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

THE BARREL OF THE GUN

THERE’S a certain amount of denial in swordfishing. The boats claw through a lot of bad weather, and the crews generally just batten down the hatches, turn on the VCR, and put their faith in the tensile strength of steel. Still, every man on a sword boat knows there are waves out there that can crack them open like a coconut. Oceanographers have calculated that the maximum theoretical height for wind-driven waves is 198 feet; a wave that size could put down a lot of oil tankers, not to mention a seventy-two-foot sword boat.

Once you’re in the denial business, though, it’s hard to know when to stop. Captains routinely overload their boats, ignore storm warnings, stow their life rafts in the wheelhouse, and disarm their emergency radio beacons. Coast Guard inspectors say that going down at sea is so unthinkable to many owner-captains that they don’t even take basic precautions. “We don’t need an EPIRB because we don’t plan on sinking,” is a sentence that Coast Guard inspectors hear a lot. One of the videos on file with the Portland Coast Guard—shown as often as possible to local fishermen—was shot from the wheelhouse of a commercial boat during a really bad blow. It shows the bow rising and falling, rising and falling over mammoth, white-streaked seas. At one point the captain says, a little smugly, “Yep, this is where you wanna be, right in your wheelhouse, your own little domain—”

At that moment a wall of water the size of a house fills the screen. It’s no bigger than the rest of the waves but it’s solid and foaming and absolutely vertical. It engulfs the bow, the foredeck, the wheelhouse, and then blows all the windows out. The last thing the camera sees is whitewater coming at it like a big wet fist.

The farther you work from shore, the less smug you can afford to be. Any weekend boater knows the Coast Guard will pluck him out of whatever idiocy he gets himself into, but sword boats don’t have that option. They’re working four or five hundred miles from shore, way beyond helicopter range. So Billy—any bluewater fisherman—has a tremendous respect for the big wet fist. When Billy receives the weather chart off the fax machine, he undoubtedly tells the crew that there’s something very heavy on the way. There are specific things you can do to survive a storm at sea and whether the crew does them, and how well they do them, depends on how jaded they all are. Billy has fished his whole life. Maybe he thinks nothing can sink him; or maybe the sea is every nightmare he’s ever had.

A good, worried crew starts by dogging down every hatch, porthole, and watertight door on the boat. That keeps breaking waves from busting things open and flooding the hold. They check the hatches on the lazarette, where the steering mechanism is housed, and make sure they’re secure. A lot of boats founder when the lazarette floods. They check the bilge pump filters and fish out any debris floating in the bilgewater. They clear everything off the deck—fishing gear, gaff pikes, oil slickers, boots—and put them down the fishhole. They remove the scupper plates so the boat can clear her decks. They tighten the anchor fastenings. They double-lash the fuel and water barrels on the whaleback. They shut off the gas cocks on the propane stove. They lash down anything in the engine room that might break loose and cause damage. They press down the fuel tanks so that some are empty and others are as full as possible. That reduces something called free surface effect—liquid sloshing around in tanks, changing the center of gravity.

Some boats pay one crew member a bit extra to oversee the engine, but the Andrea Gail doesn’t have such a position; Billy takes care of it himself. He climbs down the engine room companionway and runs through the checklist: engine oil, hydraulics, batteries, fuel lines, air intakes, injectors. He makes sure the fire and high-water alarms are on and the bilge pumps are working. He tests the backup generator. He hands out seasick pills. If one of the steel birds is out of the water, he puts it back in. He fixes his position on the chart and calculates how the weather will affect his drift. He reckons their course in his head in case a wave takes out their electronics. He checks the emergency lighting. He checks the survival suits. He checks the photos of his daughters. And then he settles down to wait.

So far the weather has been overcast but calm, light winds out of the northwest and a little bit of sea. Before the Portland Gale of 1898, one captain reported that it was “the greasiest evening you ever saw,” and a few hours later 450 people were dead. It’s not quite that calm, but almost. The wind hovers around ten knots and a six-foot swell rolls lazily under the boat. The Andrea Gail passes just north of Albert Johnston during the night, and by dawn they’ve almost made the western edge of the Banks, around 52 degrees west. They’re halfway home. Dawn creeps in with a few shreds of salmon-pink sky, and the wind starts to inch into the southeast. That’s called a backing wind; it goes counterclockwise around the compass and usually means bad weather is coming. A backing wind is an ill wind; it’s the first distant touch of a low-pressure system going into its cyclonic spin.

Then another weather fax comes in:

It reads like an inventory of things fishermen don’t want to hear. An accompanying chart shows Hurricane Grace as a huge swirl around Bermuda, and the developing storm as a tightly jammed set of barometric lines just north of Sable Island. Every boat in the swordfish fleet receives this information. Albert Johnston, south of the Tail, decides to head northwest into the cold water of the Labrador Current. Cold water is heavier, he says, and seems to lay better in the wind; it doesn’t produce such volatile seas. The rest of the sword fleet stays far to the east, waiting to see what the storm does. They couldn’t make it into port in time anyway. The Contship Holland, a hundred miles south of Billy, heads straight into the teeth of the thing. Two hundred miles east, another containership, the Liberian-registered Zarah, also heads for New York. Ray Leonard on the sloop Satori has decided not to head for port; he holds to a southerly course for Bermuda. The Laurie Dawn 8 keeps plowing out to the fishing grounds and the Eishin Maru 78, 150 miles due south of Sable Island, makes for Halifax harbor to the northeast. Billy can either waste several days trying to get out of the way, or he can stay on-course for home. The fact that he has a hold full of fish, and not enough ice, must figure into his decision.

“He did what ninety percent of us would’ve done—he battened down the hatches and hung on,” says Tommy Barrie, captain of the Allison. “He’d been gone well over a month. He probably just said, ‘Screw it, we’ve had enough of this shit,’ and kept heading home.”

THE Boston office of the National Weather Service occupies the ground floor of a low brick building along a gritty access road in back of Logan Airport. Heavy glass windows allow a tinted view of the USAir shuttle terminal and a wasteland of gravel piles and rebar. Weather Service meteorologists can look up from their radar screens and watch USAir jets taxi back and forth behind a grey jet-blast barrier. Only their stabilizers stick up above it; they cruise like silver sharks across a concrete sea.

Weather generally moves west-to-east across the country with the jet stream. In a very crude sense, forecasting simply means calling up someone to the west of you and asking them to look out their window. In the early days—just after the Civil War—the National Weather Service was under the auspices of the War Department, because that was the only agency that had the discipline and technology to relay information eastward faster than the weather moved. After the novelty of telegraph wore off, the Weather Service was shifted over to the Department of Agriculture, and it ultimately wound up in the Department of Commerce, which oversees aviation and interstate trucking. Regional Weather Service offices tend to be in very grim places, like industrial parks bordering metropolitan airfields. They have sealed windows and central air-conditioning. Very little of the air being studied actually gets inside.

October 28th is a sharp, sunny day in Boston, temperatures in the fifties with a stiff wind blowing off the ocean. A senior meteorologist named Bob Case is crisscrossing the carpeted room, consulting with the various meteorologists on duty that day. Most of them are seated at heavy blue consoles staring resolutely at columns of numbers—barometric pressure, dew-point, visibility—scrolling down computer screens. Behind the aviation desk is a bank of hotline phones: State Emergency Management, Regional Circuit, and Hurricane. Twice a day the State Emergency Management phone rings and someone in the office sprints to pick it up. It’s the state testing its ability to warn people of a nuclear strike.

Case is a fit, balding man in his mid-fifties. A satellite photo of a hurricane about to clobber the coast of Maryland hangs in his office. He is responsible for issuing regional forecasts based on satellite imagery and a nationwide system called the Limited Fine Mesh, a grid superimposed on a map of the country where the corners represent data-collection points. Twice a day hundreds of LFM weather balloons are released to measure temperature, dewpoint, barometric pressure, and windspeed, and relay the information back by theodolite. The balloons rise to 60,000 feet and then burst, allowing the instruments to float back to earth on parachutes. When people find them, they mail them back to the Weather Service. The data from the LFM, plus input from a thousand or so other ground sites around the country, is fed into huge Cray computers at the National Meteorological Center in Camp Springs, Maryland. The computers run numerical models of the atmosphere and then spit forecasts back out to regional offices, where they are amended by local meteorologists. Humans still “add value” to a forecast, as meteorologists say. There is an intuitive element to forecasting that even the most powerful computers cannot duplicate.

Since early the previous day, Case has been watching something called a “short-wave trough aloft” slide eastward from the Great Lakes. On satellite photos it looks like an S-curve in the line of clear dry air moving south from Canada. Cold air is denser than warm air, and huge, slow undulations develop along the boundary between them and roll eastward—on their side, as it were—much like an ocean swell. The undulation gets more and more pronounced until the “crest” gets separated from the rest of the warm front and just starts to spin around itself. This is called a cutoff low, or an occluded front. Air gets sucked in toward the center, the system spins faster and faster, and within hours you have a storm.

The mechanics of a hurricane are fundamentally the same as a cutoff low, but their origins differ: hurricanes brew in the lukewarm waters around the equator. When the sun hits the equator it hits it dead-on, a square-foot beam of light heating up exactly one square foot of water. The farther north or south you are, the lower the angle of the sun and the more water a square foot of sunlight must heat up; as a result the water doesn’t heat up as much. The equatorial sea cooks all summer and evaporates huge amounts of water into the air. Evaporated water is unstable and contains energy in the same way that a boulder on top of a hill does—one small push unleashes a huge destructive force. Likewise, a drop in air temperature causes water vapor to precipitate out as rain and release its latent energy back into the atmosphere. The air above one square foot of equatorial water contains enough latent energy to drive a car two miles. A single thunderstorm could supply four days’ worth of the electrical power needed by the United States.

Warm air is less dense than cool air; it rises off the surface of the ocean, cools in the upper atmosphere, and then dumps its moisture before rushing back to earth. Huge cumulus clouds develop over the zones of rising air, with thunder, lightning, and terrifically strong rain. As long as there’s a supply of warm water, the thunderstorm sustains itself, converting moisture into sheeting rain and downdraft winds. Other thunderclouds might line up along the leading edge of a cold front into a “squall line,” a towering convective engine that stretches from horizon to horizon.

Hurricanes start when a slight kink—a disturbance in the trade winds, a dust storm blowing out to sea off the Sahara—develops in the upper-level air. The squall line starts to rotate around the kink, drawing in warm, volatile air and sending it up the gathering vortex at its center. The more air that gets drawn in, the faster it spins, and the more water is evaporated off the ocean. The water vapor rises up the core of the system and releases rain and latent heat. Eventually the system starts spinning so fast that inward-spiralling air can no longer overcome the centrifugal force and make it into the center. The eye of the storm has formed, a column of dry air surrounded by a solid wall of wind. Tropical birds get trapped inside and cannot escape. A week later, after the system has fallen apart, frigate birds and egrets might find themselves over Newfoundland, say, or New Jersey.

A mature hurricane is by far the most powerful event on earth; the combined nuclear arsenals of the United States and the former Soviet Union don’t contain enough energy to keep a hurricane going for one day. A typical hurricane encompasses a million cubic miles of atmosphere and could provide all the electric power needed by the United States for three or four years. During the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, winds surpassed 200 miles an hour and people caught outside were sandblasted to death. Rescue workers found nothing but their shoes and belt buckles. So much rain can fall during a hurricane—up to five inches an hour—that the soil liquefies. Hillsides slump into valleys and birds drown in flight, unable to shield their upward-facing nostrils. In 1970, a hurricane drowned half a million people in what is now Bangladesh. In 1938, a hurricane put downtown Providence, Rhode Island, under ten feet of ocean. The waves generated by that storm were so huge that they literally shook the earth; seismographs in Alaska picked up their impact five thousand miles away.

A lesser version of that is heading toward the Grand Banks: Hurricane Grace, a late-season fluke that still contains enough energy to crank another storm system off the chart. Ordinarily, Grace would come ashore somewhere in the Carolinas, but the same cold front that spawned the short-wave trough aloft also blocks her path on shore. (Cold air is very dense, and warm weather systems tend to bounce off them like beach balls off a brick wall.) According to atmospheric models generated by the Cray computers in Maryland, Grace will collide with the cold front and be forced northward, straight into the path of the short-wave trough. Wind is simply air rushing from an area of high pressure to an area of low; the greater the pressure difference, the faster it blows. An Arctic cold front bordering a hurricane-fortified low will create a pressure gradient that meteorologists may not see in their lifetime.

Ultimately, the engine behind all of this activity is the jet stream, a river of cold upper-level air that screams around the globe at thirty or forty thousand feet. Storms, cold fronts, short-wave troughs—they’re all dragged eastward sooner or later by upper-level winds. The jet stream is not steady; it convulses like a loose firehose, careening off mountains, veering across plains. These irregularities create continent-sized eddies that come ballooning out of the Arctic as deep cold fronts. They are called anticyclones because the cold air in them flows outwards and clockwise, the opposite of a low. It is along the leading edge of these anticyclones that low-pressure waves sometimes develop; occasionally, one of these waves will intensify into a major storm. Why, and when, is still beyond the powers of science to predict. It typically happens over areas where a leg of the jet stream collides with subtropical air—the Great Lakes, the Gulf Stream off Hatteras, the southern Appalachians. Since air flows counterclockwise around these storms, the winds come out of the northeast as they move offshore. For that reason they’re known as “nor’easters.” Meteorologists have another name for them. They call them “bombs.”

The first sign of the storm comes late on October 26th, when satellite images reveal a slight bend in the leading edge of the cold front over western Indiana. The bend is a pocket of low barometric pressure—a short-wave trough—imbedded in the wall of the cold front at around 20,000 feet. It’s the embryo of a storm. The trough moves east at forty miles an hour, strengthening as it goes. It follows the Canadian border to Montreal, cuts east across northern Maine, crosses the Bay of Fundy, and traverses Nova Scotia throughout the early hours of October 28th. By dawn an all-out gale is raging north of Sable Island. The upper-level trough has disintegrated, to be replaced by a sea-level low, and warm air is rising out the top of the system faster than it can be sucked in at the bottom. That is the definition of a strengthening storm. The barometric pressure is dropping more than a millibar an hour, and the Sable Island storm is sliding away fast to the southeast with sixty-five-knot winds and thirty-foot seas. It’s a tightly packed low that Billy Tyne, two hundred miles away, can’t even feel yet.

The Canadian Government maintains a data buoy seventy miles east of Sable Island, at 43.8 north and 57.4 west, just short of Billy’s position. It is simply known as buoy #44139; there are eight others like it between Boston and the Grand Banks. They relay oceanographic information back to shore on an hourly basis. Throughout the day of October 28th, buoy #44139 records almost no activity whatsoever—dinghy-sailing weather on the high seas. At two o’clock the needle jumps, though: suddenly the seas are twelve feet and the winds are gusting to fifteen knots. That in itself is nothing, but Billy must know he has just seen the first stirrings of the storm. The wind calms down again and the seas gradually subside, but a few hours later another weather report creaks out of the radiofax:

Billy’s at 44 north, 56 west and heading straight into the mouth of meteorological hell. For the next hour the sea is calm, horribly so. The only sign of what’s coming is the wind direction; it shirts restlessly from quadrant to quadrant all afternoon. At four o’clock it’s out of the southeast. An hour later it’s out of the south-southwest. An hour after that it’s backed around to due north. It stays that way for the next hour, and then right around seven o’clock it starts creeping into the northeast. And then it hits.

It’s a sheer change; the Andrea Gail enters the Sable Island storm the way one might step into a room. The wind is instantly forty knots and parting through the rigging with an unnerving scream. Fishermen say they can gauge how fast the wind is—and how worried they should be—by the sound it makes against the wire stays and outrigger cables. A scream means the wind is around Force 9 on the Beaufort Scale, forty or fifty knots. Force 10 is a shriek. Force 11 is a moan. Over Force 11 is something fishermen don’t want to hear. Linda Greenlaw, captain of the Hannah Boden, was in a storm where the wind registered a hundred miles an hour before it tore the anemometer off the boat. The wind, she says, made a sound she’d never heard before, a deep tonal vibration like a church organ. There was no melody, though; it was a church organ played by a child.

By eight o’clock the barometric pressure has dropped to 996 millibars and shows no sign of levelling off. That means the storm is continuing to strengthen and create an even greater vacuum at its center. Nature, as everyone knows, abhors a vacuum, and will try to fill it as fast as possible. The waves catch up with the wind speed around eight PM and begin increasing exponentially; they double in size every hour. After nine o’clock every graph line from data buoy #44139 starts climbing almost vertically. Maximum wave heights peak at forty-five feet, drop briefly, and then nearly double to seventy. The wind climbs to fifty knots by nine PM and gradually keeps increasing until it peaks at 58 knots. The waves are so large that they block the anemometer, and gusts are probably reaching ninety knots. That’s 104 miles an hour—Gale Force 12 on the Beaufort Scale. The cables are moaning.

Minutes after the evening weather report, Tommy Barrie raises Tyne on the single sideband. Barries from Florida, a solid, square-shouldered guy with slicked-back hair and a voice like a box of rocks. He wants to know, of all things, how much gear to fish that night. He’s six hundred miles to the east and figures he might as well squeeze in as much fishing as he can. The conversation, as Barrie remembers it, is brief and to-the-point:

We’re over here around the forty-six, Billy. What’s it look like?

It’s blowin’ fifty to eighty and the seas are thirty feet. It was calm for a while, but now it’s startin’ to come on pretty good. I’m 130 miles east of Sable.

Okay, we’re gonna keep the gear in the boat but let’s talk at eleven. Maybe we’ll throw a little bit of gear in late.

All right, I’ll give you a check after the weather. I’ll tell you what’s goin’ on out here.

We’ll be standin’ by.

After talking to Barrie, Billy picks up the microphone on his single sideband and issues one last message to the fleet: She’s comin’ on boys, and she’s comin’ on strong. The position he’d given Linda Greenlaw on the Hannah Boden—44 north, 56.4 west—is a departure from his original heading. It appears to be more the heading of a man bound for Halifax, Nova Scotia, or maybe even Louisbourg, Cape Breton Island, than Gloucester, Massachusetts. Louisbourg is only 250 miles to the northeast, a twenty-four-hour drive with the seas at their stern. Maybe Billy, having looked down the barrel of the gun, has decided to dodge north like Johnston. Or maybe he’s worried about fuel, or needs to pick up ice, or decides that the cold countercurrent inside Sable is starting to look pretty good.

Whatever the reason, Billy changes course sometime before six PM and neglects to tell the rest of the fleet. They all assume he’s headed straight for Gloucester. Albert Johnston on the Mary T, Tommy Barrie on the Allison, and Linda Greenlaw on the Hannah Boden all hear Billy Tyne’s six o’clock bulletin on the weather. Only Linda is worried—“Those boys sounded scared and we were scared for them,” she says. The rest of the fleet is more nonchalant. “We live in this stuff for years and years,” says Barrie. “You have to look at the charts, listen to the weather, talk to the other boats, and make a decision on your own. You can’t just go out there and wait for nice weather.”

THE storm is centered around Sable Island, but its far western edges are already brushing the New England coast. The Satori—now too far offshore to abort the trip—starts to feel the storm as early as Sunday morning. Another wall of fog moves in from Georges Bank and the barometer starts a slow downward slide that can only mean something very big is on the way. The Satori is at the top of the Great South Channel, off Cape Cod, and working her way through an increasingly restless and uneasy sea. Stimpson mentions the weather forecasts again, but Leonard insists there’s no reason to worry. By Sunday morning the swells start to mound up in ominous, chaotic ways, and that afternoon, when Stimpson tunes in to the NOAA weather broadcast, she feels the first stabs of fear: NORTHEAST WIND 30 TO 40 KNOTS, AVERAGE SEAS EIGHT TO FIFTEEN FEET, VISIBILITY UNDER TWO MILES IN RAIN.

By nightfall the wind swings out of the northeast, as predicted, and starts to climb steadily up the Beaufort scale. It’s clear that both the Satori and the boat she left Portsmouth with are in for a bad night. The two crews talk every hour or so over the VHF, but by midnight on Sunday, the air is so highly charged that the radios are useless. Around eleven o’clock Stimpson takes one last call from the other boat—We’re having a rough time and have lost gear on deck—and they’re not heard from again. The Satori heads alone into the night, straining crazily up the swells and struggling to maintain steerageway.

Monday dawns a full gale, the seas building to twenty feet and the wind shearing ominously through the rigging. The sea takes on a grey, marbled look, like bad meat. Stimpson tells Leonard that she really thinks it’s going to be a bad one, but he insists it’ll blow itself out in twenty-four hours. I don’t think so, Ray, Stimpson tells him, I’ve got a bad feeling. She and Leonard and Bylander eat chili cooked by Stimpson’s mother and spend as much time as possible below deck, out of the weather. The navigation table is across from the galley on the starboard side, and Bylander sets herself up as the communications person, monitoring the radar and weather forecasts and tracking their position by GPS. A dash into shore would be risky now, across shipping lanes and dangerous shoal waters, so they reef down the sails and keep to open sea.

Monday night the storm crosses offshore and the “first stage wind surge” passes over the Satori. NOAA weather radio reports that conditions will ease off briefly and then deteriorate again as the storm swings back toward the coast. By then, though, the Satori might be far enough south to escape its full wrath. They wallow on through Monday night, the barometer rising slightly and the wind easing off to the northeast; but then late that night, like a bad fever, it comes on again. The wind climbs to fifty knots and the seas rise up in huge dark mountains behind the boat. The crew take turns at the helm, clipped into a safety line, and occasionally take a breaking sea over the cockpit. The barometer crawls downward all night, and by dawn the conditions are worse than anything Stimpson has ever seen in her life. For the first time, she starts thinking seriously about dying at sea.

Meanwhile, five hundred miles to the east, the sword fleet is getting slammed. On Albert Johnston’s boat, the crew is so terrified that they just watch videos. Johnston stays at the helm and drinks a lot of coffee; like most captains, he’s loath to relinquish the helm unless the weather calms down a bit. On the Andrea Gail, Billy probably takes the helm while the rest of the crew go below and try to forget about it. Some guys get stoned, which keeps them calm, and some sleep, or try to. Others just lie on their bunks and think about their families, or their girlfriends, or how much they wish this wasn’t happening.

“I picture it like this,” says Charlie Reed, trying to imagine the last evening aboard the Andrea Gail. “The guys are down below readin’ books, and every now and then the boat takes a big sea on the side. They run up to the wheelhouse and ask, ‘Hey, what’s goin’ on, Cap?’ and Billy says something like, ‘Well, we’re gettin’ there, boys, we’re gettin’ there.’ If Billy’s goin’ downsea it has to be an awful frightening ride. Sometimes you come off the top of one of those waves and it just kinda leaves out from under you. The boat just drops. It’s better to take the seas head-on—at least that way you can see what’s comin’ at you. That’s about all you can do.”

Of the men on the boat, Bugsy, Murph, and Billy have the most time at sea—thirty-four years, all told, much of it together. At home Billy has a photo of the three of them at sea with a gigantic swordfish. He has hip boots on, rolled down to his shins, and he’s sitting on a hatchcover pulling open the fish’s mouth with a steel hook. He’s staring straight into the camera. Bugsy’s just behind Billy, head cocked to one side, looking as gaunt and ethereal as Christ on the Shroud of Turin. Murph’s in back, squinting into the sea glare and noticeably huge even beneath a bulky pair of Farmer John waders.

All these men have seen their share of close calls at sea, but Murph’s record is the worst. He’s six-foot-two, 250 pounds, covered in tattoos and, apparently, extremely hard to kill. Once a mako shark clamped its jaws around his arm on deck and his friends had to beat it to death. The Coast Guard helicoptered him out. Another time he was laying out the longline when an errant hook went into his palm, out the other side and into a finger. No one saw it happen, and he was dragged off the back of the boat and down into the sea. All he could do was watch the hull of his boat get smaller and smaller above him and hope someone noticed he was gone. Luckily another crew member turned around a few seconds later, understood what was happening, and hauled him in like a swordfish. I thought I was gone, Mom, he told his mother later. I thought I was dead.

The worst accident occurred on a sticky, windless night off Cape Canaveral. Murph tried sleeping up on deck but it was too hot, so he went below to see if it was any better down there. The air-conditioning was broken, though, so he went back up on deck. He was half asleep when a tremendous shriek of metal brought him to his feet. The boat lurched to one side and water started pouring into the hold. A sleek dark shape loomed in the water off their bow. After the bilge pumps kicked in and the boat stabilized, they turned their searchlights on it: they’d been run down by the conning tower of a British nuclear submarine. It had ripped a hole in the hull and crushed Murph’s bunk like a beer can.

With all this catastrophe in his life Murph had two choices—decide either that he was blessed or that his death was only a matter of time. He decided it was only a matter of time. When he met his wife, Debra, he told her flat-out he wasn’t going to live past thirty; she married him anyway. They had a baby, Dale Junior, but the marriage broke up because Dale Senior was always at sea. And a few weeks before signing onto the Andrea Gail, Murph had stopped by his parents’ house in Bradenton for a somewhat unsettling goodbye. His mother reminded him that he needed to keep up on his life insurance policy—which included burial coverage—and he just shrugged.

Mom, I wish you’d quit worryin’ about burying me, he said. I’m going to die at sea.

His mother was taken aback, but they talked a bit longer, and at one point he asked whether she still had his high school trophies. Of course I do, she said.

Well, make sure you keep them for my son, he said, and kissed her goodbye.

“It took my breath away,” says his mother. “And then he was gone—I mean one minute he was there, the next he was out the door. I didn’t even have time to think. He was a rough, tough man. He wasn’t exactly a house person.”

Murph left for Boston in late June by train. (He was scared of flying.) He brought with him The Joy of Cooking, which his mother had given him, because he loved to cook on board the boats. He had taken his sea blanket to Debra’s to wash but forgot to retrieve it, and so Debra folded it and put it up for his return. He’d told her he’d be home by November 2nd to take her out to dinner on her birthday. You’d better be, she said. After the first trip he called her and said he’d made over six thousand dollars and that he was going to send a package down for Dale Junior. He didn’t call his parents because Debra said she’d call for him. He talked to his son for a while and then said goodbye to Debra and hung up the phone.

That was September 23rd. The Andrea Gail was due to leave within hours.

BY ten o’clock average windspeed is forty knots out of the north-northeast, spiking to twice that and generating a huge sea. The Andrea Gail is a square-transom boat, meaning the stern is not tapered or rounded, and she tends to ride up the face of a following sea rather than slice through it. Every time a large sea rises to her stern, the Andrea Gail slews to one side and Billy must fight the wheel to keep from broaching. Broaching is when the boat turns broadside to the seas and rolls over. Fully loaded steel boats don’t recover from broachings; they downflood and sink.

If Billy’s still running with the weather, he’s taking seas almost continually over his stern and running a real risk of having a hatchcover or watertight door tear loose. And to make matters worse, the waves have an exceptionally short period; instead of coming every fifteen seconds or so, the waves now come every eight or nine. The shorter the period, the steeper the wave faces and the closer they are to breaking; forty-five-foot breaking waves are much more destructive than rolling swells twice that size. According to buoy #44139, maximum wave heights for October 28th coincide with exceptionally low periods right around ten o’clock. It’s a combination that a boat the size of the Andrea Gail couldn’t take for long. Certainly by ten—if not earlier, but no later than ten—Billy Tyne must have decided to bring his boat around into the seas.

If there’s a maneuver that raises the hairs on the back of a captain’s neck, it’s coming around in large seas. The boat is broadside to the waves—“beam-to”—for half a minute or so, which is easily long enough to get rolled over. Even aircraft carriers are at risk when they’re beam-to in a big sea. If Billy attempts to come around that late in the storm, he’d make sure the decks were cleared and give her full power on the way around. The Andrea Gail would list way over and Billy would peer out of the windows to see what was bearing down on them. With luck, he’d pick a lull between the waves and they’d round up into the weather without any problem.

Billy’s been through a lot of storms, though, and he’s probably brought her around earlier in the evening, maybe even before talking to Barrie. Either way, it’s a significant moment; it means they’ve stopped steaming home and are simply trying to survive. In a sense Billy’s no longer at the helm, the conditions are, and all he can do is react. If danger can be seen in terms of a narrowing range of choices, Billy Tyne’s choices have just ratcheted down a notch. A week ago he could have headed in early. A day ago he could have run north like Johnston. An hour ago he could have radioed to see if there were any other vessels around. Now the electrical noise has made the VHF practically useless, and the single sideband only works for long range. These aren’t mistakes so much as an inability to see into the future. No one, not even the Weather Service, knows for sure what a storm’s going to do.

There are distinct drawbacks to heading into the weather, though. The windows are exposed to breaking seas, the boat uses more fuel, and the bow tends to catch the wind and drag the boat to leeward. The Andrea Gail has a high bow that would force Billy to oversteer simply to stay on course. One can imagine Billy standing at the helm and gripping the wheel with the force and stance one might use to carry a cinder block. It would be a confused sea, mountains of water converging, diverging, piling up on themselves from every direction. A boat’s motion can be thought of as the instantaneous integration of every force acting upon it in a given moment, and the motion of a boat in a storm is so chaotic as to be almost without pattern. Billy would just keep his bow pointed into the worst of it and hope he doesn’t get blind-sided by a freak wave.

The degree of danger Billy’s in can be gauged from the beating endured by the Contship Holland, two hundred or so miles to the east. The Holland is a big ship—542 feet and 10,000 tons—and capable of carrying almost seven hundred land/sea containers on her decks. She could easily take the Andrea Gail as cargo. From her daily log, October 29th-30th:

In other words, Billy’s riding out a storm that has forced a 10,000-ton containership to abandon course and simply steer to survive. The next High Seas report comes in at eleven PM, and Tommy Barrie mulls it over while waiting for Billy to call. The storm is supposed to hit just west of the Tail, around the 42 and the 55, but the Weather Service doesn’t always know everything. The 42 and the 55 are only about a hundred miles southeast of Billy, so he’s a much more reliable source for local conditions than the weather radio. It’s possible, Barrie thinks, that the Allison could get away with fishing a little gear that night. Two sections, maybe eight miles of line. Barries the westernmost boat of the main fleet, so whatever is on the way is going to hit him first; but first of all it’s going to hit Billy Tyne. Barrie waits twenty, thirty minutes, but Billy never calls. That’s not as bad as it sounds—we’re all big boys out there, as Barrie says, and can take care of ourselves. Maybe Billy’s got his hands full, or maybe he went below to take a nap, or maybe he simply forgot.

Finally, around midnight, Barrie tries to raise Billy himself. He can’t get through, though, which is more serious. It means the Andrea Gail has sunk, has lost her antennas, or there’s such pandemonium on board that no one can get to the radio. Barrie guesses it’s the antennas—they’re bolted to a steel mast behind the wheelhouse, and although they’re high up, they’re fragile. Most sword boats have lost them at one point or another, and there’s not much that can be done about it until the weather calms down. You can’t even survive a walk across the deck during Force 12 conditions, much less a trip up the mast.

Losing the antennas would seriously affect the Andrea Gail: it would mean they’d lost their GPS, radio, weatherfax, and loran. And a wave that had taken out their antennas may well have also stripped them of their radar, running lights, and floodlight. Not only would Billy not know where he was, he wouldn’t be able to communicate with anyone or detect other boats in the area; he’d basically be back in the nineteenth century. There’s not much he could do at this point but keep the Andrea Gail pointed into the seas and hope the windows don’t get blown out. They’re half-inch Lexan, but there’s a limit to what they can take; the Contship Holland took waves over her decks that peeled land/sea containers open like sardine cans, forty feet above the surface. The Andrea Gail’s pilothouse is half that high.

Around midnight a curious thing happens: The Sable Island storm eases up a bit. The winds drop a few knots and maximum wave heights fall about ten feet. Their periods lengthen as well, meaning there are fewer breaking waves; instead of crashing through walls of water, the Andrea Gail rises up the face of each wave and plunges down its backside.

Forty-five-foot waves have an angled face of sixty or seventy feet, which is nearly the length of the boat. On exceptionally big waves, the Andrea Gail has her stern in the trough and her bow still climbing toward the crest.

The lull, such as it is, lasts until one AM. At that point the center of the low is directly over the Andrea Gail. It’s possible that the low, with its ferocious winds and extremely tight pressure gradient, has developed an eye similar to that of a hurricane. Two days later, satellite photographs will show clouds swirling into its center like water down a drain. Dry Arctic air wraps one-and-a-half times around the low before finally making it into the center—an indication of how fast the system is spinning. On October 28 th the center isn’t that well defined, but it may serve to take the edge off the conditions just a bit. The reprieve doesn’t last long, though; within a couple of hours the waves are back up to seventy feet. A seventy-foot wave has an angled face of well over a hundred feet. The sea state has reached levels that no one on the boat, and few people on earth, have ever seen.

When the Contship Holland finally limped into port several days later, one of her officers stepped off and swore he’d never set foot on another ship again. She’d lost thirty-six land/sea containers over the side, and the ship’s owners promptly hired an American meteorological consultant to help defend them against lawsuits. “The storm resulted in large-scale destruction of offshore shipping and coastal installations from Nova Scotia to Florida,” wrote Bob Raguso of Weathernews New York. “It was called an extreme nor’easter by U.S. scientists and ranked as one of the five most intense storms from 1899-1991. It had the highest significant wave heights either arrived at by measurement or calculation. Some scientists termed it the hundred year storm.”

The Andrea Gail is at the epicenter of this storm and almost on top of the Sable Island shoals. It’s very likely she has lost her antennas, or Billy would have radioed Tommy Barrie that things looked bad—and definitely don’t fish any gear that night. On the other hand, it’s debatable whether the sea state could have overwhelmed Billy’s boat that early in the evening; the fifty-five-foot Fair Wind didn’t flip until winds hit a hundred knots and the waves were running seventy feet. A more likely scenario is that Billy manages to get through the ten o’clock spike in weather conditions but takes a real beating—the windows are out, the electronics are dead, and the crew is terrified.

For the first time they are completely, irrevocably on their own.