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

GRAVEYARD OF THE ATLANTIC

ALBERT JOHNSTON:

I was the first one to know how bad it was really gonna be. Halifax called for twenty meter seas and when we heard that we thought, Oh boy. You don’t really have time to run to land so we tried to get into the coldest water we could find. The colder the water, the denser it is and the waves don’t get as big. Also, I knew we’d get a northeast-northwest wind. I wanted to make as much headway as possible ’cause the Gulf Stream was down south and that’s where the warm water and fast current are.

There was an awful lot of electrical noise along the leading edge of this thing, there was so much noise you couldn’t hear anything on the radio. I was up in the wheelhouse, when it’s bad like that I usually stay up there. If it looks like it’s settlin’ down a bit and I can grab a little sleep, then I will. The crew just racks out and watches videos. Everybody acknowledged this was the worst storm they’d ever been in—you can tell by the size of the waves, the motion of the boat, the noise, the crashing. There’s always a point when you realize that you’re in the middle of the ocean and if anything goes wrong, that’s it. You see so much bad weather that you kind of get used to it. But then you see really bad weather. And that, you never get used to.

They had ship reports of thirty meter seas. That’s ninety feet. I would imagine—truthfully, in retrospect—that if the whole U.S. swordfish fleet had been caught in the center of that thing, everybody would’ve gone down. We only saw, I don’t know, maybe fifty foot waves, max. We went into it until it started to get dark, and then we turned around and went with it. You can’t see those rogue waves in the dark and you don’t want to get blasted and knock your wheelhouse off. We got the RPM tuned in just right to be in synch with the waves; too fast and we’d start surfing, too slow and the waves would just blast right over the whole boat. The boat was heavy and loaded with fish, very stable. It made for an amazingly good ride.

JOHNSTON had finished his last haul late in the afternoon of the 28th: nineteen swordfish, twenty bigeye, twenty-two yellowfin, and two mako. He immediately started steaming north and by morning he was approaching the Tail of the Banks, winds out of the northeast at one hundred knots and seas twenty to thirty feet. Several hundred miles to the west, though, conditions have gone off the chart. The Beaufort Wind Scale defines a Force 12 storm as having seventy-three-mile-an-hour winds and forty-five-foot seas. Due south of Sable Island, data buoy #44137 starts notching seventy-five-foot waves on the afternoon of the 29th and stays up there for the next seventeen hours. Significant wave height—the average of the top third, also known as HSig—tops fifty feet. The first hundred-foot wave spikes the graph at eight PM, and the second one spikes it at midnight. For the next two hours, peak wave heights stay at a hundred feet and winds hit eighty miles an hour. The waves are blocking the data buoy readings, though, and the wind is probably hitting 120 or so. Eighty-mile-an-hour wind can suck fish right out of bait barrels. Hundred-foot waves are fifty percent higher than the most extreme sizes predicted by computer models. They are the largest waves ever recorded on the Scotian Shelf. They are among the very highest waves measured anywhere in the world, ever.

Scientists understand how waves work, but not exactly how huge ones work. There are rogue waves out there, in other words, that seem to exceed the forces generating them. For all practical purposes, though, heights of waves are a function of how hard the wind blows, how long it blows for, and how much sea room there is—“speed, duration, and fetch,” as it’s known. Force 12 winds over Lake Michigan would generate wave heights of thirty-five feet after ten hours or so, but the waves couldn’t get any bigger than that because the fetch—the amount of open water—isn’t great enough. The waves have reached what is called a “fully developed sea state.” Every wind speed has a minimum fetch and duration to reach a fully developed sea state; waves driven by a Force 12 wind reach their full potential in three or four days. A gale blowing across a thousand miles of ocean for sixty hours would generate significant wave heights of ninety-seven feet; peak wave heights would be more than twice that. Waves that size have never been recorded, but they must be out there. It’s possible that they would destroy anything in a position to measure them.

All waves, no matter how huge, start as rough spots—cats’ paws—on the surface of the water. The cats’ paws are filled with diamond-shaped ripples, called capillary waves, that are weaker than the surface tension of water and die out as soon as the wind stops. They give the wind some purchase on an otherwise glassy sea, and at winds over six knots, actual waves start to build. The harder the wind blows, the bigger the waves get and the more wind they are able to “catch.” It’s a feedback loop that has wave height rising exponentially with wind speed.

Such waves are augmented by the wind but not dependent on it; were the wind to stop, the waves would continue to propagate by endlessly falling into the trough that precedes them. Such waves are called gravity waves, or swells; in cross-section they are symmetrical sine curves that undulate along the surface with almost no energy loss. A cork floating on the surface moves up and down but not laterally when a swell passes beneath it. The higher the swells, the farther apart the crests and the faster they move. Antarctic storms have generated swells that are half a mile or more between crests and travel thirty or forty miles an hour; they hit the Hawaiian islands as breakers forty feet high.

Unfortunately for mariners, the total amount of wave energy in a storm doesn’t rise linearly with wind speed, but to its fourth power. The seas generated by a forty-knot wind aren’t twice as violent as those from a twenty-knot wind, they’re seventeen times as violent. A ship’s crew watching the anemometer climb even ten knots could well be watching their death sentence. Moreover, high winds tend to shorten the distance between wave crests and steepen their faces. The waves are no longer symmetrical sine curves, they’re sharp peaks that rise farther above sea level than the troughs fall below it. If the height of the wave is more than one-seventh the distance between the crests—the “wavelength”—the waves become too steep to support themselves and start to break. In shallow water, waves break because the underwater turbulence drags on the bottom and slows the waves down, shortening the wavelength and changing the ratio of height to length. In open ocean the opposite happens: wind builds the waves up so fast that the distance between crests can’t keep up, and they collapse under their own mass. Now, instead of propagating with near-zero energy loss, the breaking wave is suddenly transporting a huge amount of water. It’s cashing in its chips, as it were, and converting all its potential and kinetic energy into water displacement.

A general rule of fluid dynamics holds that an object in the water tends to do whatever the water it replaces would have done. In the case of a boat in a breaking wave, the boat will effectively become part of the curl. It will either be flipped end over end or shoved backward and broken on. Instantaneous pressures of up to six tons per square foot have been measured in breaking waves. Breaking waves have lifted a 2,700-ton breakwater, en masse, and deposited it inside the harbor at Wick, Scotland. They have blasted open a steel door 195 feet above sea level at Unst Light in the Shetland Islands. They have heaved a half-ton boulder ninety-one feet into the air at Tillamook Rock, Oregon.

There is some evidence that average wave heights are slowly rising, and that freak waves of eighty or ninety feet are becoming more common. Wave heights off the coast of England have risen an average of 25 percent over the past couple of decades, which converts to a twenty-foot increase in the highest waves over the next half-century. One cause may be the tightening of environmental laws, which has reduced the amount of oil flushed into the oceans by oil tankers. Oil spreads across water in a film several molecules thick and inhibits the generation of capillary waves, which in turn prevent the wind from getting a “grip” on the sea. Plankton releases a chemical that has the same effect, and plankton levels in the North Atlantic have dropped dramatically. Another explanation is that the recent warming trend—some call it the greenhouse effect—has made storms more frequent and severe. Waves have destroyed docks and buildings in Newfoundland, for example, that haven’t been damaged for decades.

As a result, stresses on ships have been rising. The standard practice is to build ships to withstand what is called a twenty-five-year stress—the most violent condition the ship is likely to experience in twenty-five years. The wave that flooded the wheelhouse of the Queen Mary, ninety feet up, must have nearly exceeded her twenty-five-year stress. North Sea oil platforms are built to accommodate a 111-foot wave beneath their decks, which is calculated to be a one-hundred-year stress. Unfortunately, the twenty-five-year stress is just a statistical concept that offers no guarantee about what will happen next year, or next week. A ship could encounter several twenty-five-year waves in a month or never encounter any at all. Naval architects simply decide what level of stress she’s likely to encounter in her lifetime and then hope for the best. It’s economically and structurally impractical to construct every boat to hundred-year specifications.

Inevitably, then, ships encounter waves that exceed their stress rating. In the dry terminology of naval architecture, these are called “nonnegotiable waves.” Mariners call them “rogue waves” or “freak seas.” Typically they are very steep and have an equally steep trough in front of them—a “hole in the ocean” as some witnesses have described it. Ships cannot get their bows up fast enough, and the ensuing wave breaks their back. Maritime history is full of encounters with such waves. When Sir Ernest Shackleton was forced to cross the South Polar Sea in a twenty-two-foot open life boat, he saw a wave so big that he mistook its foaming crest for a moonlit cloud. He only had time to yell, “Hang on, boys, it’s got us!” before the wave broke over his boat. Miraculously, they didn’t sink. In February 1883, the 320-foot steamship Glamorgan was swept bow-to-stern by an enormous wave that ripped the wheelhouse right off the deck, taking all the ship’s officers with it. She later sank. In 1966, the 44,000-ton Michelangelo, an Italian steamship carrying 775 passengers, encountered a single massive wave in an otherwise unremarkable sea. Her bow fell into a trough and the wave stove in her bow, flooded her wheelhouse, and killed a crewman and two passengers. In 1976, the oil tanker Cretan Star radioed, “…vessel was struck by a huge wave that went over the deck…” and was never heard from again. The only sign of her fate was a four-mile oil slick off Bombay.

South Africa’s “wild coast,” between Durban and East London, is home to a disproportionate number of these monsters. The four-knot Agulhas Current runs along the continental shelf a few miles offshore and plays havoc with swells arriving from Antarctic gales. The current shortens their wavelengths, making the swells steeper and more dangerous, and bends them into the fastwater the way swells are bent along a beach. Wave energy gets concentrated in the center of the current and overwhelms ships that are there to catch a free ride. In 1973 the 12,000-ton cargo ship Bencruachan was cracked by an enormous wave off Durban and had to be towed into port, barely afloat. Several weeks later the 12,000-ton Neptune Sapphire broke in half on her maiden voyage after encountering a freak sea in the same area. The crew were hoisted off the stern section by helicopter. In 1974, the 132,000-ton Norwegian tanker Wilstar fell into a huge trough (“There was no sea in front of the ship, only a hole,” said one crew member) and then took an equally huge wave over her bow. The impact crumpled inch-thick steel plate like sheetmetal and twisted railroad-gauge I-beams into knots. The entire bow bulb was torn off.

The biggest rogue on record was during a Pacific gale in 1933, when the 478-foot Navy tanker Ramapo was on her way from Manila to San Diego. She encountered a massive low-pressure system that blew up to sixty-eight knots for a week straight and resulted in a fully developed sea that the Ramapo had no choice but to take on her stern. (Unlike today’s tankers, the Ramapo’s wheelhouse was slightly forward of amidships.) Early on the morning of February seventh, the watch officer glanced to stern and saw a freak wave rising up behind him that lined up perfectly with a crow’s nest above and behind the bridge. Simple geometry later showed the wave to be 112 feet high. Rogue waves such as that are thought to be several ordinary waves that happen to get “in step,” forming highly unstable piles of water. Others are waves that overlay long-distance swells from earlier storms. Such accumulations of energy can travel in threes—a phenomenon called “the three sisters”—and are so huge that they can be tracked by radar. There are cases of the three sisters crossing the Atlantic Ocean and starting to shoal along the loo-fathom curve off the coast of France. One hundred fathoms is six hundred feet, which means that freak waves are breaking over the continental shelf as if it were a shoreline sandbar. Most people don’t survive encounters with such waves, and so firsthand accounts are hard to come by, but they do exist. An Englishwoman named Beryl Smeeton was rounding Cape Horn with her husband in the 1960s when she saw a shoaling wave behind her that stretched away in a straight line as far as she could see. “The whole horizon was blotted out by a huge grey wall,” she writes in her journal. “It had no curling crest, just a thin white line along the whole length, and its face was unlike the sloping face of a normal wave. This was a wall of water with a completely vertical face, down which ran white ripples, like a waterfall.”

The wave flipped the forty-six-foot boat end over end, snapped Smeeton’s harness, and threw her overboard.

Tommy Barrie had a similar experience off Georges Bank. He was laying-to in a storm when a wave clobbered him out of nowhere, imploding his windows. “There was this ‘boom’ and the Lexan window was blown right off,” he says. “The window hit the clutch and so the clutch was pinned and we couldn’t get her into gear. The boat’s over a bit, layin’ in a beam sea and shit flyin’ everywhere—things that have never moved on that boat before goin’ all over the place. The wave ripped the life raft off its mount and blew the front hatch open. It was dogged down, but there was so much water it blew it open anyway. I came up quick and radioed the Miss Millie: ‘Larry we took a hell of a wave, stand by, I’m here.’ I took the boat downsea and about ten minutes later the same wave hit him. His bird came out of the water and the hull took a big dent.”

If a wave takes Billy’s windows out, it would be similar to the one experienced by Smeeton or Barrie—big, steep, and unexpected. It’s an awful scene to imagine: water knee-deep in the wheelhouse, men scrambling up the companionway, wind screaming through the blown-out window. If enough water gets in, it can make its way down to the engine room, soak the wiring, and take on an electric charge. The entire boat gets electrified; anyone standing in water gets electrocuted. A boat that loses her windows can start filling up with water in minutes, so two men tie safety lines to their waists and crawl out onto the whaleback deck with sheets of marine plywood. “The plywood acts like a kite, you have to manhandle the sonofabitch,” says Charlie Reed. “It’s a horrible thought, someone out there in that weather. As captain, it’s your worst fear, someone goin’ over the side.”

It’s hard to find a more dangerous job than venturing onto the whaleback during a storm to do a little carpentry. On land a loo-knot wind reduces people to a crawl; at sea it knocks you flat. The decks are awash, the boat is rolling, the spray is raking you like grapeshot. You work in the calm of the wave troughs and flatten yourself at the crests to keep from being blown off the boat. One man holds the plywood against the window while the other lines up a power drill with the holes in the wheelhouse and starts drilling. He drills one hole, hammers a bolt through, and then someone in the wheelhouse threads on the nut while the men on the outside keep drilling and bolting, drilling and bolting until the plywood is screwed down tight. Some captains put a piece of inner tube between the wood and steel to make it waterproof.

Although it’s a suicidal job, crews that lose their windows almost always manage to get some plywood up, even if it means turning downsea to do it. After the plywood is bolted down, the crew starts bucket-bailing the wheelhouse and putting the cabin back in order. Maybe someone tries to wire the loran or radio up to a battery to see if he can get a signal. Billy starts shifting fuel from one tank to another, trying to trim the boat. Someone probably checks the engine room and work deck—are the scuppers clearing their water? Are the birds down? Is the fish hatch secure?

There’s not much they can do at this point but head into the storm and hope they don’t take any more big waves. If waves keep taking out their windows they could turn around and go downsea, but that generates a whole new set of problems. Several large waves could simply bury them, or the lazarette could flood, or sediment could get stirred up in the tanks and clog the fuel filters. If the ship motion is violent enough, the crew has to change the filters nonstop—pull them out, flush the sediment, put them back in again, over and over, as fast as they can. Or the engine stops and the boat goes over.

There’s no question Billy would radio for help now if he had the capability. All he’d have to do is say “mayday,” on channel 16 or 2182 kilohertz, and give his coordinates. Sixteen and 2182 are monitored by the Coast Guard, the military, and all oceangoing vessels; according to maritime law, any vessel that picks up a mayday must respond immediately, unless their own lives would be put in danger. The Coast Guard would send out an Aurora rescue plane to locate the Andrea Gail and circle her. A rescue-swimmer and helicopter crew would be placed on standby at the airbase outside Halifax. The Canadian Coast Guard cutter Edward Cornwallis would start steaming east out of Halifax on what would probably be a thirty-six-hour trip. The Triumph C, an ocean-going tug based at a drilling platform off Sable Island, would put to sea as well. The Contship Holland, the Zarah, and possibly the Mary T, would all try to converge on Billy. Once there, they wouldn’t be able to leave until the Coast Guard signs them off.

Presumably, then, Billys radios are out. The Coast Guard never receives a call. Now his only link to the rest of the world is his EPIRB, which sits outside in a plastic holster on the whaleback deck. It’s about the size of a bowling pin and has a ring switch that can be set to “off,” “on,” or “armed.” EPIRBs are kept permanently in the “armed” position, and if the boat goes down, a water-sensitive switch triggers a radio signal that gets relayed by satellite to listening posts on shore. The Coast Guard immediately knows the name of the boat, the location, and that something has gone disastrously wrong. If a boat loses her radios before actually sinking, though, the captain can send a distress signal by just twisting the ring switch to the “on” position. It’s the same as screaming “mayday” into the radio.

Billy doesn’t do it, though; he never trips the switch. This can only mean one thing: that he’s hopeful about their chances right up until the moment when they have no chance at all. He must figure that the kind of sea that took out their windows probably won’t hit again—or that, if it does, they’ll be able to take it. Statistically a forty-knot wind generates thirty- or forty-foot breaking sea every six minutes or so—greenwater over the bow and whitewater over the house. Every hour, perhaps, Billy might get hit by a breaking fifty-footer. That’s probably the kind of wave that blew out the windows. And every 100 hours, Billy can expect to run into a nonnegotiable wave—a breaking seventy-footer that could flip the boat end over end. He’s got to figure the storm’s going to blow out before his hundred hours are up.

Everyone on a sinking boat reacts differently. A man on one Gloucester boat just curled up and started to cry while his shipmates worked untethered on deck. The Andrea Gail crew, all experienced fishermen, are probably trying to shrug it off as just another storm—they’ve been through this before, they’ll go through it again, and at least they’re not puking. Billy’s undoubtedly working too hard at the helm to give drowning much thought. Ernie Hazard claims it was the last thing on his mind. “There was no conversation, just real businesslike,” he says of going down off Georges Bank. “You know, ‘Let’s just get this thing done.’ Never any overwhelming sense of danger. We were just very, very busy.”

Be that as it may, certain realities still must come crashing in. At some point Tyne, Shatford, Sullivan, Moran, Murphy, and Pierre must realize there’s no way off this boat. They could trigger the EPIRB, but a night rescue in these conditions would be virtually impossible. They could deploy the life raft, but they probably wouldn’t survive the huge seas. If the boat goes down, they go down with it, and no one on earth can do anything about it. Their lives are utterly and completely in their own hands.

That fact must settle into Bobby Shatford’s stomach like a bad meal. It was he, after all, who had those terrible misgivings the day they left. That last afternoon on the dock he came within a hair’s breadth of saying no—just telling Chris to start up the car and drive. They could have gone back to her place, or up the coast, or anywhere at all. It wouldn’t have mattered; he wouldn’t be in this storm right now, and neither would the rest of them. It would have taken Billy at least a day to replace him, and right now they’d still be east with the rest of the fleet.

The previous spring Bobby and Chris rented a movie called The Fighting Sullivans, about five brothers who died on a U.S. Navy boat during World War Two. It was Ethel’s favorite movie. Sitting there with Chris, watching the movie, and thinking about his brothers, Bobby started to cry. He was not a man who cried easily and Chris was unsure what to do. Should she say something? Pretend not to notice? Turn off the TV? Finally, Bobby said that he was upset by the idea of all his brothers fishing, and that if anything happened to him, he wanted to be buried at sea. Chris said that nothing was going to happen to him, but he insisted. Just bury me at sea, he said. Promise me that.

And now here he is, getting buried at sea. The conditions have degenerated from bad to unspeakable, Beaufort Force 10 or 11. The British Manual of Seamanship describes a Force 10 gale as: “Foam is in great patches and is blown in dense white streaks along the direction of the wind. The rolling of the sea becomes heavy and shock-like.” Force 11 is even worse: “Exceptionally high waves, small or medium-sized ships might be lost from view behind them. The sea is completely covered with long patches of white foam.” Hurricane Grace is still working her way north, and when she collides with the Sable Island storm—probably in a day or so—conditions will get even more severe, maybe as high as Force 12. Very few boats that size can withstand a Force 12 gale.

Since Billy presumably can’t use his radio, there’s no way to know how things are going aboard the Andrea Gail. A fairly good idea, though, can be had from the Eishin Maru 78, the Japanese longliner two hundred miles to the southwest. The Eishin Maru has a Canadian observer on board, Judith Reeves, who is charged with making sure the vessel abides by Canadian fishing regulations. The storm hits the Eishin Maru around the same time as the Andrea Gail, but not as abruptly; buoy #44137, sixty miles to the south, shows a slow, gradual increase in windspeed starting at five PM on the 28th. By dawn on the 29th, the wind is forty knots gust-ing to fifty, and peak wave heights are only forty-five feet. That’s considerably less than what Billy is experiencing, but it just keeps getting worse. By midnight sustained wind-speeds are fifty knots, gusts are hitting sixty, and peak wave heights are over one hundred feet. At ten past eight at night, October 29th, the first big wave hits the Eishin Maru.

It blows out a portside window with the sound of a shotgun going off. Water inundates the bridge and barrels down the hallway into Reeves’s room. She hears panicked shouts from the crew and then orders that she doesn’t understand. Men scramble to board up the window and bail out the water, and within an hour the captain has regained control of the bridge. The boat is taking a horrific beating, though. She’s 150 feet long—twice the size of the Andrea Gail—and waves are completely burying her decks. There are no life jackets on hand, no survival suits, and no EPIRB. Just before dawn, the second wave hits.

It blows out four windows this time, including the one with plywood over it. “All the circuits went, there was smoke and wires crackling,” says Reeves. “We crippled the ship. The VHF, the radar, the internal communication system, the navigation monitors, they were all rendered inoperable. That’s when the radio operator came to me and said—in sign language—that he wanted me to go into the radio room.”

The radio operator had managed to contact the ship’s agent by satellite phone, and Reeves is put on the line to explain what kind of damage they’ve sustained. While she’s talking, Coast Guard New York breaks in; they’ve been listening in on the conversation and want to know if the Eishin Maru needs help. Reeves says they’ve lost most of their electronics and are in serious trouble. New York patches her through to the Coast Guard in Halifax, and while they’re discussing how to get people off the boat, the radio operator interrupts her. He’s pointing to a sentence in an English phrase book. Reeves leans in close to read it: “We are helpless and drifting. Please render all assistance.” (Unknown to Reeves, the steering linkage has just failed, although the radio operator doesn’t know how to explain that to her.) Its at this moment that Reeves realizes she’s going down at sea.

“We had no steerage and we were right in the eye of the storm,” she says. “It was a confused sea, all the waves were coming from different directions. The wind was picking up the tops of the waves and slinging them so far that when the search-and-rescue plane arrived, we couldn’t even see it. The whole vessel would get shoved over on its side, so that we were completely upside-down. If you get hit by one wave and then hit by another, you can drive the vessel completely down into the water. And so that second before the vessel starts to come up you’re just holding your breath, waiting.”

They’re dead in the water, taking the huge waves broadside. According to Reeves, they are doing 360-degree barrel rolls and coming back up. Four boats try to respond to her mayday, but three of them have to stand down because of the weather. They cannot continue without risking their own lives. The ocean-going tug Triumph C leaves Sable Island and claws her way southward, and the Coast Guard cutter Edward Cornwallis is on her way from Halifax. The crew of the Eishin Maru, impassive, are sure they’re going to die. Reeves is too busy to think about it; she has to look for the life jackets, work the radio and satellite phone, flip through the Japanese phrase book. Eventually she has a moment to consider her options.

“Either I jump ship, or I go down with the ship. As for the first possibility, I thought about it for a while until I realized that they’d hammered all the hatches down. I thought, ‘God, I’ll never get off this friggin’ boat, it will be my tomb.’ So I figured I’d do whatever I had to do at the time, and there was no point in really thinking about it because it was just too frightening. I was just gripped by this feeling that I was going to have to do something very unpleasant. You know, like drowning is not going to be pleasant. And it wasn’t until the moment we lost steerage that I actually thought we were going to die. I mean, I knew there was a real possibility, and I was going to have to face that.”

Soon after losing steerage, a communications officer in New York asks Reeves how it’s going. Not too well, she says. Is your survival suit out? Yeah, it’s here, she says. Well, how many Japanese can you fit into it? Reeves laughs; even that slight joke is enough to ease the desperateness of the situation. A couple of hours later the satellite phone rings. Improbably, it’s a Canadian radio reporter who wants to interview her. His name is Rick Howe.

Miss Reeves, is it rough out there? Howe asks, over the static and wind-shriek.

It’s pretty rough.

What about the trawler, what’s the problem?

It’s not a trawler, it’s a longliner. The problem is we took three windows out of the bridge earlier this morning and lost all our instrumentation.

Are you in any danger or are you confident everything’s going to work out all right?

Well, we’re in danger, definitely we’re in danger. We’re drifting in twelve meter swells and between fifty and sixty knot winds. If we get any more water coming through the bridge that’s gonna wipe out any communication that we have left. So we’re definitely in danger right now.

Do you know how dose the nearest ship to you is?

We’re looking at about a hundred miles. If we have to abandon ship there are helicopters that can be here in three-and-a-half hours. Unfortunately they won’t be able to come in the dark, so if anything happens in the dark, we’re goners.

You mentioned that you expect the weather to clear up later in the day. What more can you tell us about that?

The swell size is supposed to go down to five to eight meters and the winds come around to the east, twenty-five to thirty-five knots. So that will take a lot of the edge off the fear I have right now, which is of sustaining a direct hit. If we take a direct hit, and the boat goes over, and we take another hit, the boat goes down. And we’re all shored up here, everything is battened down, hatched and practically nailed shut. If she goes over there’s no way anybody’s gonna get out, over.

Now is there a point where you may have to abandon ship, and is the crew and yourself prepared for that eventuality?

Well, to tell you the absolute truth I don’t think the crew is very prepared for an emergency. They have no emergency beacon and don’t seem very up on their emergency procedure, which is a little frightening. I’m the only one who has a survival suit. But, in a swell like we have today, it wouldn’t do me much good.

Yeah, right. Well, listen, I thank you for talking to us, and the whole of the province is praying for your safe return.

Thank you.

With that, Reeves turns back to the business at hand.

AFTER talking to Tommy Barrie, Billy is probably able to steam northwest another two or three hours before the seas get too rough to take on his stern. That would place him just north of data buoy #44139 and on the edge of Banquereau, one of the old fishing grounds off Nova Scotia. The 200-fathom line turns a corner at Banquereau, running north up the St. Lawrence Channel and south-southwest to Sable Island. About sixty miles due east is an underwater canyon called “The Gully,” and then the Sable Island shallows start.

Sable Island is a twenty-mile sandbar that extends another forty or fifty miles east-west below water. From a distance, the surf that breaks on the shoals looks like a white sand cliff. Mariners have headed for it in storms, thinking they might save themselves by driving their boat onto the beach, only to be pounded to pieces by twenty-foot waves on the outer bar. Sable Island historian George Patterson writes, in 1894: “From the east end a bar stretches northeasterly for seventeen miles, of which the first four are dry in fine weather, the next nine covered with heavy breakers and the last four with a heavy cross-sea. The island and its bar present a continuous line of upwards of fifty miles of terrific breakers. The currents around the island are terribly conflicting and uncertain, sometimes passing around the whole circuit of the compass in twenty-four hours. An empty cask will be carried round and round the island, making the circuit several times, and the same is the case with bodies from wrecks.”

The island prowls restlessly around the Scotian Shelf, losing sand from one end, building it up on the other, endlessly, throughout the centuries. Since 1873 it has melted away beneath the foundations of six lighthouses. Herds of wild horses live on the island, the descendants of tough Breton mountain horses left there by the French. Nothing but mar-ran grass holds the dunes in place, and cranberries, blueberries, and wild roses grow in the inland bogs. The Gulf Stream and the glacial Labrador Current converge at Sable, frequently smothering the island in fog. Five thousand men are said to have drowned in its shallows, earning it the name “The Graveyard of the Atlantic,” and at least that many have been pulled to safety by lifesaving crews that have been maintained there since 1801. “We have had a tolerable winter, and no wrecks, except the hull of the schooner Juno, of Plymouth,” one island-keeper recorded in 1820. “She came ashore without masts, sails or rigging of any description, and no person on board except one dead man in the hold.”

In bad weather, horsemen circled the island looking for ships in distress. If any were spotted, the horsemen rushed back for the surf boat and rowed out through the breakers to save anyone who was still alive. Sometimes they were able to fire rockets with a line attached and rig up a breeches buoy. After the storm died down they’d salvage the cargo and saw the ship timber up for firewood or construction material. People pulled from sinking ships often spent the entire winter on the island. Sometimes two or three hundred people would be camped out in the dunes, waiting for a relief ship to arrive in the spring.

Today there are two lighthouses, a Coast Guard station, a meteorological station, and several dozen oil and natural gas wells. There’s a sixty-foot shoal thirty miles to the northwest and a forty-five-foot shoal twenty miles to the east. They mark the western and eastern ends of the sandbar, respectively. Billy isn’t right on top of the bars yet, but he’s getting close. In the old days it was known that most shipwrecks on Sable occurred because of errors in navigation; the westerly current was so strong that it could throw boats off by sixty to a hundred miles. If Billy has lost his electronics—his GPS, radar, and loran—he’s effectively back in the old days. He’d have a chart of the Grand Banks on the chart table and would be estimating his position based on compass heading, forward speed, and wind conditions. This is called dead reckoning. Maybe the currents and the storm winds push Billy farther west than he realizes, and he gets into the shallows around Sable. Maybe he has turned downsea on purpose to keep water out of the wheel-house, or to save fuel. Or maybe their steering’s gone and, like the Eishin Maru, they’re just careening westward on the weather.

Whatever it is, one thing is known for sure. Around midnight on October 28th—when the storm is at its height off Sable Island—something catastrophic happens aboard the Andrea Gail.