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

THE DREAMS OF THE DEAD

BY the time word has spread throughout Gloucester that the fleet’s in trouble, the storm has retrograded to within 350 miles of Cape Cod and developed such a steep pressure gradient that an eye starts to form. Satellite photos show a cyclonic swirl two thousand miles wide off the East Coast; the southern edge reaches Jamaica and the northern edge reaches the coast of Labrador. In all, three quarters of a million square miles of ocean are experiencing gale-force conditions, and an area three or four times that is indirectly involved in the storm. On the satellite photos, moist air flowing into the low looks like a swirl of cream in a cup of black coffee. Thick strands of white cloud-cover and dark Arctic air circle one-and-a-half times around the low before making it into the center. The low grinds steadily toward the coast, intensifying as it goes, and by the morning of October 30th it has stalled two hundred miles south of Montauk, Long Island. The worst winds, in the northeast quadrant, are getting dragged straight across Gloucester Harbor and Massachusetts Bay.

So sudden and violent are the storm’s first caresses of the coast that a tinge of hysteria creeps into the local weather bulletins: UNCONFIRMED REPORTS OF TWO HOUSES COLLAPSING HAVE BEEN RECEIVED FROM THE GLOUCESTER AREA … OTHER MASSACHUSETTS LOCATIONS UNDER THE GUN … SEAS OF 25 TO 45 FEET HAVE OCCURRED TODAY FROM GEORGES BANK EAST … THE DANGEROUS STORM ASSOCIATED WITH HIGH SEAS IS MOVING CLOSER TO NEW ENGLAND.

The first coastal flood warnings are issued at 3:15 AM on the 29th, based mainly on reports from Nantucket of sustained winds up to forty-five knots. Predictions from the Weather Service’s computers are systematically exceeding almost all atmospheric models for the area, and high tides are predicted to be two to three feet above normal. (These predictions, as it turns out, will be way too low.) The warnings go out via satellite uplink along something called the NOAA Weather Wire, which feeds into local media and emergency services. By dawn, radio and television announcers are informing the public about the oncoming storm, and the state Emergency Management Agency is contacting local authorities along the coast to make sure they take precautions. The EMA is based in Framingham, Massachusetts, outside of Boston, and has direct lines to Governor Weld’s Office, the National Guard, the State Police barracks, and the National Weather Service. Any threat to the public health is routed through the EMA. If local communities don’t have the resources to cope, state agencies step in; if state agencies can’t handle it, the federal government gets called. The EMA is set up to handle everything from severe thunderstorms to nuclear war.

October 30th, on shore, starts deceptively calm and mild; oak leaves skitter down the street and the midday sun has a thin warmth to it that people won’t feel again until spring. The only sign that something is amiss is along the coast, where huge grey swells start to roll in that can be heard miles inland. Swells are the outriders of sea weather, and if they keep getting bigger, the weather is approaching. The Gloucester Police Department blocks access to the shore but people go anyway, parking their cars half a mile away and walking through the rising wind and rain to hilltops where they can look out to sea. They are greeted by an ocean that has been wholly transformed. Swells march shoreward from the horizon in great, even bands, their white crests streaming sideways in the wind and their ranks breaking, reforming, and breaking again as they close in on Cape Ann. In the shallows they draw themselves up, hesitate, and then implode against the rocks with a force that seems to shake the entire peninsula. Air trapped inside their grey barrels gets blown out the back walls in geysers higher than the waves themselves. Thirty-foot seas are rolling in from the North Atlantic and attacking the town of Gloucester with a cold, heavy rage.

By midafternoon the wind is hitting hurricane force and people are having a hard time walking, standing up, being heard. Moans emanate from the electric lines that only offshore fishermen have ever heard before. Waves inundate Good Harbor Beach and the parking lot in front of the Stop-n-Shop. They rip up entire sections of Atlantic Road. They deposit a fifteen-foot-high tangle of lobster traps and sea muck at the end of Grapevine Road. They fill the swimming pool of a Back Shore mansion with ocean-bottom rubble. They suck beach cobbles up their huge faces and sling them inland, smashing windows, peppering lawns. They overrun the sea wall at Brace Cove, spill into Niles Pond, and continue into the woods beyond. For a brief while it’s possible to surf across people’s lawns. So much salt water gets pumped into Niles Pond that it overflows and cuts Eastern Point in half. Eastern Point is where the rich live, and by nightfall the ocean is two feet deep in some of the nicest living rooms in the state.

In several places around the state, houses float off their foundations and out to sea. Waves break through a thirty-foot sand dune at Ballston Beach in Truro and flood the headwaters of the Pamet River. Six-thousand-pound boat moorings drag inside Chatham Harbor. The Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant in Plymouth shuts down because seaweed clogs the condenser intakes. A Delta Airlines pilot at Logan is surprised to see spray from breaking waves top the 200-foot cranes on Deer Island; just sitting on the runway, his airspeed indicator clocks eighty miles an hour. Houses are washed out to sea in Gloucester, Swampscott, and on Cape Cod. Rising waters inundate half of the town of Nantucket. A man is swept off the rocks in Point Judith, Rhode Island, and is never seen again, and a surfer dies trying to ride twenty-foot shorebreak in Massachusetts. Plum Island is cut in half by the waves, as is Hough’s Neck and Squantum, in Quincy. Over one hundred houses are destroyed in the town of Scituate, and the National Guard has to be called out to help the inhabitants evacuate. One elderly woman is taken from her house by a backhoe while surf breaks down her front door.

The winds have set so much water in motion that the ocean gets piled up against the continent and starts blocking the rivers. The Hudson backs up one hundred miles to Albany and causes flooding, and the Potomac does the same. Tides are five feet above normal in Boston Harbor, within one inch of an all-time Boston record. Had the storm occurred a week earlier, during the highest tides of the month, water levels would be a foot and a half higher, flooding downtown Boston. Storm surge and huge seas extinguish Isle of Shoals and Boone’s Island lighthouses off the coast of Maine. Some Democrats are cheered to see waves obliterate the front of President Bush’s summer mansion in Kennebunkport. Damage along the East Coast surpasses one and a half billion dollars, including millions of dollars in lobster pots and other fixed fishing gear.

“The only light I can shed on the severity of the storm is that until then, we had never—ever—had a lobster trap move offshore,” says Bob Brown. “Some were moved thirteen miles to the west. It was the worst storm I have ever heard of, or experienced.”

BY nightfall on the 30th—with wave heights at their peak and the East Coast bearing the full brunt of the storm—the Coast Guard finds itself with two major search-and-rescue operations on its hands. In Boston, a Coast Guardsman starts telephoning every harbormaster in New England, asking if the Andrea Gail is in port. If the town is too small to have a harbormaster, they ask a town selectman to walk down to the waterfront and take a look. Coast Guard cutters also poke their way along the coast checking every harbor and cove they can find. In Maine’s Jonesport area a cutter checks Sawyers Cove, Roque Harbor, Black Cove, Moose Peak Light, Chandler and Englishman Bay, Little Machias Bay, Machias Bay East Side, Machias Bay West Side, and Mistaken Harbor, all without success. The entire coast from Lubec, Maine, to eastern Long Island is scrutinized without turning up any sign of the Andrea Gail

The search for Rick Smith is in some ways simpler than for the Andrea Gail because the pilots know exactly where he went down, but a single human being—even with a strobe light—is extremely hard to spot in such conditions. (One pilot missed a five-hundred-foot freighter because it was obscured by waves during one leg of his search.) As a result, the combined assets of half a dozen East Coast airbases are thrown into the search. Smith has a wife and three daughters at home and he knows, personally, a significant proportion of the people who are looking for him. He’s one of the most highly trained survival swimmers in the world and if he hits the water alive, he’ll probably stay that way. He might eventually die of thirst, but he’s not going to drown.

The first thing the Coast Guard does is drop a radio marker buoy where the other Guardsmen were picked up; the buoy drifts the way a person would, and the search area shifts continuously southwestward. Planes fly thirty-mile trackline searches five hundred feet above the water, but in these conditions the chances of spotting a man are only one in three, so some areas get flown over and over again. There are so many planes in the air, and the search area is so limited, that it’s a virtual certainty they’ll find him. And indeed, they find almost everything. They find the nine-man life raft pushed out of the helicopter by Jim Mioli. A Guard diver is dropped from a helicopter to knife it so it won’t throw off other searchers. They find the Avon raft abandoned by the Tamaroa, and rafts from other boats they didn’t even know about. And then, just before dusk on the 31st, a Coast Guard plane spots a stain of Day-Glo green dye in the water.

PJs are known to carry dye for just such emergencies, and this undoubtedly comes from Rick Smith. The pilot circles lower and sees a dark shape at the center—probably Rick Smith himself. The search plane crew drop a marker buoy, life raft, and flare kit, and the pilot radios the coordinates in to Boston. A helicopter is diverted to the scene and the cutter Tamaroa, two and a half hours away, changes course and starts heading for the spot. An H-60 launches from Elizabeth City, escorted by a tanker plane, and a Navy jet equipped with forward-looking infrared is readied for takeoff. If the rescuers can’t get Smith by helicopter, they’ll get him by ship; if they can’t get him by ship, they’ll drop a life raft; if he’s too weak to get into the life raft, they’ll drop a rescue swimmer. Smith is one of their own, and they’re going to get him one way or another.

It’s full dark when the first helicopter, zeroed-in by the marker buoy, arrives on-scene. There’s no sign of Smith. The Coast Guard pilot who spotted him, debriefed back on-base, says the dye was fresh and he was “awful sure” there was a man in the middle of it. The seas were too rough to tell whether he swam to the life raft that was dropped to him, though. Three hours later one of the helicopter pilots radios that they’ve spotted Smith near the radio marker buoy. Another H-60 and tanker plane prepare to launch from Suffolk, but no sooner are those orders given than the pilot on-scene corrects himself: He didn’t spot a person, he spotted a life raft. It was probably dropped by the Coast Guard earlier that day. The Suffolk aircraft stand down.

Throughout that night the storm slides south along the coast and then doubles back on itself, heading toward Nova Scotia and dissipating by the hour. The convective engine of the storm that sucks warm moist air off the ocean is finally starting to break down in cold northern water. By the morning of November 1st the conditions are stable enough to evacuate John Spillane, and he’s strapped into a rescue litter and carried out of his room and onto the aft deck of the Tamaroa. He’s hoisted up into the belly of an H-3 and flown to Atlantic City, where he’s rushed into intensive care and given two units of blood. A few hours later a Coast Guardsman tracks down a search pilot who says that he dropped green dye into the water to mark a line he’d seen. That explains the dye but not the person spotted at the center of it. A Coast Guard survival specialist named Mike Hyde says that Smith could stay warm virtually forever in a quarter-inch wetsuit, but that he might drown by inhaling water into his lungs. There aren’t any charts or graphs for survival time in the conditions he was in, Hyde says.

If Smith made it through the storm, though, Hyde’s personal guess is that he could survive another four days. Eventually, he’ll die of dehydration. The sea is much calmer now, but the search has been going full-bore for seventy-two hours without turning up anything; chances are almost nonexistent that Smith is alive. On the morning of November 2nd—the storm now over Prince Edward Island and failing fast—the cutter Tamaroa makes port at Shinnecock Inlet, Long Island, and Ruvola, Buschor, and Mioli are taken off by motor launch. Rick Smith’s wife, Marianne, is at Suffolk Airbase for the event, and several people express concern over her watching the airmen reunited with their families.

What do they think, that I want those women to lose their husbands, too? she wonders. She takes John Brehm, the PJ supervisor, aside and says, Look, John, if they haven’t found Rick by now, they’re not going to. As far as I’m concerned, I’m a widow and I need to know what’s going to happen.

Brehm expresses the hope that they might still find him, but Marianne just shakes her head. If he were alive, he’d signal, she says. He’s not alive.

Marianne Smith, who’s nursing a three-week-old baby, practically hasn’t slept since the ditching. She found out about it late the first night, when someone from the airbase called and woke her up out of an exhausted sleep. It took her a minute to even understand what the person was saying, and when she did, he reassured her that it was a controlled ditching and everything would be fine. Things were not fine, though. First they wouldn’t tell her which four crew members had been picked up by the Tamaroa (she understandably assumed one of them was her husband), and then they said they’d spotted him at the center of some green dye, and then they lost him again. Now she’s between worlds, treated as a widow by everyone on base but still reassured that her husband will be found alive. No one, it seems, can openly face the fact that Rick Smith is dead. The planes keep going out, the grids keep getting flown.

Finally, after nine days of round-the-clock flights, the Coast Guard suspends its search for Rick Smith. The consensus is that he must have hit the water so hard that he was knocked unconscious and drowned. Another possibility is that Spillane hit him when he landed, or that the life raft hit him, or that he jumped with his gunner’s strap on. The gunner’s strap is used to keep crewmen from falling out of helicopters, and if Smith jumped with it on, he’d have just dangled below the helicopter until Ruvola set it down.

John Spillane prefers to believe that Smith was knocked out on impact. He was weighed down by a lot of gear, and he must have lost position during his fall and hit the water flat. Spillane’s only memory of the fall is exactly that: starting to flail and thinking, “My God, what a long way down.” Those words, or something very like them, are probably the last thoughts that went through Rick Smith’s mind.

WHILE aircraft are crisscrossing the waters off the coast of Maryland, an even larger search continues for the Andrea Gail. Fifteen aircraft, including a Navy P-3 transferred from the Smith search, are flying grids southwest of Sable Island, where a life raft would most likely have drifted. A rumor ripples through Gloucester that Billy Tyne called someone on a satellite phone the night of the 29th, but Bob Brown chases the rumor down and tells the Coast Guard it’s bogus. Half the boats in the sword fleet—the Laurie Dawn 8, Mr. Simon, Mary T, and Eishin Maru—sustain considerable damage and cut their trips short. The eastern half of the fleet misses the full fury of the storm (“Oh, we only had about seventy-knot winds,” Linda Greenlaw recalls), but such extreme weather generally ruins the fishing for days, and most of the eastern boats head in as well.

Nothing is seen or heard of the Andrea Gail until November 1st when Albert Johnston, steaming for home, plows straight through a cluster of blue fuel barrels. They’re a hundred miles southwest of Sable, and they all have AG stencilled on the side. “The barrels went down either side of the hull, I didn’t even have to change course,” says Johnston. “It was spooky. You know, just a few fuel barrels, that’s all that was left.”

An hour later Johnston passes another cluster, then a third, and calls their position in to the Coast Guard. The barrels don’t, by themselves, mean the Andrea Gail went down—they could have just washed off the deck—but they’re not a good sign. The Canadian and American Coast Guards keep widening the search area without finding anything; finally, on November 4th, things start to turn up. A Coast Guardsman on a routine beach patrol around Sable Island finds a propane tank and radio beacon with Andrea Gail painted on them. The beacon is for locating fishing gear and has been switched on, which may have been a desperate attempt to surround the stricken boat with as many electronically active objects as possible. Normally they’re stowed in the “off” position.

And then, on the afternoon of November 5th, an EPIRB washes up on Sable Island. It’s an orange 406-megahertz model, built by an American company named Koden, and the ring switch has been turned off. That means that it can’t signal even if it hits the water. The serial number is 986. It’s from the Andrea Gail.

Like the bottled note thrown overboard from the schooner Falcon a century ago, the odds of something as small as an EPIRB winding up in human hands are absurdly small. And the odds of Billy Tyne disarming his EPIRB—there’s no reason to, it wouldn’t even save batteries—are even smaller. Bob Brown, Linda Greenlaw, Charlie Reed, no one who knows Billy can explain it. The fourteen-page incident log kept by the Canadian Coast Guard records the discovery of the propane tank and the radio beacon, but not of the EPIRB. The entire day, in fact, that the EPIRB is found—November 5th, 1991—is missing from the log. Rumors start creeping around Gloucester that the Coast Guard did pick up an EPIRB signal when the Andrea Gail was in trouble, but conditions were too severe to go out. And when, against all odds, the EPIRB washes up on Sable Island, the Coast Guard switches it off to cover themselves.

Whether the rumors are fair or not, they’re in some ways beside the point. Conditions severe enough to frighten the Coast Guard are severe enough to prevent a rescue, and by the time the EPIRB started signalling—if it ever did—the crew of the Andrea Gail were probably doomed anyway. Judging by the rescue attempts off Long Island, even a helicopter hovering directly over the Andrea Gail crew would have been powerless to help them. Regardless, the EPIRB is duly transported back to the United States for inspection by the Federal Communications Commission.

On November 6th, a Canadian pilot spots an uninflated life raft just off the Nova Scotia coast, but there’s no one inside it, and he loses sight of it before it can be recovered. Two days later the Hannah Boden, steaming home after three weeks at sea, spots another cluster of fuel barrels marked AG on the side, but there’s still no sign of the boat. Finally, a half hour before midnight on November 8th, the search for the Andrea Gail is permanently suspended. She’s been missing for almost two weeks, and planes have searched 116,000 square miles of ocean without finding any survivors. All they turned up was a little deck gear.

“I WENT down to the fish pier a lot after the search ended,” says Chris Cotter. “I went there a lot, I went there alone and I’d go through these things—you know, picturing what happened to their bodies, that kind of horror. I’d reject it from my mind and my soul as soon as it blew in, and then I’d remember the good things, he’d come back to me and it would be okay. I miss him immensely, though, I fight it all the time. Later, I tell myself. I’ll see him later on.”

The memorial service is held several days later at St. Ann’s Church, just up the hill from the Crow’s Nest. It’s the first service in thirteen years for Gloucestermen lost at sea, and it brings people out who don’t even know the men who died. The sea was their domain, they knew it well, Reverend Casey says quietly to the thousand people packed into his church for the service. I urge you to mourn not just for these three men, but for all the other brave people who gave their lives for Gloucester and its fishing industry.

Mary Anne and Rusty Shatford read a poem about fishing, and Sully’s brother speaks, and some of the Tyne family speak. Bob and Susan Brown are at the service, but they say very little and leave as soon as it’s over. This is the third time men have died on one of Bob Brown’s boats and, regardless of fault, people in town are not inclined to forget it. After the service the mourners drive and walk down the steep hill to Rogers Street and pile into the Crow’s Nest and the Irish Mariner, where a wake is held for the next couple of days. Food is brought and people go to Sully’s brother’s apartment, then back to the Crow’s Nest, then over to the Tynes’, and back to the Nest again, endlessly, all weekend long.

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.

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.