square inch. The membrane is so fine that it even filters out bacteria and viruses. The boat butcher—who is constantly covered in fish guts—gets to shower every day. The rest of the crew showers every two or three.

  The fish hold is gained by a single steel ladder that drops steeply down from a hatch in the middle of the deck. During storms, the hatch is covered and lashed down so that big seas can’t pry it off—although they still manage to. The hold is divided by plywood penboards that keep the load from shifting; a shifted load can put a boat over on her side and keep her there until she sinks. There’s an industrial freezer in the stern where the food is stored, and then another compartment called the lazarette. The lazarette is where the steering mechanism is housed; like the engine room, it’s not sealed off from the rest of the boat.

  Up on deck, immediately forward of the fish hold, is the tool room. Six leader carts, spools as big as car tires, are lined up behind the staircase that rises to the whaleback deck. The men hang their foul weather gear along the wall behind the spools, along with anything else that could get swept away on deck. An overhang in the whaleback protects the Lindegren longline reel, and the portside bulwark has been raised to the height of the whaleback and extended eighteen feet aft. Huddled up against it are bins full of ball drops, highflyers, radio beacons—everything that hangs off a longline.

  At the stern of the boat is the setting-out house, a frame-and-plywood shed that gives some shelter to the men when they’re baiting the line. A big sea across the stern might take out the setting-out house; otherwise it would probably be protected by the pilothouse up front. The deck is steel and covered with no-skid tiles. The gunwales are waist-high and have gaps in them, called scuppers, or freeing ports, that allow boarding seas to drain off the deck. The scuppers are normally blocked by scupper plates that prevent fish and gear from sliding out to sea, but when the weather gets dangerous the plates are taken out. Or should be.

  The ability of a boat to clear her decks is one of the most crucial aspects of her design. A boarding sea is like putting a swimming pool on the deck; the boat wallows, loses her steerage, and for a few moments is in extreme danger. One longline fisherman, a Gloucester local named Chris, was almost lost in such a situation. The boat he was on was running downsea when she took “one wicked sea from hell.” The stern lifted, the bow dropped, and they started surfing down the face of the wave. When they got to the bottom there was nowhere to go but down, and the crest of the breaking wave drove them like a piling. Chris looked out the porthole, and all he could see was black.

  If you look out the porthole and see whitewater, you’re still near the surface and relatively safe. If you see greenwater, at least you’re in the body of the wave. If you see blackwater, you’re a submarine. “I felt the boat come to a complete stop,” says Chris. “I thought, ‘My God we’re goin’ down.’ We hung there a moment and then the buoyancy caught and it was as if she’d been thrown into reverse. We plowed right back out the way we came.”

  Any number of tilings could have happened to Chris’s boat at that moment. The breather pipes could have gotten stuffed and killed the engine. The fish hatch could have given way and filled the hold. A tool could have gotten loose and knocked out some machinery. The wheelhouse windows could have exploded, a bulkhead could have failed, or thirty tons of ice and fish could have shifted in the hold. But even assuming the boat popped up like a cork, she would still be laboring under a crushing load of water. If anything were caught in the scuppers—a hatch cover, an old sleeping bag—the water would have been impeded as it drained off. All it takes is a moment of vulnerability for the next wave to roll you over: props in the air, crew on their ass, cargo avalanching. It’s the end.

  Every boat has a degree of roll from which she can no longer recover. The Queen Mary came within a degree or two of capsizing off Newfoundland when a rogue wave burst her pilothouse windows ninety feet up; she sagged on her beam ends for an agonizing minute before regaining her trim. Two forces are locked in combat for a ship like that: the downward push of gravity and the upward lift of buoyancy. Gravity is the combined weight of the vessel and everything on it—crew, cargo, fishing gear—seeking the center of the earth. Buoyancy is the force of all the enclosed air in the hull trying to rise above water level.

  On a trim and stable ship, these two forces are equal and cancel each other out along the centerline; but all this changes when a boat gets shoved over onto her side. Instead of being lined up, the two forces are now laterally offset. The center of gravity stays where it is, but the center of buoyancy migrates to the submerged side, where proportionally more air has been forced below the waterline. With gravity pushing down at the center and buoyancy pushing up from the submerged side, the ship pivots on her center and returns to an even keel. The more the ship heels, the farther apart the two forces act and the more leverage the center of buoyancy has. To greatly simplify, the lateral distance between the two forces is called the righting arm, and the torque they generate is called the righting moment. Boats want a big righting moment. They want something that will right them from extreme angles of heel.

  The righting moment has three main implications. First of all, the wider the ship, the more stable she is. (More air is submerged as she heels over, so the righting arm is that much longer.) The opposite is also true: The taller the ship, the more likely she is to capsize. The high center of gravity reduces what is
called the metacentric height, which determines the length of the righting arm. The lower the metacentric height, the less leverage there is with which to overcome the downward force of gravity. Finally, there always comes a point where the boat can no longer right herself. Logically, this would happen when her decks have gone past vertical and the center of gravity falls outside the center of buoyancy—the “zero-moment” point. But in reality, boats get into trouble a lot sooner than that. Depending on the design, an angle of about sixty or seventy degrees starts to put a vessel’s lee gunwales underwater. That means there’s greenwater on deck, and the righting moment has that much more weight to overcome. The boat may eventually recover, but she’s spending more and more time underwater. The deck is subject to the full fury of the waves and a hatch might come loose, a bulkhead might fail, a door might burst open because someone forgot to dog it down. Now she’s not just sailing, she’s sinking.

  The problem with a steel boat is that the crisis curve starts out gradually and quickly becomes exponential. The more trouble she’s in, the more trouble she’s likely to get in, and the less capable she is of getting out of it, which is an acceleration of catastrophe that is almost impossible to reverse. With the boat’s bilge partially flooded, she sits lower in the water and takes more and more prolonged rolls. Longer rolls mean less steerage; lower buoyancy means more damage. If there’s enough damage, flooding may overwhelm the pumps and short out the engine or gag its air intakes. With the engine gone, the boat has no steerageway at all and turns broadside to the seas. Broadsides exposes her to the full force of the breaking waves, and eventually a part of her deck or wheelhouse lets go. After that, downflooding starts to occur.

  Downflooding is the catastrophic influx of ocean water into the hold. It’s a sort of death rattle at sea, the nearly vertical last leg of an exponential curve. In Portland, Maine, the Coast Guard Office of Marine Safety has a video clip of a fishing boat downflooding off the coast of Nova Scotia. The boat was rammed amidship by another boat in the fog, and the video starts with the ramming boat backing full-screw astern. It’s all over in twenty seconds: the crippled vessel settles in her stern, rears bow-up, and then sinks. She goes down so fast that it looks as if she’s getting yanked under by some huge hand. The last few moments of the film show the crew diving off the upended bow and trying to swim to the other boat fifty feet away. Half of them make it, half of them don’t. They’re sucked down by the vacuum of a large steel boat making for the deep.