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.
Were 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 roll over, 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!
Stimpson 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 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 passes the letter along to Admiral Bill Kime, Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, and the case filters through the command structure back to Di 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.
The storm hasn’t yet finished with people, though; hasn’t stopped reverberating through people’s lives. Eighteen months after the ditchings, a nor’easter roars up the coast that, even before it’s fully formed, meteorologists are referring to as the “Mother of All Storms.” It has a distinct eye, just like a hurricane, and a desperately low central barometric pressure. One ship in its path watches wave heights jump from three feet to twenty feet in less than two hours. The storm drops fifty inches of snow on the mountains of North Carolina and sets all-time barometric records from Delaware to Boston. Winds hit no miles an hour in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Coast Guard rescues 235 people off boats during the first two days alone. Wave heights surpass sixty feet off much of the East Coast and creep up toward one hundred feet off Nova Scotia. Data buoys record significant wave heights—the average of the top third—only a few feet lower than in the storm that sank the Andrea Gail. By the narrowest of margins the “Halloween Gale,” as that storm has come to be known, retains the record for most powerful nor’easter of the century.
Caught in the worst of this is the 584-foot Gold Bond Conveyor, the freighter that, two years earlier, had relayed the Satori’s mayday to Boston. The Gold Bond Conveyor has a regular run between Halifax and Tampa carrying gypsum ore, and on March 14th, about a hundred miles southeast of where Billy Tyne went down, she runs into the Mother of All Storms. She’s the only vessel of any kind to encounter both storms at their height, and they happen to be two of the most powerful nor’easters of the century. One could say the vessel was marked. That evening the captain radios Halifax that waves are breaking over their upper decks, and shortly after midnight he calls again to say that they’re abandoning ship. The seas are a hundred feet and the snow is driving down sideways in the dark. Thirty-three men go over the side and are never seen again.
But it’s still not over; the Halloween Gale has one last shoulder to tap. Adam Randall has been working steadily on the Mary T, but in February, Albert Johnston hauls her out for repairs and Randall has to find another job. He finds one on the Terri Lei, a tuna longliner out of Georgetown, South Carolina. The Terri Lei is a big, heavily built boat with a highly experienced crew, and she’s due to go out at the end of March. Chris Hansen, Randall’s girlfriend, drives him to Logan Airport for the flight south, but all the planes are grounded because of the blizzard—the Mother of All Storms. He gets a flight out the next day, but when he talks with Chris Hansen on the phone from South Carolina, she tells him she’s worried about him. Are you okay? There’s a funny sound in your voice, she says.
Yeah, I’m fine, he says. I don’t really want to go on this trip. It’ll be good, though—maybe I’ll make some money.
The night before leaving, the crew of the Terri Lei go to a local bar and get into a fight with the crew of another boat. Several men wind up in the hospital, but the next day, bruised and sore, the crew of the Terri Lei cut their lines and head out to sea. They’re going to work the deep waters just off the continental shelf, due east of Charleston. It’s spring, the fish are working their way up the Gulf Stream, and with a little luck they’ll make their trip in ten or twelve sets. On the night of April 6th they finish setting their gear and then Randall calls Chris Hansen on the ship-to-shore radio. They talk for over half an hour—ship to shore isn’t cheap, Randall’s phone bill is regularly five hundred dollars—and he tells Chris that they’d had some bad weather but it’s passed and all their gear is in the water. He says he’ll call her soon.
Randall’s a tough one to categorize. He’s an expert fisherman and marine welder but has also, at various times, considered hairdressing or nursing as careers. He has a tattoo of a clipper ship on one arm, an anchor on the other, and a scar on his hand where he once stitched himself up with a needle and thread. He has the sort of long blond hair that one associates with English rock stars, but he also has the muscled build of a man who works hard. (“You can hit him with a hammer and he won’t bruise,” Chris Hansen says.) Randall says that at times he can feel ghosts swirling around the boat, the ghosts of men who died at sea. They’re not at peace. They want back in.
The next morning the crew of the Terri Lei start hauling their gear in choppy seas and gusty winds. They’re 135 miles offshore and there are a lot of boats in the area, including a freighter en route from South America to Delaware. At 8:45 AM the Charleston Coast Guard pick up an EPIRB distress signal, and they immediately send out two aircraft and a cutter to investigate. It might be a false alarm—the weather is moderate and no ships have reported trouble—but they have to respond anyway. They home in on the radio signal and immediately spot the EPIRB amidst a scattering of deck gear. A short distance away floats a life raft with the canopy up and Terri Lei stencilled on one side.
The boat herself has vanished and no one signals from the raft, so a swimmer drops into the water to investigate. He strokes over and hauls himself up on one of the grab lines. The raft is empty. No one got off the Terri Lei alive.
AFTERWORD
“I’M SORRY the way I was when I first met you,” Ricky Shatford told me in a Gloucester bar not long ago. The book had been out for about three months, and the Shatford family—and Gloucester—had been rocked
by a wave of publicity. Summer people were visiting Cape Pond Ice, tourists were booking rooms at the Crow’s Nest, the Shatfords were being stopped in the street. “You were writing about my baby brother and I couldn’t deal with it,” Ricky went on. “I told people I was going to kill you.”
The first time I’d ever gone into the Crow’s Nest, it had taken me half an hour to work up the nerve. It wasn’t the bar—I’d been in rough bars before—it was what I was going in there for. I was going in there to ask a woman about the death of her son. I wasn’t a fisherman, I wasn’t from Gloucester, and I wasn’t a journalist, at least by my own definition of the word. I was just a guy with a pen and paper and an idea for a book. I slid a steno pad under my belt against the small of my back, where it was hidden by my jacket. I put a tape recorder and a smaller notebook in my jeans pocket in case I needed them. Then I took a long breath and I got out of the car and walked across the street.
The front door was heavier than I expected, the room was darker, and there were a dozen men clutching beers in the indoor gloom. Every single one turned and looked at me when I walked in. I ignored their looks and walked across the room and sat down at the bar. Ethel came over, and after ordering a beer I told her that I was writing about dangerous jobs, particularly fishing, and that I wanted to talk to her. “I know you lost your son a couple of years ago,” I said. “I was living in Gloucester at the time, and I remember the storm. It must have been very hard for you. I can’t imagine how hard that must have been.”
The Perfect Storm Page 23