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

GOD’S COUNTRY

BY midafternoon the Andrea Gail is ready: The food and bait have been stowed away, the fuel and water tanks have been topped off, spare drums of both have been lashed onto the whaleback, the gear’s in good order, and the engine’s running well. All there remains to do is leave. Bobby climbs off the boat without saying anything to Bugsy—they’re still morose after their fight—and walks across the parking lot to Chris’s Volvo. They drive back across town to Thea’s and trot up her front steps in a soft warm rain. Thea hears their feet on the stoop and invites them in and takes her cue from a quick glance from Chris. I’ve got some errands to do, I’ll be back in a few hours, she says. Make yourselves at home.

Chris and Bobby tug each other into the dark bedroom and lie down on the bed. Outside, the rain taps on. Chris and Bobby can’t see the ocean but they can smell it, a dank taste of salt and seaweed that permeates the entire peninsula and lays claim to it as part of the sea. On rainy days there’s no getting away from it, wherever you go you breathe in that smell, and this is one of those days. Chris and Bobby lie together on Thea’s bed, talking and smoking and trying to forget the fact that this is his last day, and after an hour the phone rings and Bobby jumps up to answer it. It’s Sully on the line, calling from the Crow’s Nest. It’s five o’clock, Sully says. Time to go.

The mood is dark and grim when they get down to the Nest. Alfred Pierre is still locked in an upstairs room with his girlfriend and won’t come out. Billy Tyne’s just returned from a two-hour phone conversation with his ex-wife, Jodi. Murph’s there with a pile of toys on the pool table, packing them into a cardboard box. Ethel’s in the back room crying: Bobby’s money problems, the black eye, the month offshore. The Grand Banks in October is no joke and everybody knows it. There won’t be half a dozen boats out there from the whole East Coast fleet.

Alfred Pierre finally comes down and sidles into the bar. He’s a big, shy man who’s not well known around town, although people seem to like him. His girlfriend has come down from Maine to see him off and she’s not handling it well, her eyes are red and she’s holding him as if she might physically keep him from getting on the boat. Murph finishes strapping his package up with tape and asks Chris to run him across town on an errand. He wants to pick up some movies. Sully is talking to Bugsy in a corner, and everyone’s congratulating Ethel’s eldest son, Rusty, for his upcoming marriage next week. Most of the people in the room will be a thousand miles into the North Atlantic by then.

Chris and Murph return ten minutes later with a cardboard box spilling with videos. There’s a VCR on the Andrea Gail, and someone off another boat offered Murph the movies. Alfred has a beer bottle clenched in one big hand and is still muttering about not wanting to go. Sully’s saying the same thing; he’s in a yellow slicker over by the pool table telling Bugsy how he’s got a bad feeling about this trip. It’s the money, he says; if I didn’t need the money I wouldn’t go near this thing.

Okay you guys, Billy says. One last drink. Everyone downs one last drink. Okay, one more, someone says. Everyone has one more. Bobby’s drinking tequila. He’s standing by Chris looking down at the floor and she’s holding his hand and neither of them is saying much. Sully comes over and asks if they’re going to be okay. Chris says, Sure, we’ll be fine and then she says: Actually, I’m not sure. Actually, no, I don’t think so.

Six men are leaving for a month and it feels as if things are shearing off into a new and empty direction from which they may never return. Ethel, trying to maintain her composure, goes around the room hugging all the men. The only person she doesn’t hug is Alfred because she doesn’t know him well enough. Bobby asks his mother if they can take the color TV above the bar. If it’s okay with Billy, she says.

Billy looks up. Ethel, he says, they can take the TV, but if they watch it instead of doin’ their work it’s goin’ straight overboard.

That’s fine, Billy, that’s fine, Ethel says.

Billy’s girlfriend sees Bobby’s shiner under the brim of his Budweiser cap and glances over at Chris. She’s of the old school where ladies don’t slug their men.

You northern gals, she says.

I didn’t mean it, says Chris. It was a mistake.

It’s now way too late for anyone to back out. Not in the literal sense—any one of them could still take off running out the door—but people don’t work like that. More or less, they do what others expect them to. If one of the crew backed out now he’d sit around for a month and then either go to a welcome-home party or a memorial service. Either would be horrible in its own way. Half the crew have misgivings about this trip, but they’re going anyhow; they’ve crossed some invisible line, and now even the most desperate premonitions won’t save them. Tyne, Pierre, Sullivan, Moran, Murphy, and Shatford are going to the Grand Banks on the Andrea Gail.

Okay, Billy says. Let’s go.

Everyone files out the big wooden door. The rain has stopped and there are even a few scraps of clear sky off to the west. Pale, late-summer blue. Chris and Bobby get into her Volvo and Alfred and his girlfriend get into their car and everyone else walks. They cross Rogers Street through the impatient stream of Friday afternoon traffic and then angle down through the gate in the chain-link fence. There are fuel tanks on iron scaffolds behind Rose’s, and small boats up with tarps over them, and a battered sign that says “Carter’s Boat Yard.” One of the fuel tanks has a pair of humpback whales painted on it. Chris drives past the little group, tires crunching on the gravel, and comes to a stop in front of the Andrea Gail. The boat is tied up to a small piece of wharf behind Old Port Seafoods, next to the fire boat and a dockside fuel pump. Bobby looks over at her.

I don’t want to do this, he says. I really don’t.

Chris is holding onto him in the front seat of her Volvo, with everything she owns in the back. Well don’t go then, she says. Well fuck it. Don’t go.

I got to go. The money; I got to.

Billy Tyne walks over and leans in the window. You gonna be all right? he asks. Chris nods her head. Bobby is really starting to fight the tears and he looks away so that Billy doesn’t see. Okay, Billy says to Chris. We’ll see you when we get back. He walks across the dock and jumps down onto the deck of the boat. Then Sully comes over. He’s known Bobby most of his life—without Bobby he probably wouldn’t even have taken the trip—and he’s worried about him now. Worried that somehow Bobby isn’t going to make it, that the trip’s a huge mistake. Are you two okay? he says. Are you sure?

Yeah, we’re okay, says Chris. We just need a minute.

Sully smiles and slaps the car roof and walks away. Bugsy and Murph don’t have anyone to linger over and so they waste no time getting on the boat; now it’s just the two couples in their cars. Alfred detaches himself from his girlfriend in the front seat and gets out and walks across the dock. His girlfriend looks around, crying, and spots Chris in the Volvo. She draws two fingers down her cheeks—“Yes, I’m sad, too”—and then just sits there, tears running down her cheeks. There’s nothing more to wait for now, nothing more to say. Bobby’s trying to keep it together because of the other five guys on the boat, but Chris is not trying to keep it together.

Well, I gotta go now, he says.

Yep.

And Christina, you know, I’ll always love you.

She smiles at him through her tears. Yeah, I know, she says.

Bobby kisses her and gets out of the car, still holding hands. He closes the door and gives her a final smile and then starts walking across the gravel. As Chris remembers it he doesn’t look back, not once, and he keeps his face hidden the entire way.

ALMOST as soon as the New World was discovered, Europeans were fishing it. Twelve years after Columbus, a Frenchman named Jean Denys crossed the Atlantic, worked the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, and returned home with a hold full of cod. Within a few years there were so many Portuguese boats on the Banks that their king felt compelled to impose an import tax in order to protect the fishermen at home. Codfish ran so thick off Newfoundland, it was said, that they slowed ships down in the water.

Codfish weren’t quite that plentiful, but they were certainly worth crossing the Atlantic for. And they were easily transported: Crews salted them aboard ship, dried them when they got home, and then sold them by the hundreds of thousands. The alternative was to go over with two crews, one to fish and another to preserve the catch on shore. The fish were split down the middle and then laid on racks, called flakes, to cure all summer in the Newfoundland air. Either way, the result was a rugged slab of protein that could be treated as indelicately as shoe leather and then soaked back to a palatable form. Soon European ships were shuttling back and forth across the North Atlantic in a hugely lucrative—if perilous—trade.

For the first fifty years the European powers were content to fish off Newfoundland and leave the coastlines alone. They were jagged, gloomy places that seemed to offer little more than a chance to impale one’s ship. Then, in 1598, a French marquis named Troilus de Mesgouez pulled sixty convicts from French prisons and deposited them on a barren strip of sand called Sable Island, south of Nova Scotia. Left to shift for themselves, the men hunted wild cattle, constructed huts from shipwrecked vessels, rendered fish oil, and gradually killed one another off. By 1603, there were only eleven left alive, and these unfortunates were dragged back to France and presented to King Henri IV. They were clothed in animal skins and had beards halfway down their chests. Not only did the king pardon them their crimes, he gave them a bounty to make up for their suffering.

It was around this time that Cape Ann was first sighted by Europeans. In 1605, the great French explorer Samuel de Champlain was working his way south from Casco Bay, Maine, when he rounded the rock ledges of Thatcher’s, Milk, and Salt islands and cast anchor off a sandy beach. The natives drew for him a map of the coastline to the south, and Champlain went on to explore the rest of New England before returning to Cape Ann the following year. This time he was clawing his way up the coast in some ugly fall weather when he sought shelter in a natural harbor he’d missed on his previous trip. He was greeted by a party of Abenaki Indians, some of whom wore the scraps of Portuguese clothing they had traded for a hundred years before, and they made a great show of hospitality before launching a surprise attack from the woods of Eastern Point. The Frenchmen easily fended them off and on the last day of September, 1606, with the Indians waving goodbye from the shore and the oaks and maples rusting into their fall colors, Champlain set sail again. Because of the sheltered coves and thick shellfish beds he called the place “Beauport”—The Good Harbor. Seventeen years later a group of Englishmen sailed into Beauport, eyed the local abundance of cod, and cast their anchor. The year was 1623.

The ship was financed by the Dorchester Company, a group of London investors that wanted to start tapping the riches of the New World. Their idea was to establish a settlement on Cape Ann and use it to support a fleet of boats that would fish all spring and summer and return to Europe in the fall. The shore crew was charged with building a habitable colony and drying the catch as it came in. Unfortunately, luck was against the Dorchester men from the start. The first summer they caught a tremendous amount of fish, but the bottom dropped out of the cod market, and they didn’t even make expenses. The next year prices returned to normal, but they caught almost no fish at all; and the third year violent gales damaged the boats and drove them back to England. The company was forced to liquidate its assets and bring its men home.

A few of the settlers refused to leave, though. They combined forces with a band of outcasts from the tyrannical Plymouth colony and formed the nucleus of a new colony at Gloucester. New England was an unforgiving land in those days, where only the desperate and the devout seemed to survive, and Gloucester wound up with more than its share of the former. Its most notorious citizen was the Reverend John Lyford, whose deeds were so un-Christian—he criticized the Church and groped a local servant girl—as to be deemed unprintable by a local historian; another was a “shipwrecked adventurer” named Fells who fled Plymouth to escape public whipping. His crime was that he’d had “unsanctioned relations” with a young woman.

Gloucester was a perfect place for loose cannons like Lyford and Fells. It was poor, remote, and the Puritan fathers didn’t particularly care what went on up there. After a brief period of desertion, the town was re-settled in 1631, and almost immediately the inhabitants took to fishing. They had little choice, Cape Ann being one big rock, but in some ways that was a blessing. Farmers are easy to control because they’re tied to their land, but fishermen are not so easy to control. A twenty-year-old off a three-month trip to the Banks has precious little reason to heed the bourgeois mores of the town. Gloucester developed a reputation for tolerance, if not outright debauchery, that drew people from all over the Bay Colony. The town began to thrive.

Other communities also had a healthy streak of godlessness in them, but it was generally relegated to the outskirts of town. (Wellfleet, for example, reserved an island across the harbor for its young men. In due time a brothel, a tavern, and a whale lookout were built there—just about everything a young fisherman needed.) Gloucester had no such buffer, though; everything happened right on the waterfront. Young women avoided certain streets, town constables were on the lookout for errant fishermen, and orchard owners rigged guns up to trip-wires to protect their apple trees. Some Gloucester fishermen, apparently, didn’t even respect the Sabbath: “Cape Cod captains went wild-eyed in an agony of inner conflict,” recorded a Cape Cod historian named Josef Berger, “as they read the Scriptures to their crews while some godless Gloucester craft lay in plain sight… hauling up a full share of mackerel or cod.”

If the fishermen lived hard, it was no doubt because they died hard as well. In the industry’s heyday, Gloucester was losing a couple of hundred men every year to the sea, four percent of the town’s population. Since 1650, an estimated 10,000 Gloucester-men have died at sea, far more Gloucestermen than died in all the country’s wars. Sometimes a storm would hit the Grand Banks and half a dozen ships would go down, a hundred men lost overnight. On more than one occasion, Newfoundlanders woke up to find their beaches strewn with bodies.

The Grand Banks are so dangerous because they happen to sit on one of the worst storm tracks in the world. Low pressure systems form over the Great Lakes or Cape Hatteras and follow the jet stream out to sea, crossing right over the fishing grounds in the process. In the old days, there wasn’t much the boats could do but put out extra anchor cable and try to ride it out. As dangerous as the Grand Banks were, though, Georges Bank—only 180 miles east of Cape Cod—was even worse. There was something so ominous about Georges that fishing captains refused to go near it for 300 years. Currents ran in strange vortexes on Georges, and the tide was said to run off so fast that ocean bottom was left exposed for gulls to feed on. Men talked of strange dreams and visions they had there, and the uneasy feeling that dire forces were assembling themselves.

Unfortunately, Georges was also home to one of the greatest concentrations of marine life in the world, and it was only a matter of time before someone tried to fish it. In 1827, a Gloucester skipper named John Fletcher Wonson hove-to off Georges, threw out a fishing line, and pulled up a halibut. The ease with which the fish had been caught stuck in his mind, and three years later he went back to Georges expressly to fish. Nothing particularly awful happened, and soon ships were going back and forth to Georges without a second thought. It was only a one-day trip from Gloucester, and the superstitions about the place started to fade. That was when Georges turned deadly.

Because the fishing grounds were so small and close to shore, dozens of schooners might be anchored within sight of each other on a fair day. If a storm came on gradually, the fleet had time to weigh anchor and disperse into deeper water; but a sudden storm could pile ship upon ship until they all went down in a mass of tangled spars and rigging. Men would be stationed at the bow of each boat to cut their anchor cables if another boat were bearing down on them, but that was usually a death sentence in itself. The chances of sailing clear of the shoal water were horribly small.

One of the worst of these catastrophes happened in 1862, when a winter gale bore down on seventy schooners that were working a closely packed school of cod. Without warning the sky turned black and the snow began to drive down almost horizontally. One fisherman described what ensued:

My shipmates showed no sign of fear; they were now all on deck and the skipper was keeping a sharp lookout. Somewhere about nine o’clock, the skipper sang out, “There’s a vessel adrift right ahead of us! Stand by with your hatchet, but don’t cut until you hear the word!” All eyes were bent now on the drifting craft. On she came, directly at us. A moment more and the signal to cut must be given. With the swiftness of a gull, she passed by, so near that I could have leaped aboard. The hopeless, terror-stricken faces of the crew we saw but a moment, as the doomed craft sped on her course. She struck one of the fleet a short distance astern, and we saw the waters close over both vessels almost instantly.

A FEW modern swordfishing boats still fish Georges Bank, but most make the long trip to the Grand. They’re out for longer but come back with more fish—the old trade-off. It takes a week to reach the Grand Banks on a modern sword boat. You drive east-northeast around the clock until you’re 1,200 miles out of Gloucester and 400 miles out of Newfoundland. From there it’s easier to get to the Azores than back to the Crow’s Nest. Like Georges, the Grand Banks are shallow enough to allow sunlight to penetrate all the way to the bottom. An infusion of cold water called the Labrador Current crosses the shoals and creates the perfect environment for plankton; small fish collect to feed on the plankton, and big fish collect to feed on the small fish. Soon the whole food chain’s there, right up to the seventy-foot sword boats.

The trips in and out are basically the parts of the month that swordfishermen sleep. In port they’re too busy cramming as much life as they can into five or six days, and on the fishing grounds they’re too busy working. They work twenty hours a day for two or three weeks straight and then fall into their bunks for the long steam back. The trips entail more than just eating and sleeping, though. Fishing gear, like deck gear, takes a terrific amount of abuse and must be repaired constantly. The crew doesn’t want to waste a day’s fishing because their gear’s messed up, so they tend to it on the way out: they sharpen hooks, tie gangions, tie ball drops, set up the leader cart, check the radio buoys. At the Hague Line—where they enter Canadian waters—they must stow the gear in accordance with international law, and are briefly without anything to do. They sleep, talk, watch TV, and read; there are high school dropouts who go through half a dozen books on the Grand Banks.

Around eight or nine at night the crew squeeze into the galley and shovel down whatever the cook has put together. (Murph is the cook on the Andrea Gail; he’s paid extra and stands watch while the other men eat.) At dinner the crew talk about what men everywhere talk about—women, lack of women, kids, sports, horseracing, money, lack of money, work. They talk a lot about work; they talk about it the way men in prison talk about time. Work is what’s keeping them from going home, and they all want to go home. The more fish they catch, the sooner the trip’s over, which is a simple equation that turns them all into amateur marine biologists. After dinner someone takes his turn at the dishes, and Billy goes back up to the wheelhouse so Murph can eat. No one likes washing dishes, so guys sometimes trade the duty for a pack of cigarettes. The longer the trip, the cheaper labor gets, until a $50,000-a-year fisherman is washing dishes for a single smoke. Dinner, at the end of such a trip, might be a bowl of croutons with salad dressing.

Everyone on the crew stands watch twice a day. The shifts are two hours long and involve little more than watching the radar and occasionally punching numbers into the autopilot. If the gear is out, the night watches might have to jog back onto the mainline to keep from drifting too far away. The Andrea Gail has a padded chair in her wheelhouse, but it’s set back from the helm so that no one can fall asleep on watch. The radar and loran are bolted to the ceiling, along with the VHF and single sideband, and the video plotter and autopilot are on the control panel to the left. There are nine Lexan® windows and a pistol-grip spotlight that protrudes from the ceiling. The wheel is the size of a bicycle tire and positioned at the very center of the helm, about waist high. There’s no reason to touch the wheel unless the boat has been taken off autopilot, and there’s almost no reason to take the boat off autopilot. From time to time the helmsman checks the engine room, but otherwise he just stares out at sea. Strangely, the sea doesn’t get tedious to look at—wave trains converge and crisscross in patterns that have never happened before and will never happen again. It can take hours to tear one’s eyes away.

Billy Tyne’s been out to the Grand Banks dozens of times before, and he’s also fished off the Carolinas, Florida, and deep into the Caribbean. He grew up on Gloucester Avenue, near where Route 128 crosses the Annisquam River, and married a teenaged girl who lived a few blocks away. Billy was exceptional for downtown Gloucester in that he didn’t fish and his family was relatively well-off. He ran a Mexican import business for a while, worked for a vault manufacturer, sold waterbeds. His older brother was killed at age twenty-one by a landmine in Vietnam, and perhaps Billy drew the conclusion that life was not something to be pissed away in a bar. He enrolled in school, set his sights on being a psychologist, and started counselling drug-addicted teenagers. He was searching for something, trying out different lives, but nothing seemed to fit. He dropped out of school and started working again, but by then he had a wife and two daughters to support. His wife, Jodi, had been urging him to give fishing a try because she had a cousin whose husband made a lot of money at it. You never know, she told him, you just might like it.

“It was all over after that,” says Jodi. “The men don’t know anything else once they do it; they love it and it takes over and that’s the bottom line. People get possessed with church or God and fishing’s just another thing they’re possessed with. It’s something inside of them that nobody can take away and if they’re not doin’ it they’re not gonna be happy.”

It helped, of course, that Billy was good at it. He had an uncanny ability to find fish, a deep sense of where they were. “It was weird—it was like he had radar,” says Jodi. “He was one of the few guys who could go out and catch fish all the time. Everyone always wanted to fish with him ’cause he always made money.” Tyne’s very first trip was on the Andrea Gail, and after that he switched over to the Linnea C., owned by a man named Warren Cannon. Tyne and Cannon became close friends and, for eight years, Cannon taught him everything he knew. After his long apprenticeship Tyne decided to go out on his own, and he began to take out the Haddit—“that fuckin’ Clorox bottle,” as Charlie Reed called it. (It was a fiberglass boat.) By this time Tyne was fully hooked; the strains of being at sea had split up his marriage, but he still wouldn’t give it up. He moved to Florida to be closer to his ex-wife and daughters, and fished harder than ever.

Every summer Tyne’s two daughters, Erica and Billie Jo, went up to Gloucester to visit their grandparents, and Tyne would stop over between trips to see them. He also kept in touch with Charlie Reed, and when Reed stepped down from the Andrea Gail, Billy’s name came up. Brown offered him a site as skipper of the boat and one-third of the crew share. It was a good deal; a man like Tyne could clear $100,000 a year that way. He accepted. In the meantime, Reed got a job on a ninety-foot steel dragger called the Corey Pride. He’d make less money, but he’d spend more time at home. “I just couldn’t get into the gypsy life anymore,” Reed says. “Movin’ around, not comin’ home three months at a time—I got by, but it was hell on my wife. And I thought I’d made enough to keep all my kids in school. I hadn’t, but I thought I had.”

THE Andrea Gail rides out to the fishing grounds on the back of a high pressure system that comes bulging out of Canada. The winds are out of the northwest and the skies are a deep sharp blue. These are the prevailing winds for the area; they are the reason people say “Down East” when they refer to northeast Maine. Schooners that hauled eastward downwind could be in St. John’s or Halifax within twenty-four hours. A 365-horsepower diesel engine makes the effect less pronounced, but heading out is still a shorter trip than heading in. By September 26th or 27th, Billy Tyne’s around 42 north and 49 west, about 300 miles off the tip of Newfoundland, in a part of the Grand Banks known as the “Tail.” Canadian National Waters, which extend two hundred miles offshore, exclude foreign boats from most of the Banks, but two small sections protrude to the northeast and southeast: the Nose and the Tail. Sword boats patrol an arc hinging on a spot around 50 degrees west and 44 degrees north. Inside that arc are the broad, fertile submarine plains of the Grand Banks, off-limits to all but Canadian boats and licensed foreign boats. Outside that arc are thousands of legal swordfish that might conceivably be fooled by a mackerel hung on a big steel hook.

Swordfish are not gentle animals. They swim through schools of fish slashing wildly with their swords, trying to eviscerate as many as possible; then they feast. Swordfish have attacked boats, pulled fishermen to their deaths, slashed fishermen on deck. The scientific name for swordfish is Xiphias gladius; the first word means “sword” in Greek and the second word means “sword” in Latin. “The scientist who named it was evidently impressed by the fact that it had a sword,” as one guidebook says.

The sword, which is a bony extension of the upper jaw, is deadly sharp on the sides and can grow to a length of four or five feet. Backed up by 500 pounds of sleek, muscular fish, the weapon can do quite a bit of damage. Swordfish have been known to drive their swords right through the hulls of boats. Usually this doesn’t happen unless the fish has been hooked or harpooned, but in the nineteenth century a swordfish attacked a clipper ship for no apparent reason. The ship was so badly damaged that the owner applied to his insurer for compensation, and the whole affair wound up in court.

Grand Banks swordfish spawn in the Caribbean and then edge northward during the summer months, heading for the cold, protein-rich waters off Newfoundland. During the daylight hours the fish work their way down the water column to depths of 3,000 feet, chasing squid, hake, cod, butterfish, bluefish, mackerel, menhaden, and bonito, and at night they follow their prey back up to the surface. Their young hatch with scales and teeth, but no sword, and have been described as “wistful-looking.” Although all manner of fish feed on larval swordfish, only mako, sperm whale, and killer whale attack them when they’re fully grown. Mature swordfish are considered to be one of the most dangerous game fish in the world and have been known to fight nonstop for three or four hours. They have sunk small boats in their struggles. Sport fishermen need live bait on heavy steel hooks that are secured to 500-pound test steel wire or chain to catch swordfish; they also need a “numbing club” on board to beat the fish senseless. Commercial fishermen, who are in the business of avoiding the thrill of fishing, use different methods entirely. They hang a thousand baited hooks on forty miles of monofilament and then crawl into bed to get some sleep.

Bob Brown doesn’t know when Billy makes his first set because Billy hates talking to him on the radio. He’s been known to leave messages with Linda Greenlaw in order not to talk to Bob Brown; he’s been known to fake static on the single sideband. But it’s reasonable to assume that on the night of September 27th, Tyne’s making his first set of the trip. The boat’s outriggers are boomed out and two steel plates, known as “birds,” hang by chain down into the water to provide stability. The ocean has already settled into the galloping darkness of mid-autumn, and the wind has swung around to the southeast. The surface of the ocean is cross-hatched with changing weather.

Baiting has all the glamour of a factory shift and considerably more of the danger. The line is spooled on a big Lindegren drum that sits under the shelter of the whaleback on the port side of the boat. It crosses diagonally over the deck, passes through an overhead block, and then bends straight back toward the stern. A steel ring guides it over the rail and into the water. That’s where the baiters stand. There’s a bait table on top of the stern rail—basically a wooden well with squid and mackerel in it—and a leader cart on either side. The leader carts are small drums spooled with hundreds of lengths of seven-fathom line, called gangions. Each gangion has a number ten hook at one end and a stainless steel snap on the other.

The baiter reaches behind him and takes a gangion from his backup man, who’s peeling them off the leader cart one at a time. The baiter impales a squid or mackerel onto the hook, snaps the gangion onto the mainline, and throws the whole thing over the side. The hook is easily big enough to pass through a man’s hand, and if it catches some part of the baiter’s body or clothing, he goes over the side with it. For this reason, baiters have complete control over the hook; no one handles the gangion while they’re on it. There’s also a knife bolstered to the baiting table. A baiter might, conceivably, grab it fast enough to sever the line before going over.

Since swordfish feed at night, each hook is also fixed with a Cylume lightstick that illuminates the bait. Cylumes are cigar-sized plastic tubes with phosphorescent chemicals inside them that activate when the tube is snapped in half. They cost a dollar apiece, and a sword boat might go through five thousand in a trip. The hooks and lightsticks are spaced about thirty feet apart, but the exact interval is determined by the speed of the boat. If the captain wants to fish the hooks closer together, he slows down; if he wants to spread them apart, he speeds up. The typical speed for setting-out on the Grand Banks is six or seven knots. At that speed it takes about four hours to set out thirty miles of line.

Every three hooks the baiter snaps on a ball drop, which floats on the surface and keeps the longline from sinking to the bottom. A typical arrangement is to hang your line at five fathoms and dangle your hooks to twelve—that’s about seventy feet down. Depending on currents and the temperature breaks, that’s where swordfish like to feed. Every four miles, instead of a ball drop, the baiter clips on a highflyer. The highflyer is a float and aluminum pole with a radar-reflecting square on top. It bobs along on the surface of the ocean and shows up very clearly on the radar screen. Finally, every eight miles, a radio transmitter is attached. It has a big whip antenna that broadcasts a low-frequency signal back to the boat. This allows the captain to track the gear down if it parts off midstring.

A fully baited longline represents a significant amount of money, and captains have been known to risk the lives of their crew to get them back. Forty miles of monofilament line goes for $1,800. Each of the radio beacon buoys costs $1,800, and there are six of them on a longline. The poly-balls cost six dollars apiece and are set every three hooks for 1,000 hooks. The hooks are a dollar, the lightsticks are a dollar, the squid is a dollar, and the gangions are two dollars. Every night, in other words, a sword boat drops $20,000 worth of gear into the North Atlantic. One of the biggest disputes on a sword boat is whether to set out or not. Crews have hauled in a full gale because their captain misjudged the weather.

The baiting usually gets finished up late in the evening, and the Andrea Gail crew hangs their rain gear in the tool room and tramps into the kitchen. They eat dinner quickly, and when they’re done, Billy climbs up the companionway to take over the helm from Murph. He checks his loran bearings, which fix him on the chart, and the video plotter, which fixes him in relation to the mainline. The radar is always on and has a range of fifteen miles or so; the highflyers on the mainline register as small squares on the screen. The VHF is tuned to channel 16, and the single sideband is tuned to 2182 megahertz. They are both emergency channels, and if two boats need to communicate, they contact each other and switch to a separate working channel.

At 11:00 PM the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) broadcasts a weather forecast, and the captains generally check in with each other afterward to discuss its finer points. By then most of the crew has already turned in—they’re into a stretch of twenty twenty-hour work days, and sleep becomes as coveted as cigarettes. The bunks are bolted against the tapered sides of the bow, and the men fall asleep listening to the diesel engine and the smack of waves against the hull. Underwater, the prop whine and the cavitation of hundreds of thousands of air bubbles radiate outward into the ocean. The sound wraps around the foreshores of Newfoundland, refracts off the temperature discontinuity of the Gulf Stream, and dissipates into the crushing black depths beyond the continental shelf. Low frequency vibrations propagate almost forever underwater, and the throb of the Andrea Gail’s machinery must reach just about every life form on the Banks.

DAWN at sea, a grey void emerging out of a vaster black one. “The earth was without form and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” Whoever wrote that knew the sea—knew the pale emergence of the world every morning, a world that contained absolutely nothing, not one thing.

A long blast on the airhorn.

The men stagger out of their bunks and pour themselves coffee under the fluorescent lights of the galley, squinting through swollen lids and bad moods. They can just start to make out shapes on deck when they go out. It’s cold and raw, and under their slickers they have sweat shirts and flannel shirts and thermal tops. Dawn’s not for another hour, but they start work as soon as they can see anything. At 43 degrees north, a week after the equinox, that’s 5:30 in the morning.

The boat is at the start of the mainline, about one hundred miles outside Canada’s territorial limit. You generally set into the Gulf Stream and haul into the Gulf Stream, so the previous afternoon they’d set the gear while steaming west into the warm four-knot current. Then they’d turned around and headed east again, back to the start of the mainline. That gives the entire string the same amount of time in the water, and also keeps the boat from losing too much ground to the eastward currents. Billy has hunted down the beginning of the mainline with the radio beacon signals and now sits, bow toward America, ready to haul.

Haulback is less dangerous than setting-out because the hooks are coming inboard rather than going outboard, but the mainline still gets pulled at considerable velocity out of the water. The hooks can whiplash over the rail and snag people in all kinds of horrible ways; one crewman took a hook in the face that entered under his cheekbone and came out his eye socket. To make matters worse, the boat is rarely a stable platform, and rarely dry. Keeping one’s feet while eighteen inches of deck slop pour out the scuppers can require the balance of an ironworker in a sleet storm.

Nevertheless, you’re hauling up your lottery ticket, and even the most jaded deckhand wants to know what he’s hit. The line has been unhooked from the stern guide ring and now comes onboard through a cutout in the starboard rail and into the overhead block. The captain steers the boat from an auxiliary helm on deck and runs up to the wheel-house from time to time to check the radar for other boats in their path. The man at the line is called the hauler, and it’s his job to unclip the gangions and hand them back to the coiler, who pulls the bait off and wraps them around the leader cart. Being a hauler is a high-stress job; one hauler described having to pry his fingers off the hydraulic lever at the end of the day because he was so tense. Haulers are paid extra for the trip and are chosen because they can unclip a gangion every few seconds for four hours straight.

A hooked swordfish puts a telltale heaviness in the line, and when the hauler feels that, he eases off on the hydraulic lever to keep the hook from tearing out. As soon as the fish is within reach, two men swing gaff hooks into his side and drag him on board. If the fish is alive, one of the gaffers might harpoon him and haul him up on a stouter line to make sure he doesn’t get away. Then the fish just lies there, eyes bulging, mouth working open and shut. If it’s a good haul there are sometimes three or four half-dead swordfish sloshing back and forth in the deck wash, bumping into the men as they work. A puncture wound by a swordfish bill means a severe and nearly instantaneous infection. As the fish are brought on board their heads and tails are sawn off, and they’re gutted and put on ice in the hold.

Mako shark eat pretty much what swordfish do, so occasionally longliners haul mako up as well. They’re dangerous, though: A mako once bit Murph so badly that he had to be helicoptered back to shore. (Touching even a severed mako head can trigger it to bite.) The rule for mako is that they’re not considered safe until they’re on ice in the hold. For that reason some boats don’t allow live mako on board; if one is caught, the gaffer pins him against the hull while another crew member blows his head open with a shotgun. Then he’s hauled on board and gutted. “We fish too far out to take any chances,” says a former crew member of the Hannah Boden. “You’re out of helicopter range, and help is two days’ drive to the west’ard. If you’re still alive when we get there, we’ll take you to a Newfoundland hospital. And then your troubles have just begun.”

A longliner might pull up ten or twenty swordfish on a good day, one ton of meat. The most Bob Brown has ever heard of anyone catching was five tons a day for seven days—70,000 pounds of fish. That was on the Hannah Boden in the mid-eighties. The lowest crew member made ten thousand dollars. That’s why people fish; that’s why they spend ten months a year inside seventy feet of steel plate.

For every trip like that, though, there’s a dozen busts. Fish are not distributed equally throughout the water column; they congregate in certain areas. You have to know where those areas are. You generally set westward into the current. With a thermocline scope you get temperature readings at different depths; with a Doppler you get the velocity and direction of subsurface currents at three different levels. You want to set in “fast water” because the gear covers more area. You might anchor one end of the gear in cold water, which moves more slowly, because then you know where to find it. You want to hang the bait between layers of warm and cold water because the food chain tends to collect there. Squid feed on cold-water plankton, and swordfish dart out of pockets of warm Gulf Stream water to feed on the squid. Warm-water eddies that spin off the Gulf Stream into the North Atlantic are particularly good places to fish; captains track them down with daily surface temperature maps from NOAA weather satellites. Finally, you want to avoid the dark of the moon when you plan your trips. No one knows why, but for several days before and after, the fish refuse to feed.

Sword boat captains are required by law to keep records of every position fished, every set made, every fish caught. Not only does this help determine whether the boat is adhering to federal regulations, but it allows marine biologists to assess the health of the swordfish stock. Migratory patterns, demographic shifts, mortality rates—it can all be inferred from catch logs. In addition, observers for the National Marine Fisheries Service occasionally accompany boats offshore to get a better understanding of the industry they’re charged with regulating. On August 18, 1982, the principal planner for the Massachusetts Coastal Zone Management Program, Joseph Pelczarski, left on such a trip. He steamed out of New Bedford aboard the Tiffany Vance, a California longliner that was going to try gillnetting off Georges Bank. (The gillnet was new to the East Coast and Pelczarski wanted to see how it worked.) Spotter planes, as it turned out, reported almost no swordfish on Georges, but infrared satellite imagery revealed an enormous warm water eddy at the Tail of the Banks. Alex Bueno, the ship’s captain, decided to try longlining up north, and Pelczarski went with him. Pelczarski’s account had almost no impact on gillnet regulations—they made just one set and caught just one fish—but it gave government biologists and statisticians one of their few glimpses of life on a longliner:

The F/V Tiffany Vance arrived in Shelburne, Nova Scotia at first light on August 21. We left that afternoon at 5:30 P.M. with fuel and supplies and were escorted out of the harbor by dolphins riding the bow wake. Two Spanish fishing vessels (a crewman on the Tiffany Vance was from Spain) were sighted heading west. Numerous container vessels were seen heading towards Canada. We arrived on the Tail of the Banks on August 25. The water temperature was constantly monitored for “edges” where cold and warm water meet. On August 26, the captain found good water as well as an open area among the other swordfish longliners, and we were to set that evening. The set-out took an hour and a half and five hundred hooks were used.

Haulback began at 5:10 A.M. with the pulling on board of the highflyer and radio beacon. Yankee hooks and traps were coiled and boxed as they came on board and monofilament hooks were wound on reels. The captain steering and throttling the boat fishes the longline for “weight.” The first fish was a swordfish. With its bill breaking the water surface and then rolling on its back, dead, it was hauled to the vessel on the longline. Gaffed, it is pulled aboard, its sword sawed off and the fish is cleaned. The crew checks the stomach contents and feels the internal body temperature for clues as to what type of water the fish has been in. Most of the swordfish were feeding on squid.

The next two days of fishing took place in the same general area south of the Tail of the Banks. On the second day we caught eleven swordfish, four blue sharks, one mako shark, one sea turtle (released alive) and one skate. We kept the mako in addition to the swordfish. The third day during set-out we had a gear conflict. Despite efforts by captains to establish berths and to contact all area boats on gear positions, we crossed a longline. Our vessel’s stabilizers, which hang from outriggers about 18 feet below the surface, caught on a longline. The port stabilizer held fast but the starboard stabilizer, which is composed of lead and steel, left rhe water and slammed into the bait box just inches from a seaman.

To escape gear conflicts and the increased traffic, we moved northeast over the Newfoundland seamounts. The next fishing day, August 30—31, was fairly routine. The captain set out a lesser number of hooks (300) because the water wasn’t quite right (flat water). Despite this we caught nine swordfish. During haulback we lost the gear for an hour due to the mainline parting. After haulback the captain, in order to find better waters, steamed all night and into the northeast approximately 170 miles towards the Flemish Cap. Whales were seen in the distance. On September 4 we set out 400 hooks and the catch consisted of twelve swordfish, one mako shark, three lancetfish, three skates, one blue shark and a leatherback turtle, which was released alive.

On the night of September 5, the captain rendezvoused with the swordfish vessel Andrea Gail so I could get home. The vessels tied stern-to-stern and transferred my gear on a second line. Then the vessels untied and the Andrea Gail aligned her starboard side to the stern of the Tiffany Vance, and I swam the 30 yards to the Andrea Gail. They pulled me on board, and two days later we landed at the port of Burin, Newfoundland. The owner of the Andrea Gail, Robert Brown, who flew to Newfoundland to replace malfunctioning generators, flew us home to Beverly Airport on September 9, 1982. The Tiffany Vance arrived in New Bedford on October 18—sixty-three days at sea with 25,000 pounds of swordfish.

Swordfish fishermen, in particular the Grand Banks fishermen, are at sea for extended periods of time without communication with the mainland. An opportunity to study short-term culture shock is available among these fishermen, and should be undertaken.

Through the end of September and the first week in October the crew of the Andrea Gail set out their gear, steam back, haul it up, and set it out again. The days are hot and the men are in t-shirts on deck, their skin curing to a salt-streaked brown in the afternoon sun. In the evening they put on jackets and sweatshirts and work the bait table with their hoods pulled up. The light angles and reddens and finally sinks into darkness with the decklights ruining the stars and the sharp cold air digging at memories of the New England fall. Around ten o’clock the men finish up and pitch into their bunks for a few hours’ sleep.

To a fisherman, the Grand Banks are as distinct and recognizable as, say, the Arizona deserts or the swamps of Georgia. They have their own particular water, light, wildlife, “feel.” No bluewater fisherman could ever wake up on the Grand Banks and think he was off Georges, say, or Long Island. Cliffs of fog move in and smother the boats for weeks at a time. Winter cold fronts come howling down off the Canadian Shield and make the water smoke. The sea is so rich with plankton that it turns a dull green-grey and swallows light rather than reflects it. Petrels and shearwaters circle the boats hundreds of miles from land. Great skuas swoop over the waters, rasping hah-hah-hah at their empty world. Prehistoric-looking creatures called beaked whales spook the crews of fogbound boats. Killer whales range up and down the longlines eating—strangely enough—only the pectoral fins of blue sharks.

Billy’s fishing about 200 miles east of the Tail, near a set of shallows known as the Newfoundland Seamounts. On the horizon he can occasionally make out the white pilothouse of a boat called the Mary T, captained by a Florida man named Albert Johnston. Johnston and Billy fish end for end for about a week, setting their gear southwestward in two great parallel lines. The lines stitch back and forth across slight temperature breaks to anchor the gear in the slower-moving cold water. From time to time they see each other during the haulback, but mostly they’re just snowy images on each other’s radar screens. Sword boats on the high seas don’t socialize much. One would think they would—my God, all that emptiness—but generally they’d rather socialize in a barroom or in bed with their wives. (A waterfront joke: What’s the second thing a fisherman does when he gets home? Puts down his bags.) Captains have been known to pull one steel bird out of the water on the trip home just because it slows them down by half a knot. Over the course of a week that means twelve more hours until they get home. Four or five days into October, Johnston hauls his last set and tells the rest of the fleet he’s heading in. He says he’ll radio the weather conditions back as he goes. The boat rolls along atop an old decayed swell, and the crew catch up on their sleep and take turns at the helm. A new moon rises behind them on October 7th, and they follow its pale suggestion all through the day until late that afternoon. The sunset is a bloody rust-red on a sharp autumn horizon, and the night comes in fast with a northwest wind and a sky rivetted with stars. There’s no sound but the smack of water on steel and the heavy gargle of the diesel engine. The Mary T makes port in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, on October nth, after more than a month at sea.

Fairhaven is a smaller version of New Bedford, which sits half a mile away across the Acushnet River. Both cities are tough, bankrupt little places that never managed to diversify during the century-long decline of the New England fishing industry. If Gloucester is the delinquent kid who’s had a few scrapes with the law, New Bedford is the truly mean older brother who’s going to kill someone one day. One New Bedford bar was the scene of an infamous gang rape; another was known to employ a Doberman pinscher as a bouncer, A lot of heroin passes through New Bedford, and a lot of sword-fishermen get in trouble there. One of Johnston’s crew drew a $13,000 check in New Bedford and returned a week later without any shoes.

Johnston ties up at Union Wharf alongside McLean’s Seafood and North Atlantic Diesel. McLean’s is a battered two-story building with cement floors for draining fishblood and a rabbit warren of offices upstairs where deals are cut. Dark, wild-haired young men stomp around in rubber boots and shout to each other in Portuguese as they heave fish around the room. With long knives they “loin” the fish—carve the meat off the bones—and then seal it in vacuum bags and load it onto trucks. A good worker can loin a full-sized fish in two minutes. McLean’s moves two million pounds of swordfish a year, and a million pounds of tuna. They fly it overseas, ship it around the country, and sell it to the corner store.

Johnston’s boat takes most of a day to unload, the next day he settles the accounts and starts fitting the boat out again. Food, diesel, water, ice, repairs, the usual. The faster the turnaround, the better—not only will his crew be more likely to survive New Bedford’s charms, but it’s getting late in the season to head out to the Grand Banks. The longer you wait, the worse the storms are. “You get in that kind of weather and if anything goes wrong—if a hatch busts off or one of the outriggers gets tangled up—you can really be in trouble,” says Johnston. “Some of the guys get to where they feel invincible, but they don’t realize that there’s a real fine line between what they’ve seen and what it can get to. I know a guy who lost a 900-foot boat out there. It broke in half and sank with thirty men.

Sure enough, Johnston’s still fitting-out when the first ugly weather blows through. It’s a double-low that grinds off the coast and cranks the wind around to the southwest. The storm intensifies as it plows out to sea and catches Billy one morning while he’s hauling back. The wind is thirty knots and the waves are washing over the deck, but they can’t stop working until the gear is in. Late in the morning, they get slammed.

It’s a rogue wave: steep, cresting, and maybe thirty feet high. It avalanches over the decks and buries the Andrea Gail under tons of water. One moment they’re at the hauling station tending the line, the next they’re way over on their side. Heavily, endlessly, the Andrea Gail rights herself, and Billy brings her around into the weather and checks for damages. The batteries have come out of their boxes down in the engine room, but that’s about it. That evening Billy radios Charlie Johnson of the Seneca to tell him what happened. Charlie’s in Bay Bulls, Newfoundland, getting a crankshaft fixed, and Billy calls him every evening to keep him updated on the fleet. Jesus, we took a hell of a wave, Billy says. We went way over on our side. I didn’t think we’d make it back up.

They discuss the weather and the fishing for a few minutes and then sign off. The story of the wave doesn’t sound good to Charlie Johnson—the Andrea Gail’s known as a tough little boat and shouldn’t go over that easily. Not with a bird in the water and twenty thousand pounds of fish in the hold. “I didn’t want to say anything, but it didn’t seem right,” Johnson says. “You’re in God’s country out there. You can’t make any mistakes.”

The Andrea Gail fishes east of the Tail for another week and does very poorly, the trip’s shaping up to be a total bust. A boat can’t stay indefinitely out at sea—supplies run low, the crew gets crazy, the fish get old. They’ve got to find some fish fast. Around mid-month they pull their gear and steam northeast all night to a set of shallows known as the Flemish Cap. The rest of the fleet is way off to the south and west: Tommy Barrie on the Allison, Charlie Johnson on the Seneca, Larry Horn on the Miss Millie, Mike Hebert on the Mr. Simon, and Linda Greenlaw on the Hannah Boden.

There’s also a 150-foot Japanese longliner named the Eishin Maru #78. The Eishin Maru is carrying a Canadian Fisheries observer, Judith Reeves, who is the only person on board who has a survival suit or knows how to speak English. The Mary T is on her way out, and another boat named the Laurie Dawn 8 has just arrived in New Bedford to gear up.

Billy’s at 41 degrees west, way out on the edge. He’s almost off the fishing charts. The weather has turned raw and blustery and the men work in layers of sweatshirts and overalls and rubber slickers. It’s the end of the season, their last chance for a decent trip. They just want to get this thing done.