RECREATING the last days of six men who disappeared at sea presented some obvious problems for me. On the one hand, I wanted to write a completely factual book that would stand on its own as a piece of journalism. On the other hand, I didn’t want the narrative to asphyxiate under a mass of technical detail and conjecture. I toyed with the idea of fictionalizing minor parts of the story—conversations, personal thoughts, day-to-day routines—to make it more readable, but that risked diminishing the value of whatever facts I was able to determine. In the end I wound up sticking strictly to the facts, but in as wide-ranging a way as possible. If I didn’t know exactly what happened aboard the doomed boat, for example, I would interview people who had been through similar situations, and survived. Their experiences, I felt, would provide a fairly good description of what the six men on the Andrea Gail had gone through, and said, and perhaps even felt.

As a result, there are varying kinds of information in the book. Anything in direct quotes was recorded by me in a formal interview, either in person or on the telephone, and was altered as little as possible for grammar and clarity. All dialogue is based on the recollection of people who are still alive, and appears in dialogue form without quotation marks. No dialogue was made up. Radio conversations are also based on people’s recollections, and appear in italics in the text. Quotes from published material are in italics, and have occasionally been condensed to better fit the text. Technical discussions of meteorology, wave motion, ship stability, etc., are based on my own library research and are generally not referenced, but I feel compelled to recommend William Van Dorn’s The Oceanography of Seamanship as a comprehensive and immensely readable text on ships and the sea.

In short, I’ve written as complete an account as possible of something that can never be fully known. It is exactly that unknowable element, however, that has made it an interesting book to write and, I hope, to read. I had some misgivings about calling it The Perfect Storm, but in the end I decided that the intent was sufficiently clear. I use perfect in the meteorological sense: a storm that could not possibly have been worse. I certainly mean no disrespect to the men who died at sea or the people who still grieve for them.

My own experience in the storm was limited to standing on Gloucester’s Back Shore watching thirty-foot swells advance on Cape Ann, but that was all it took. The next day I read in the paper that a Gloucester boat was feared lost at sea, and I clipped the article and stuck it in a drawer. Without even knowing it, I had begun to write The Perfect Storm.

ONE midwinter day off the coast of Massachusetts, the crew of a mackerel schooner spotted a bottle with a note in it. The schooner was on Georges Bank, one of the most dangerous fishing grounds in the world, and a bottle with a note in it was a dire sign indeed. A deckhand scooped it out of the water, the sea grass was stripped away, and the captain uncorked the bottle and turned to his assembled crew: “On Georges Bank with our cable gone our rudder gone and leaking. Two men have been swept away and all hands have been given up as our cable is gone and our rudder is gone. The one that picks this up let it be known. God have mercy on us.”

The note was from the Falcon, a boat that had set sail from Gloucester the year before. She hadn’t been heard from since. A boat that parts her cable off Georges careens helplessly along until she fetches up in some shallow water and gets pounded to pieces by the surf. One of the Falcon’s crew must have wedged himself against a bunk in the fo’c’sle and written furiously beneath the heaving light of a storm lantern. This was the end, and everyone on the boat would have known it. How do men act on a sinking ship? Do they hold each other? Do they pass around the whisky? Do they cry?

This man wrote; he put down on a scrap of paper the last moments of twenty men in this world. Then he corked the bottle and threw it overboard. There’s not a chance in hell, he must have thought. And then he went below again. He breathed in deep. He tried to calm himself. He readied himself for the first shock of sea.

A SOFT fall rain slips down through the trees and the smell of ocean is so strong that it can almost be licked off the air. Trucks rumble along Rogers Street and men in t-shirts stained with fishblood shout to each other from the decks of boats. Beneath them the ocean swells up against the black pilings and sucks back down to the barnacles. Beer cans and old pieces of styrofoam rise and fall and pools of spilled diesel fuel undulate like huge iridescent jellyfish. The boats rock and creak against their ropes and seagulls complain and hunker down and complain some more. Across Rogers Street and around the back of the Crow’s Nest, through the door and up the cement stairs, down the carpeted hallway and into one of the doors on the left, stretched out on a double bed in room number twenty-seven with a sheet pulled over him, Bobby Shatford lies asleep.

He’s got one black eye. There are beer cans and food wrappers scattered around the room and a duffel bag on the floor with t-shirts and flannel shirts and blue jeans spilling out.

Lying asleep next to him is his girlfriend, Christina Cotter. She’s an attractive woman in her early forties with rust-blond hair and a strong, narrow face. There’s a TV in the room and a low chest of drawers with a mirror on top of it and a chair of the sort they have in high-school cafeterias. The plastic cushion cover has cigarette burns in it. The window looks out on Rogers Street where trucks ease themselves into fish-plant bays.

It’s still raining. Across the street is Rose Marine, where fishing boats fuel up, and across a small leg of water is the State Fish Pier, where they unload their catch. The State Pier is essentially a huge parking lot on pilings, and on the far side, across another leg of water, is a boatyard and a small park where mothers bring their children to play. Looking over the park on the corner of Haskell Street is an elegant brick house built by the famous Boston architect, Charles Bulfinch. It originally stood on the corner of Washington and Summer Streets in Boston, but in 1850 it was jacked up, rolled onto a barge, and transported to Gloucester. That is where Bobby’s mother, Ethel, raised four sons and two daughters. For the past fourteen years she has been a daytime bartender at the Crow’s Nest. Ethel’s grandfather was a fisherman and both her daughters dated fishermen and all four of the sons fished at one point or another. Most of them still do.

The Crow’s Nest windows face east into the coming day over a street used at dawn by reefer trucks. Guests don’t tend to sleep late. Around eight o’clock in the morning, Bobby Shatford struggles awake. He has flax-brown hair, hollow cheeks, and a sinewy build that has seen a lot of work. In a few hours he’s due on a swordfishing boat named the Andrea Gail, which is headed on a one-month trip to the Grand Banks. He could return with $5,000 in his pocket or he could not return at all. Outside, the rain drips on. Chris groans, opens her eyes, and squints up at him. One of Bobby’s eyes is the color of an overripe plum.

Did I do that?

Yeah.

Jesus.

She considers his eye for a moment. How did I reach that high?

They smoke a cigarette and then pull on their clothes and grope their way downstairs. A metal fire door opens onto a back alley, they push it open and walk around to the Rogers Street entrance. The Crow’s Nest is a block-long faux-Tudor construction across from the J. B. Wright Fish Company and Rose Marine. The plate-glass window in front is said to be the biggest barroom window in town. That’s quite a distinction in a town where barroom windows are made small so that patrons don’t get thrown through them. There’s an old pool table, a pay phone by the door, and a horseshoe-shaped bar. Budweiser costs a dollar seventy-five, but as often as not there’s a fisherman just in from a trip who’s buying for the whole house. Money flows through a fisherman like water through a fishing net; one regular ran up a $4,000 tab in a week.

Bobby and Chris walk in and look around. Ethel’s behind the bar, and a couple of the town’s earlier risers are already gripping bottles of beer. A shipmate of Bobby’s named Bugsy Moran is seated at the bar, a little dazed. Rough night, huh? Bobby says. Bugsy grunts. His real name is Michael. He’s got wild long hair and a crazy reputation and everyone in town loves him. Chris invites him to join them for breakfast and Bugsy slides off his stool and follows them out the door into the light rain. They climb into Chris’s twenty-year-old Volvo and drive down to the White Hen Pantry and shuffle in, eyes bloodshot, heads throbbing. They buy sandwiches and cheap sunglasses and then they make their way out into the unrelenting greyness of the day. Chris drives them back to the Nest and they pick up thirty-year-old Dale Murphy, another crew member from the Andrea Gail, and head out of town.

Dales nickname is Murph, he’s a big grizzly bear of a guy from Bradenton Beach, Florida. He has shaggy black hair, a thin beard, and angled, almost Mongolian eyes; he gets a lot of looks around town. He has a three-year-old baby, also named Dale, whom he openly adores. His ex-wife, Debra, was three-time Southwestern Florida Women’s boxing champion and by all rights, young Dale is going to be a bruiser. Murph wants to get him some toys before he leaves, and Chris takes the three men to the shopping center out by Good Harbor Beach. They go into the Ames and Bobby and Bugsy get extra thermals and sweats for the trip and Murph walks down the aisles, filling a cart with Tonka trucks and firemen’s helmets and ray guns. When he can’t fit any more in he pays for it, and they all pile into the car and drive back to the Nest. Murph gets out and the other three decide to drive around the corner to the Green Tavern for another drink.

The Green Tavern looks like a smaller version of the Nest, all brick and false timber. Across the street is a bar called Bill’s; the three bars form the Bermuda Triangle of downtown Gloucester. Chris and Bugsy and Bobby walk in and seat themselves at the bar and order a round of beers. The television’s going and they watch it idly and talk about the trip and the last night of craziness at the Nest. Their hangovers are starting to soften. They drink another round and maybe half an hour goes by and finally Bobby’s sister Mary Anne walks in. She’s a tall blonde who inspires crushes in the teenaged sons of some of her friends, but there’s a certain no-nonsense air about her that has always kept Bobby on his toes. Oh shit, here she comes, he whispers.

He hides his beer behind his arm and pulls the sunglasses down over his black eye. Mary Anne walks up. What do you think I am, stupid? she asks. Bobby pulls the beer out from hiding. She looks at his eye. Nice one, she says.

I was in a riff downtown.

Right.

Someone buys her a wine cooler and she takes a couple of sips. I just came to make sure you were getting on the boat, she says. You shouldn’t be drinking so early in the day.

Bobbys a big, rugged kid. He was sickly as a child—he had a twin who died a few weeks after birth—but as he got older he got stronger and stronger. He used to play tackle football in pick-up games where broken bones were a weekly occurrence. In his jeans and hooded sweatshirt he looks like such a typical fisherman that a photographer once took a picture of him for a postcard of the waterfront; but still, Mary Anne’s his older sister, and he’s in no position to contradict her.

Chris loves you, he says suddenly. I do, too.

Mary Anne isn’t sure how to react. She’s been angry at Chris lately—because of the drinking, because of the black eye—but Bobby’s candor has thrown her off. He’s never said anything like that to her before. She stays long enough to finish her wine cooler and then heads out the door.

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.

NEW ENGLANDERS started catching swordfish in the early 1800s by harpooning them from small sailboats and hauling them on board. Since swordfish don’t school, the boats would go out with a man up the mast looking for single fins lolling about in the glassy inland waters. If the wind sprang up, the fins were undetectable, and the boats went in. When the lookout spotted a fish, he guided the captain over to it, and the harpooner made his throw. The throw had to take into account the roll of the boat, the darting of the fish, and the refraction of light through water. Giant bluefin tuna are still hunted this way, but fishermen use spotter planes to find their prey and electric harpoons to kill them. Giant bluefin are a delicacy in Japan; they are airfreighted over and get up to eighty dollars a pound. A single bluefin might go for thirty or forty thousand dollars.

Spotter planes were introduced to New England fishermen in 1962, but it was the longline that really changed the fishery. For years the Norwegians had caught mako on long-lines, along with a few swordfish, but they had never gone after swordfish exclusively. Then, in 1961, Canadian fishermen made some alterations to the gear and nearly tripled the total northeastern sword catch. The boom didn’t last long, though; ten years later the U.S. Food and Drug Administration determined that swordfish carried a dangerous amount of mercury in them, and both the American and Canadian governments banned sale of the fish. Some longliners went out after swordfish anyway, but they risked having their catch seized and tested by the F.D.A.

Finally, in 1978, the U.S. government relaxed the standards for acceptable mercury contamination in fish, and the gold rush was on. In the interim fishing had changed, though; boats were using satellite navigation, electronic fish finders, temperature-depth gauges. Radar reflectors were used to track gear, and new monofilament made it possible to set thirty or forty miles of line at a time. By the mid-eighties, the U.S. swordfish fleet alone was up to 700 boats fishing around fifty million hooks a year. “The technological change appears to be bumping up against the limits of the resource,” as one government study put it at the time.

Until then the fishery had been relatively unregulated, but a new drift-entanglement net in the early eighties finally got the wheels of bureaucracy turning. The nets were a mile long, ninety-feet wide, and set out all night from the stern of a converted longliner. Although the large mesh permitted juveniles to escape, the National Marine Fisheries Service was still leery of its impact on the swordfish population. They published a management plan for the North Atlantic swordfish that suggested numerous regulatory changes, including limiting the use of drift nets, and invited responses from state and federal agencies, as well as individual fishermen. A series of public hearings were held up and down the East Coast throughout 1983 and 1984, and fishermen who couldn’t attend—those who were fishing, in other words—sent in letters. One of the people who responded was Bob Brown, who explained in a barely legible scrawl that he’d made fifty-two sets that year and there seemed to be plenty of mature fish out there, they just stayed in colder water than people realized. Alex Bueno of the Tiffany Vance wrote a letter pointing out, among other things, that draggers weren’t likely to switch over to drift nets because they cost too much, and that swordfish population estimates were inaccurate because they didn’t take into account fish outside the two-hundred-mile limit. Sportsfishermen accused commercial fishermen of raping the oceans, commercial fishermen accused sportsfishermen of squandering a resource, and almost everyone accused the government of gross incompetence.

In the end, the Fishery Management Plan did not include a catch quota for Atlantic swordfish, but it required all sword boats to register with the National Marine Fisheries Service, a division of the Department of Commerce. Boat owners who had never swordfished in their lives scrambled for permits just to keep their options open, and the number of boats nearly doubled while, by all indications, the swordfish stock continued to decline. From 1987 to 1991, the total North Atlantic swordfish catch went from 45 million pounds to 33 million pounds, and their average size dropped from 165 pounds to no. This was what resource management experts know as tragedy of the commons, a reference to overgrazing in eighteenth-century England. “In the case of common grazing areas,” explained one fisheries-management pamphlet, “grass soon disappeared as citizens put more and more sheep on the land. There was little incentive to conserve or invest in the resource because others would then benefit without contributing.”

That was happening throughout the fishing industry: haddock landings had plummeted to one-fiftieth of what they were in 1960, cod landings had dropped by a factor of four. The culprit—as it almost always has been in fishing—was a sudden change in technology. New quick-freeze techniques allowed boats to work halfway around the world and process their fish as they went, and this made the three-mile limit around most countries completely ineffectual. Enormous Russian factory ships put to sea for months at a time and scoured the bottom with nets that could take thirty tons of fish in a single haul. They fished practically within sight of the American coast, and within years the fish populations had been staggered by fifty-percent losses. Congress had to take action, and in 1976 they passed the Magnuson Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which extended our national sovereignty to two hundred miles offshore. Most other nations quickly followed suit.

Of course, the underlying concern wasn’t for fish populations, it was for the American fleet. Having chased out the competition, America set about constructing an industry that could scrape Georges Bank just as bare as any Russian factory ship. After the passage of the Magnuson Act, American fishermen could take out federally guaranteed loans and set themselves up for business in quarter-million-dollar steel boats. To make matters worse, the government established eight regional fishing councils that were exempt from conflict-of-interest laws. In theory, this should have put fisheries management in the hands of the people who fished. In reality, it showed the fox into the chicken coop.

Within three years of Magnuson, the New England fleet had doubled to 1,300 boats. Better equipment resulted in such huge takes that prices dropped and fishermen had to resort to more and more devastating methods just to keep up. Draggers raked the bottom so hard that they actually levelled outcrops and filled in valleys—the very habitats where fish thrived. A couple of good years in the mid-eighties masked the overall decline, but the end was near, and many people knew it. The first time anyone—at least any fisherman—suggested a closure was in 1988, when a Chatham fisherman named Mark Simonitsch stood up to speak at a New England Fisheries Council meeting. Simonitsch had fished off Cape Cod his whole life; his brother, James, was a marine safety consultant who had worked for Bob Brown.

Both men knew fishermen, knew fish, and knew where things were headed.

Simonitsch suggested that Georges Bank be closed to all fishing, indefinitely. He was shouted down, but it was the beginning of the end.

The swordfish population didn’t crash as fast as some others, but it crashed all the same. By 1988, the combined North Atlantic fleet was fishing over one hundred million hooks a year, and catch logs were showing that the swordfish population was getting younger and younger. Finally, in 1990, the International Commission for the Conservation of Tunas suggested a fishing quota for the North Atlantic swordfish. The following year the National Marine Fisheries Service implemented a quota of 6.9 million pounds of dressed swordfish for U.S.-licensed sword boats, roughly two-thirds of the previous year’s catch. Every U.S.-licensed boat had to report their catch when they arrived back in port, and as soon as the overall quota was met, the entire fishery was shut down. In a good year the quota might be met in September; in bad years it might not be met at all. The result was that not only were fishing boats now racing the season, they were racing each other. When the Andrea Gail left port on September 23rd, she was working under a quota for the first time in her life.

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.”

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.

IN the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. Government decided to detonate a series of nuclear devices in the Pacific Ocean. The thinking was that deep water would absorb the shock wave and minimize the effect on the environment, while still allowing scientists to gauge the strength of the explosions. But an oceanographer named William Van Dorn, associated with the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, California, warned them that a nuclear explosion in the wrong place “could convert the entire continental shelf into a surf zone.”

Concerned, the Navy ran a series of wave tank tests to see what kind of stresses their fleet could take. (They’d already lost three destroyers to a typhoon in 1944. Before going down the ships had radioed that they were rolling through arcs of 140 degrees. They downflooded through their stacks and sank.) The Navy subjected model destroyers and aircraft carriers to various kinds of waves and found that a single nonbreaking wave—no matter how big it was—was incapable of sinking a ship. A single breaking wave, though, would flip a ship end over end if it was higher than the ship was long. Typically, the ship would climb the wave at an angle of forty-five degrees, fail to gain the top, and then slide back down the face. Her stern would bury itself into the trough, and the crest of the wave would catch her bow and flip her over. This is called pitch-poling; Ernie Hazard was pitch-poled on Georges Bank. It’s one of the few motions that can end ship-to-shore communication instantly.

Another is a succession of waves that simply drives the boat under—“founders,” as mariners say. The dictionary defines founder as “to cave in, sink, fail utterly, collapse.” On a steel boat the windows implode, the hatches fail, and the boat starts to downflood. The crew is prevented from escaping by the sheer force of the water pouring into the cabin—it’s like walking into the blast of a firehose. In that sense, pitch-poling is better than foundering because an overturned boat traps air in the hold and can stay afloat for an hour or more. That might allow members of the crew to swim out a doorway and climb into a life raft. The rafts are designed to inflate automatically and release from the boat when she goes down. In theory the EPIRB floats free as well, and begins signalling to shore. All the crew has to do is stay alive.

By the late hours of October 28th the sea state is easily high enough to either pitch-pole the Andrea Gail or drive her under. And if she loses power—a clogged fuel filter, a fouled prop—she could slew to the side and roll. The same rule applies to capsizing as to pitch-poling: the wave must be higher than the boat is wide. The Andrea Gail is twenty feet across her beam. But even if the boat doesn’t get hit by a nonnegotiable wave, the rising sea state allows Billy less and less leeway to maneuver. If he maintains enough speed to steer, he beats the boat to pieces; if he slows down, he loses rudder control. This is the end result of two days of narrowing options; now the only choice left is whether to go upsea or down, and the only outcome is whether they sink or float. There’s not much in between.

If the conditions don’t subside, the most Billy can realistically hope for is to survive until dawn. Then at least they’ll have a chance of being rescued—now it’s unthinkable. “In violent storms there is so much water in the air, and so much air in the water, that it becomes impossible to tell where the atmosphere stops and the sea begins,” writes Van Dorn. “That may literally make it impossible to distinguish up from down.” In such conditions a helicopter pilot could never pluck six people off the deck of a boat. So, for the next eight hours, the crew of the Andrea Gail must keep the pumps and engine running and just hope they don’t encounter any rogue waves. Seventy-footers are roaming around the sea state like surly giants and there’s not much Billy can do but take them head-on and try to get over the top before they break. If his floodlights are out he wouldn’t even have that option—he’d just feel a drop into the trough, a lurch, and the boat starting up a slope way too steep to survive.

“Seventy foot seas—I’d be puttin’ on my diapers at that point,” says Charlie Reed. “I’d be quite nervous. That’s higher than the highest point on the Andrea Gail. I once came home from the Grand Banks in thirty-five-foot seas. It was a scary fuckin’ thought—straight up, straight down, for six days. My guess is that Billy turned side-to and rolled. You come off one of those seas cocked, the next one comes at a different angle, it pushes the boat around and then you roll. If the boat flips over—even with everything dogged down—water’s gonna get in. The boat’s upside-down, the plywood’s buckling, that’s the end.”

When Ernie Hazard went over on Georges Bank in 1982, the motion wasn’t a violent one so much as a huge, slow somersault that laid the boat over on her back. Hazard remembers one wave spinning them around and another lifting them end over end. It wasn’t like rolling a car at high speeds, it was more like rolling a house. Hazard was thirty-three at the time; three years earlier he’d answered a newspaper ad and got a job on the Fair Wind, a lobster boat out of Newport, Rhode Island. The storm hit on their last trip of the year, late November. The crew were all good friends; they celebrated the end of their season at a steakhouse and then left for Georges Bank late the next morning. The winds were light and the forecast called for several more days of fair weather. By dawn it was blowing a hundred:

We were driving the boat well. You point the boat into the sea and try to hold your own until it blows out—stay there, take your pounding. You balance the boat, flood the tanks, try to save what you have on deck. There was the typical howling of wind in the wires and there was a lot of foam because of the wind, yellow foam, spindrift. We’d lose power on the waves because they were more foam than water, the propeller just couldn’t bite.

It happened quick. We were close to the edge of the continental shelf and the seas were getting large, starting to break. Cresting. I remember looking out the pilothouse and this monster wave came and broke over the bow and forced us backwards. There was nothing to hold us there and we must have dug the stern in and then spun around. Now we’re in a full following sea. We never went more than one more wave when we buried our bow in the trough and flipped over. There was the wave breaking and then a sensation of the boat turning, and the next thing I knew we were upside-down. Floating inside the boat.

I happened to surface in a small air pocket and I didn’t know if I was upside-down or standing on the walls or what. I made a dive into the pilothouse and I could see some light—it could have been a window or a porthole, I don’t know—and when I got back up into the wheelhouse there was no more air. It was all gone. I was thinking, “This is it. Just take a mouthful of water and it’s over.” It was very matter-of-fact. I was at a fork in the road and there was work to do—swim or die. It didn’t scare me, I didn’t think about my family or anything. It was more businesslike. People think you always have to go for life, but you don’t. You can quit.

For reasons that he still doesn’t understand, Hazard didn’t quit. He made a guess and swam. The entire port side of the cabin was welded steel and he knew if he picked that direction, he was finished. He felt himself slide through a narrow opening—the door? a window?—and suddenly he was back in the world. The boat was hull-up, sliding away fast, and the life raft was convulsing at the end of its tether. It was his only hope; he wriggled out of his clothes and started to swim.

Whether the Andrea Gail rolls, pitch-poles, or gets driven down, she winds up, one way or another, in a position from which she cannot recover. Among marine architects this is known as the zero-moment point—the point of no return. The transition from crisis to catastrophe is fast, probably under a minute, or someone would’ve tripped the EPIRB. (In fact the EPIRB doesn’t even signal when it hits the water, which means it has somehow malfunctioned. In the vast majority of cases, the Coast Guard knows when men are dying offshore.) There’s no time to put on survival suits or grab a life vest; the boat’s moving through the most extreme motion of her life and there isn’t even time to shout. The refrigerator comes out of the wall and crashes across the galley. Dirty dishes cascade out of the sink. The TV, the washing machine, the VCR tapes, the men, all go flying. And, seconds later, the water moves in.

When a boat floods, the first thing that happens is that her electrical system shorts out. The lights go off, and for a few moments the only illumination is the frenetic blue of sparks arcing down into the water. It’s said that people in extreme situations perceive things in distorted, almost surreal ways, and when the wires start to crackle and burn, perhaps one of the crew thinks of fireworks—of the last Fourth of July, walking around Gloucester with his girlfriend and watching colors blossom over the inner harbor. There’d be tourists shuffling down Rogers Street and fishermen hooting from bars and the smell of gunpowder and fried clams drifting through town. He’d have his whole life ahead of him, that July evening; he’d have every choice in the world.

And he wound up swordfishing. He wound up, by one route or another, on this trip, in this storm, with this boat filling up with water and one or two minutes left to live. There’s no going back now, no rescue helicopter that could possibly save him. All that’s left is to hope it’s over fast.

When the water first hits the trapped men, it’s cold but not paralyzing, around fifty-two degrees. A man can survive up to four hours in that temperature if something holds him up. If the boat rolls or flips over, the men in the wheelhouse are the first to drown. Their experience is exactly like Hazard’s except that they don’t make it out of the wheelhouse to a life raft; they inhale and that’s it. After that the water rises up the companionway, flooding the galley and berths, and then starts up the inverted engine room hatch. It may well be pouring in the aft door and the fish hatch, too, if either failed during the sinking. If the boat is hull-up and there are men in the engine room, they are the last to die. They’re in absolute darkness, under a landslide of tools and gear, the water rising up the companionway and the roar of the waves probably very muted through the hull. If the water takes long enough, they might attempt to escape on a lungful of air—down the companionway, along the hall, through the aft door and out from under the boat—but they don’t make it. It’s too far, they die trying. Or the water comes up so hard and fast that they can’t even think. They’re up to their waists and then their chests and then their chins and then there’s no air at all. Just what’s in their lungs, a minute’s worth or so.

The instinct not to breathe underwater is so strong that it overcomes the agony of running out of air. No matter how desperate the drowning person is, he doesn’t inhale until he’s on the verge of losing consciousness. At that point there’s so much carbon dioxide in the blood, and so little oxygen, that chemical sensors in the brain trigger an involuntary breath whether he’s underwater or not. That is called the “break point”; laboratory experiments have shown the break point to come after eighty-seven seconds. It’s a sort of neurological optimism, as if the body were saying, Holding our breath is killing us, and breathing in might not kill us, so we might as well breathe in. If the person hyperventilates first—as free divers do, and as a frantic person might—the break point comes as late as 140 seconds. Hyperventilation initially flushes carbon dioxide out of the system, so it takes that much longer to climb back up to critical levels.

Until the break point, a drowning person is said to be undergoing “voluntary apnea,” choosing not to breathe. Lack of oxygen to the brain causes a sensation of darkness closing in from all sides, as in a camera aperture stopping down. The panic of a drowning person is mixed with an odd incredulity that this is actually happening. Having never done it before, the body—and the mind—do not know how to die gracefully. The process is filled with desperation and awkwardness. “So this is drowning,” a drowning person might think. “So this is how my life finally ends.”

Along with the disbelief is an overwhelming sense of being wrenched from life at the most banal, inopportune moment imaginable. “I can’t die, I have tickets to next week’s game,” is not an impossible thought for someone who is drowning. The drowning person may even feel embarrassed, as if he’s squandered a great fortune. He has an image of people shaking their heads over his dying so senselessly. The drowning person may feel as if it’s the last, greatest act of stupidity in his life.

These thoughts shriek through the mind during the minute or so that it takes a panicked person to run out of air. When the first involuntary breath occurs most people are still conscious, which is unfortunate, because the only thing more unpleasant than running out of air is breathing in water. At that point the person goes from voluntary to involuntary apnea, and the drowning begins in earnest. A spasmodic breath drags water into the mouth and windpipe, and then one of two things happen. In about ten percent of people, water—anything—touching the vocal cords triggers an immediate contraction in the muscles around the larynx. In effect, the central nervous system judges something in the voice box to be more of a threat than low oxygen levels in the blood, and acts accordingly. This is called a laryngospasm. It’s so powerful that it overcomes the breathing reflex and eventually suffocates the person. A person with laryngospasm drowns without any water in his lungs.

In the other ninety percent of people, water floods the lungs and ends any waning transfer of oxygen to the blood. The clock is running down now; half-conscious and enfeebled by oxygen depletion, the person is in no position to fight his way back up to the surface. The very process of drowning makes it harder and harder not to drown, an exponential disaster curve similar to that of a sinking boat.

Occasionally someone makes it back from this dark world, though, and it’s from these people that we know what drowning feels like. In 1892 a Scottish doctor named James Lowson was on a steamship bound for Colombo, Sri Lanka, when they ran into a typhoon and went down in the dead of night. Most of the 150 people on board sank with the ship, but Lowson managed to fight his way out of the hold and over the side. The ship sank out from under his feet, dragging him down, and the last thing he remembers is losing consciousness underwater. A few minutes later the buoyancy of his life vest shot him to the surface, though, and he washed up on an island and lived to write about his experiences in the Edinburgh Medical Journal. He attributed the clarity of his recollection to the “preternatural calm” of people facing death. It’s as close as one is going to get to the last moments of the Andrea Gail:

All afternoon the hammering of the big seas on the doomed vessel went on, whilst night came only to add darkness to our other horrors. Shortly before ten o’clock three tremendous seas found their way down the stokehole, putting out the fires, and our situation was desperate. The end came shortly before midnight, when there was a heavy crash on the reef, and the vessel was lying at the bottom of the Straits of Formosa in under a minute.

With scarcely time to think I pulled down the life-belts and, throwing two to my companions, tied the third on myself and bolted for the companionway. There was no time to spare for studying humanity at this juncture, but I can never forget the apparent want of initiative in all I passed. All the passengers seemed paralyzed—even my companions, some of them able military men. The stewards of the ship, uttering cries of despair and last farewells, blocked the entrance to the deck, and it was only by sheer force I was able to squeeze past them. Getting out on deck, a perfect mountain of water seemed to come from overhead, as well as from below, and dashed me against the bridge companionway. The ship was going down rapidly, and I was pulled down with her, struggling to extricate myself.

I got clear under water and immediately struck out to reach the surface, only to go farther down. This exertion was a serious waste of breath, and after ten or fifteen seconds the effort of inspiration could no longer be restrained. It seemed as if I was in a vice which was gradually being screwed up tight until it felt as if the sternum and spinal column must break. Many years ago my old teacher used to describe how painless and easy a death by drowning was—“like falling about in a green field in early summer”—and this flashed across my brain at the time. The “gulping” efforts became less frequent, and the pressure seemed unbearable, but gradually the pain seemed to ease up. I appeared to be in a pleasant dream, although I had enough will power to think of friends at home and the sight of the Grampians, familiar to me as a boy, that was brought into my view. Before losing consciousness the chest pain had completely disappeared and the sensation was actually pleasant.

When consciousness returned, I found myself at the surface, and managed to get a dozen good inspirations. Land was about four hundred yards distant, and I used a bale of silk and then a long wooden plank to assist me to shore. On landing, and getting behind a sheltering rock, no effort was required to produce copius emesis. After the excitement, sound sleep set in, and this sleep lasted three hours, when a profuse diarrhea came on, evidently brought on by the sea water ingested. Until morning broke all my muscles were in a constant tremor which could not be controlled. (Several weeks later) I was sleeping in a comfortable bed and, late in the evening, a nightmare led to my having a severe struggle with the bedroom furniture, finally taking a “header” out of the bed and coming to grief on the floor.

Lowson guesses that laryngospasm prevented water from entering his lungs when he was unconscious. The crew of the Andrea Gail either have laryngospasms or completely inundated lungs. They are suspended, open-eyed and unconscious, in the flooded enclosures of the boat. The darkness is absolute and the boat may already be on her way to the bottom. At this point only a massive amount of oxygen could save these men. They have suffered, at most, a minute or two. Their bodies, having imposed increasingly drastic measures to keep functioning, have finally started to shut down. Water in the lungs washes away a substance called surfactant, which enables the alveoli to leach oxygen out of the air. The alveoli themselves, grape-like clusters of membrane on the lung wall, collapse because blood cannot get through the pulmonary artery. The artery has constricted in an effort to shunt blood to areas of the lungs where there is more oxygen. Unfortunately, those don’t exist. The heart labors under critically low levels of oxygen and starts to beat erratically—“like a bag full of worms,” as one doctor says. This is called ventricular fibrillation. The more irregularly the heart beats, the less blood it moves and the faster life functions decline. Children—who have proportionally stronger hearts than adults—can maintain a heartbeat for up to five minutes without air. Adults die faster. The heart beats less and less effectively until, after several minutes, there’s no movement at all. Only the brain is alive.

The central nervous system does not know what has happened to the body; all it knows is that not enough oxygen is getting to the brain. Orders are still being issued—Breathe! Pump! Circulate!—that the body cannot obey. If the person were defibrillated at that moment, he might possibly survive.

He could be given cardiopulmonary resuscitation, put on a respirator, and coaxed back to life. Still, the body is doing everything it can to delay the inevitable. When cold water touches the face, an impulse travels along the trigeminal and vagus nerves to the central nervous system and lowers the metabolic rate. The pulse slows down and the blood pools where it’s needed most, in the heart and skull. It’s a sort of temporary hibernation that drastically reduces the body’s need for oxygen. Nurses will splash ice water on the face of a person with a racing heart to trigger the same reaction.

The diving reflex, as this is called, is compounded by the general effect of cold temperature on tissue—it preserves it. All chemical reactions, and metabolic processes, become honey-slow, and the brain can get by on less than half the oxygen it normally requires. There are cases of people spending forty or fifty minutes under lake ice and surviving. The colder the water, the stronger the diving reflex, the slower the metabolic processes, and the longer the survival time. The crew of the Andrea Gail do not find themselves in particularly cold water, though; it may add five or ten minutes to their lives. And there is no one around to save them anyway. The electrical activity in their brains gets weaker and weaker until, after fifteen or twenty minutes, it ceases altogether.

The body could be likened to a crew that resorts to increasingly desperate measures to keep their vessel afloat. Eventually the last wire has shorted out, the last bit of decking has settled under the water. Tyne, Pierre, Sullivan, Moran, Murphy, and Shatford are dead.

ALBERT JOHNSTON, fifty miles south of the Tail on the Mary T, gets hit a few hours after the Andrea Gail but just as hard. The first sign of the storm is a massive amount of static over the VHF, and then the wind comes: thirty, forty, fifty knots, and finally it tears the anemometer off buoy #44138. The buoy is about fifty miles northwest of Johnston’s position and pegs fifty-six knots before flatlining at the bottom of the chart. Wind speeds above the interference of the wave crests are probably half again as high. The center of the low slides past Johnston late on the 18th and continues curving back around toward the coast throughout the next day. That motion spares Johnston the worst of the storm. It also, as far as he’s concerned, spares him his life.

Johnston jogs into the wind and seas until night falls and then turns around and goes with it. He doesn’t want to take the chance of running into a rogue wave in the dark and blowing his windows out. Throughout the early hours of October 29th, he surfs downwind on the backs of the huge seas, following a finger of cold Labrador Current, and when dawn breaks he turns around and fights his way northward again. He wants to gain enough sea room so that he won’t hit the Gulf Stream when he runs south again the following night. On the second day the crew fight their way onto the deck to check the fish-hold and lazarette hatches and tighten the anchor fastenings. The sun has come out, glancing dully off the green ocean, and the wind screams out of the east, setting the cables to moaning and sending long streaks of foam scudding through the air. Radio waves become so bogged down in the saturated air that the radar stops working; at one point an unidentified Japanese sword boat appears out of nowhere, searchlight prying into the gloom, and passes within a few hundred yards of the Mary T. On the steeper seas she can’t get her bow up in time and plunges straight through the wall of water. Nothing but her wheelhouse shows and then slowly, unstoppably, her bow rises back up. The two vessels pass by each other without a word or a sign, unable to communicate, unable to help each other, navigating their own courses through hell.

Except for that one expedition on deck to check the fish-hold, the crew keep to their bunks and Johnston stays bolted to the wheelhouse floor, wrestling the helm and jotting down notes in the ship log. His entries are terse, bullet descriptions of the unending chaos outside. “NE 80-100 winds came on as we passed through west side of eye,” he records on the 29th. “Seas 20–30 feet. Dangerous Storm to move E 15 kts become station drift SW & merge with Grace.” Johnston is one of the most meteorologically inclined captains of the sword fleet, and he’s been keeping a weather eye on Hurricane Grace, which has been quietly slipping up the coast. At eight AM on the 29th, Grace collides with the cold front, as predicted, and goes reeling back out to sea. She’s moving extremely fast and packing eighty-knot winds and thirty-foot seas. She’s a player now, an important—if dying—element in the atmospheric machinery assembling itself south of Sable. Grace crosses the 40th parallel that afternoon, and at eight PM on October 29th, Hurricane Grace runs into the Sable Island storm.

The effect is instantaneous. Tropical air is a sort of meteorological accelerant that can blow another storm system through the roof, and within hours of encountering Hurricane Grace, the pressure gradient around the storm forms the equivalent of a cliff. Weather charts plot barometric pressure the way topographical maps plot elevation, and in both cases, the closer together the lines are, the steeper the change. Weather charts of the Grand Banks for the early hours of October 30th show isobaric lines converging in one black mass on the north side of the storm. A storm with tightly packed isobaric lines is said to have a steep pressure gradient, and the wind will rush downhill, as it were, with particular violence. In the case of the storm off Sable Island, the wind starts rushing into the low at speeds up to a hundred miles an hour. As a NOAA disaster report put it blandly a year later, “The dangerous storm previously forecast was now fact.”

The only good thing about such winter gales, as far as coastal residents are concerned, is that they tend to travel west-to-east offshore. That means their forward movement is subtracted from their windspeed: A seventy-knot wind from a storm moving away at twenty knots effectively becomes a fifty-knot wind. The opposite is also true—forward movement is added to windspeed—but that almost never happens on the East Coast. The atmospheric movement is all west-to-east in the midlatitudes, and it’s nearly impossible for a weather system to overcome that. Storms may wobble northeast or southeast for a while, but they never really buck the jet stream. It takes a freakish alignment of variables to permit that to happen, a third cog in the huge machinations of the sky.

Generally speaking, it takes a hurricane.

By October 30th, the Sable Island storm is firmly imbedded between the remnants of Hurricane Grace and the Canadian high. Like all large bodies, hurricanes have a hard time slowing down, and her counterclockwise circulation continues long after her internal structures have fallen apart. The Canadian high, in the meantime, is still spinning clockwise with dense, cold air. These two systems function like huge gears that catch the storm between their teeth and extrude it westward. This is called a retrograde; it’s an act of meteorological defiance that might happen in a major storm only every hundred years or so. As early as October 27th, NOAA’s Cray computers in Maryland were saying that the storm would retrograde back toward the coast; two days later Bob Case was in his office watching exactly that happen on GOES satellite imagery. Meteorologists see perfection in strange things, and the meshing of three completely independent weather systems to form a hundred-year event is one of them. My God, thought Case, this is the perfect storm.

As a result of this horrible alignment, the bulk of the sword fleet—way out by the Flemish Cap—is spared the brunt of the storm, while everyone closer to shore gets pummeled. The 105-foot Mr. Simon, a hundred miles west of Albert Johnston, gets her aft door blown in, her wheelhouse flooded, and her anchor fastenings torn off. The anchor starts slamming around on deck and a crewman has to go out and cut it free. The Laurie Dawn 8 loses her antennas and then takes a wave down her breather pipes that stuffs one of her engines. Farther south down the coast the situation is even worse. A bulk carrier named the Eagle finds herself in serious trouble off the Carolinas, along with a freighter named the Star Baltic, and both struggle into port badly damaged. The ninety-foot schooner Anne Khristine, built 123 years ago, sinks off the coast of Delaware and her crew has to be saved by Coast Guard helicopters. The bulk carrier Zarah, just fifty miles south of the Andrea Gail, takes ninety-foot seas over her decks that shear off the steel bolts holding her portholes down. Thirty tons of water flood the crew mess, continue into the officers’ mess, explode a steel bulkhead, tear through two more walls, flood the crew’s sleeping quarters, course down a companionway, and kill the ship’s engine. The Zarah is 550 feet long.

And the sailing vessel Satori, alone at the mouth of the Great South Channel, is starting to lose the battle to stay afloat. Karen Stimpson crouches miserably by the navigation table and listens to the Tuesday morning NOAA forecast: ONE OF THE WORST STORMS SINCE THE BLIZZARD OF ’78, ALREADY THREE DOZEN BOATS BEACHED OR SUNK AT NAUSET BEACH. SHIP REPORTS OF 63 FOOT SEAS, WHICH IS PROBABLY HIGH BUT A SIGN OF PROBLEMS UPCOMING. HEAVY SURF ADVISORY BEING ISSUED DESPITE TEMPORARY LULL IN THE WIND FIELD.

Instead of abating, as Leonard insisted, the storm just keeps getting worse; the seas are thirty feet and the winds are approaching hurricane force. The boat rolls helplessly on her beam-ends every time a wave catches her on the side. “We were taking such a hammering—real neck-snapping violence,” says Stimpson. “Things were flying, every wave was knocking us across the cabin. It was only a matter of time before the boat started to break up.” Bylander refuses to go on deck, and Leonard curls up on his bunk, sullen and silent, sneaking gulps off a whiskey bottle. Stimpson puts on every piece of clothing she has, climbs the narrow companionway, and clips herself onto the lifeline.

No matter what she does—lashing the tiller, running downwind, showing less jib—she can’t control the boat. Several times she’s snapped to the end of her tether by boarding seas. Stimpson knows that if they don’t keep their bow to the weather they’ll roll, so she decides they have no choice but to run the engine. She goes belowdeck to ask Leonard how much fuel they have, but he gives a different answer each time she asks. That’s a bad sign for both the fuel level and Leonard’s state of mind. But fuel isn’t their only problem, Leonard points out; there’s also the propeller itself. In such chaotic seas the prop keeps lifting out of the water and revving too high; eventually the bearings will burn out.

While Leonard is explaining the subtleties of prop cavitation, the first knockdown occurs. A wave catches the Satori

broadsides and puts her mast in the water; the entire crew crashes against the far wall. Canned food rockets across the galley and water starts pouring into the cabin. At first Stimpson thinks the hull has opened up—a death sentence—but the water has just burst through the main hatch. Debris and splintered glass litter the cabin, and the nav table is drenched. The single sideband is dead, and the VHF looks doubtful.

Most of Stimpson’s experience is with wooden boats; in rough weather they tend to spring their caulking and sink. Fiberglass is a lot stronger but it, too, has limits. Stimpson just doesn’t know what those limits are. There seems to be no way to keep the boat pointed into the seas, no way to minimize the beating they’re taking. Even if the VHF can transmit a mayday—and it’s impossible to know that for sure—it only has a range of several miles. They’re fifty miles out at sea. Between waves, between slammings, Stimpson shouts, I think we should prepare a survival bag! In case we have to abandon ship!

Bylander, grateful for something to do, sorts through the wreckage on the floor and stuffs tins of food, bottled water, clothes, and a wire cheese sheer into a sea bag. Sue, we don’t need the sheer, we can bite the cheese! Stimpson says, but Bylander just shakes her head. I’ve read about this and it’s the little niceties that make the difference! Ray, where are the boat cushions? While preparing their emergency bag, they get knocked over a second time. This one is even more violent than the first, and the boat is a long time in coming back up. Stimpson and Leonard pick themselves off the floor, bruised and dazed, and Bylander sticks her head out the hatch to check for damage on deck. My God, Karen! she screams. The life raft’s gone!

“I was in a corner and I covered myself with soft things,” says Stimpson, “and with a flashlight I took about ten minutes and wrote some goodbyes and stuck it in a Ziplock bag and put it in my clothing. That was the lowest point. We had no contact with anyone, it was the dark of the night—which brings its own kind of terror—and I had a sense that things were going to get worse. But it’s a strange thing. There was no sentiment there, no time for fear. To me, fear is two AM, walking down a city street and someone’s following me—that to me is a terror beyond words. What was happening was not a terror beyond words. It was a grim sense of reality, a scrambling to figure out what to do next, a determination to stay alive and keep other people alive, and an awareness of the dark noisy slamming of the boat. But it wasn’t a terror beyond words. I just had an overwhelming sense of knowing we weren’t going to make it.”

Stimpson doesn’t know it, but Bylander tapes her passport to her stomach so her body can be identified. Both women, at this point, are prepared to die. After Stimpson finishes writing her goodbyes, she tells Leonard that it’s time to issue a mayday. Mayday comes from the French venez m’aider—come help me!—and essentially means that those on board have given up all hope. It’s up to someone else to save them. Leonard is motionless on his berth. Okay, he says. Stimpson forces her way out to the cockpit and Bylander sits down at the nav table to see if she can coax the VHF back to life.

At 11:15 PM, October 29th, a freighter off Long Island picks up a woman’s terrified voice on the VHF: This is the Satori, the Satori, 39:49 north and 69:52 west, we are three people, this is a mayday. If anyone can hear us, please pass our position on to the Coast Guard. Repeat, this is a mayday, if anyone can hear us, pass our position on to the Coast Guard…

The freighter, the Gold Bond Conveyor, relays the message to Coast Guard operations in Boston, which in turn contacts the Coast Guard cutter Tamaroa in Provincetown Harbor. The Tamaroa has just come off Georges Bank, where she was conducting spot checks on the fishing fleet, and now she’s waiting out the weather inside Cape Cod’s huge flexed arm. A small Falcon jet scrambles from Air Station Cape Cod and the Tamaroa, 1,600 tons and 205 feet, weighs anchor at midnight and heads down the throat of the storm.

The crew of the Satori have no way of knowing whether the radio is working, they just have to keep repeating the mayday and hope for the best. And even if the radio is working, they still have to be within two or three miles of another vessel for the signal to be heard. That’s a lot to ask for on a night like this. Bylander, wedged behind the nav table, broadcasts their name and position intermittently for half an hour without any response at all; they’re alone out there, as far as she can tell. She keeps trying—what else is there to do?—and Stimpson goes back on deck to try to keep the Satori pointed into the seas. She’s not there long when she hears the sound of an airplane fading in and out through the roar of the storm. She looks around frantically in the darkness, and a minute later a Falcon jet, flying low under the cloud cover, shrieks overhead and raises Bylander on the VHF. “Sue was so excited she was giddy,” Stimpson says, “but I wasn’t. I remember not feeling elated or relieved so much as like, instantly, I’d rejoined the world of the living.”

The Falcon pilot circles just below cloud level and discusses what to do next over the VHF with Bylander. The Tamaroa won’t be there for another twelve hours, and they’ve got to keep the boat afloat until then, even if that means burning out the engine. They can’t afford to risk any more knockdowns. Bylander, against Leonard’s wishes, finally toggles the starter switch, and to her amazement it turns over. With the storm jib up and the prop turning away they can now get a few degrees to the weather. It’s not a lot, but it’s enough to keep from getting broached by the seas.

Throughout the night the Falcon pilot flies over them, reassuring Bylander that they’re going to come out of this alive. Stimpson stays at the helm and Leonard lies on his bunk contemplating the impending loss of his boat. When the Tamaroa arrives he’ll have to abandon ship, which is an almost unthinkable act for a captain. The Satori is his home, his life, and if he allows himself to be taken off by the Coast Guard he’ll probably never see her again. Not intact, anyway. At some point that night, lying on his bunk waiting for dawn, Ray Leonard decides he won’t get off the boat. The women can leave if they want to, but he’ll see the vessel into port.

Throughout that night the Tamaroa slugs her way through the storm. She’s a bulldog of a vessel, built to salvage crippled battleships in World War Two, and she can “tow anything afloat,” according to her literature. The sea state is so high, though, that the most she can make is three or four knots—roughly walking pace. On the larger swells she plunges into the crest, stalls, and launches out the far side, spray streaming off her bridge and greenwater sheeting out her scuppers. She crosses Cape Cod Bay, threads the canal, leaves the Elizabeth Islands to port, and finally turns the corner around Martha’s Vineyard. Commander Lawrence Brudnicki, chief officer on board, estimates that they’ll arrive on-scene late the next afternoon; the Satori crew has to stay afloat until then. They have no life raft or survival suits on board, and the nearest helicopter base is an hour away. If the Satori goes down, the crew is dead.

Brudnicki can’t speak directly to the Satori, but he can relay messages via the Falcon that’s circling above them. Both ship and plane are also in contact with the First District Command Center in Boston—Di Comcen, as it’s referred to in Coast Guard reports. Di Comcen is responsible for coordinating all the Coast Guard vessels and aircraft on the rescue, and developing the safest strategy for taking the people off the boat. Every decision has to be approved by them. Since the Satori isn’t sinking yet, they decide to have the Falcon fly cover until the Tamaroa arrives, and then take the crew off by raft. Air rescue in such conditions can be riskier than actually staying with the boat, so it’s used as a last resort. As soon as day breaks, the Falcon will be relieved by an H-3 rescue helicopter, and H-3S will fly cover in shifts until the Tamaroa shows up. Helicopters have a limited amount of flying time—generally about four hours—but they can pluck people out of the water if need be. Falcon jets can’t do much for people in the water except circle them and watch them drown.

From the incident log, Di Comcen:

The H-3 arrives on scene around 6:30 and spends half an hour just trying to locate the Satori. The conditions are so bad that she’s vanished from the Falcon’s radar, and the H-3 pilot is almost on top of her before spotting her in the foam-streaked seas. The Falcon circles off to the southwest to prepare a life-raft drop while the H-3 takes up a hover directly over the boat. In these conditions the Falcon pilot could never line up on something as small as a sailboat, so the H-3 acts as a stand-in. The Falcon comes back at 140 knots, radar locked onto the helicopter, and at the last moment the H-3 falls away and the jet makes the drop. The pilot comes screaming over the Satori’s mast and the copilot pushes two life-raft packages out a hatch in the floorboards. The rafts are linked by a long nylon tether, and as they fall they cartwheel apart, splashing down well to either side of the Satori. The tether, released at two hundred feet into a hurricane-force wind, drops right into Bylander’s hand.

The H-3 hovers overhead while the Satori crew haul in the packages, but both rafts have exploded on impact. There’s nothing at either end of the line. The Tamaroa is still five hours away and the storm has retrograded to within a couple of hundred miles of the coast; over the next twenty-four hours it will pass directly over the Satori. A daylight rescue in these conditions is difficult, and a nighttime rescue is out of the question. If the Satori crew is not taken off in the next few hours, there’s a good chance they won’t be taken off at all. Late that morning the second H-3 arrives and the pilot, Lieutenant Klosson, explains the situation to Ray Leonard. Leonard radios back that he’s not leaving the boat.

It’s unclear whether Leonard is serious or just trying to save face. Either way, the Coast Guard is having none of it. Two helicopters, two Falcon jets, a medium-range cutter, and a hundred air- and seamen have already been committed to the rescue; the Satori crew are coming off now. “Owner refuses to leave and says he’s sailed through hurricanes before,” the Comcen incident log records at 12:24 that afternoon. “Tamaroa wants manifestly unsafe voyage so that o/o [owner-operator] can be forced off.”

A “manifestly unsafe voyage” means that the vessel has been deemed an unacceptable risk to her crew or others, and the Coast Guard has the legal authority to order everyone off. Commander Brudnicki gets on the radio with District One and requests a manifestly unsafe designation for the Satori, and at 12:47 it is granted. The Tamaroa is just a couple of miles away now, within VHF range of the Satori, and Brudnicki raises Leonard on the radio and tells him he has no choice in the matter. Everyone is leaving the boat. At 12:57 in the afternoon, thirteen hours after weighing anchor, the Tamaroa plunges into view.

There’s a lot of hardware circling the Satori. There’s the Falcon, the H-3, the Tamaroa, and the freighter Gold Bond Conveyor, which has been cutting circles around the Satori since the first mayday call. Hardware is not the problem, though; it’s time. Dark is only three hours away, and the departing H-3 pilot doesn’t think the Satori will survive another night. She’ll run out of fuel, start getting knocked down, and eventually break apart. The crew will be cast into the sea, and the helicopter pilot will refuse to drop his rescue swimmer because he can’t be sure of getting him back. It would be up to the Tamaroa to maneuver alongside the swimmers and pull them on board, and in these seas it would be almost impossible. It’s now or never.

The only way to take them off, Brudnicki decides, is to shuttle them back to the Tamaroa in one of the little Avons. The Avons are twenty-one-foot inflatable rafts with rigid hulls and outboard engines; one of them could make a run to the Satori, drop off survival suits, and then come back again to pick up the three crew. If anyone wound up in the water, at least they’d be insulated and afloat. It’s not a particularly complicated maneuver, but no one has done it in conditions like this before. No one has even seen conditions like this before. At 1:23 PM the Tamaroa crew gathers at the port davits, three men climb aboard the Avon, and they lower away.

It goes badly from the start. What passes for a lull between waves is in fact a crest-to-trough change of thirty or forty feet. Chief bosun Thomas Amidon lowers the Avon halfway down, gets lifted up by the next wave, can’t keep up with the trough and freefalls to the bottom of the cable. The lifting eye gets ripped out of its mount and Amidon almost pitches overboard. He struggles back into position, finishes lowering the boat, and makes way from the Tamaroa.

The seas are twice the size of the Avon raft. With excruciating slowness it fights its way to the Satori, comes up bow-to-stern, and a crew member flings the three survival suits on deck. Stimpson grabs them and hands them out, but Amidon doesn’t back out in time. The sailboat rides up a sea, comes down on the Avon, and punctures one of her air bladders. Things start to happen very fast now: the Avon’s bow collapses, a wave swamps her to the gunwales, the engine dies, and she falls away astern. Amidon tries desperately to get the engine going again and finally manages to, but they’re up to their waists in water and the raft is crippled. There’s no way they can even get themselves back onto the Tamaroa, much less save the crew of the Satori. Six people, not just three, now need to be rescued.

The H-3 crew watches all this incredulously. They’re in a two o’clock hover with their jump door open, just over the tops of the waves. They can see the raft dragging heavily through the seas, and the Tamaroa heaving through ninety-degree rolls. Pilot Claude Hessel finally gets on the radio and tells Brudnicki and Amidon that he may have another way of doing this. He can’t hoist the Satori crew directly off their deck, he says, because the mast is flailing too wildly and might entangle the hoist. That would drag the H-3 right down on top of the boat. But he could drop his rescue swimmer, who could take the people off the boat one at a time and bring them up on the hoist. It’s the best chance they’ve got, and Brudnicki knows it. He consults with District One and then gives the okay.

The rescue swimmer on Hessel’s helicopter is Dave Moore, a three-year veteran who has never been on a major rescue. (“The good cases don’t come along too often—usually someone beats you to them,” he says. “If a sailboat gets in trouble far out we usually get a rescue, but otherwise it’s just a lot of little stuff.”) Moore is handsome in a baby-faced sort of way—square-jawed, blue-eyed, and a big open smile. He has a dense, compact body that is more seallike than athletic. His profession of rescue swimmer came about when a tanker went down off New York in the mid-1980s. A Coast Guard helicopter was hovering overhead, but it was winter and the tanker crew were too hypothermic to get into the lift basket. They all drowned. Congress decided they wanted something done, and the Coast Guard adopted the Navy rescue program. Moore is twenty-five years old, born the year Karen Stimpson graduated from high school.

Moore is already wearing a neoprene wetsuit. He puts on socks and hood, straps on swim fins, pulls a mask and snorkel down over his head, and then struggles into his neoprene gloves. He buckles on a life vest and then signals to flight engineer Vriesman that he’s ready. Vriesman, who has one arm extended, gatelike, across the jump door, steps aside and allows Moore to crouch by the edge. That means that they’re at “ten and ten”—a ten foot hover at ten knots. Moore, who’s no longer plugged into the intercom, signals final corrections to Vriesman with his hands, who relays them to the pilot. This is it; Moore has trained three years for this moment. An hour ago he was in the lunch line back on base. Now he’s about to drop into the maelstrom.

Hessel holds a low hover with the boat at his two o’clock. Moore can see the crew clustered together on deck and the Satori making slow, plunging headway into the seas. Vriesman is seated next to Moore at the hoist controls, and avionicsman Ayres is behind the copilot with the radio and search gear. Both wear flightsuits and crash helmets and are plugged into the internal communication system in the wall. The time is 2:07 PM. Moore picks a spot between waves, takes a deep breath, and jumps.

It’s a ten-foot fall and he hits feetfirst, hands at his sides. He comes up, clears his snorkel, settles his mask, and then strikes out for the Satori. The water is lukewarm—they’re in the Gulf Stream—and the seas are so big they give him the impression he’s swimming uphill and downhill rather than over individual waves. Occasionally the wind blows a crest off, and he has to dive under the cascade of whitewater before setting out again. The Satori appears and disappears behind the swells and the H-3 thunders overhead, rotors blasting a lily pad of flattened water into the sea. Vriesman watches anxiously through binoculars from the jump door, trying to gauge the difficulty of getting Moore back into the helicopter. Ultimately, as flight engineer, it’s his decision to deploy the swimmer, his job to get everyone safely back into the aircraft. If he has any doubts, Moore doesn’t jump.

Moore swims hard for several minutes and finally looks up at Vriesman, shaking his head. The boat’s under power and there’s no way he’s going to catch her, not in these seas. Vriesman sends the basket down and Moore climbs back in. Just as he’s about to ride up, the wave hits.

It’s huge and cresting, fifty or sixty feet. It avalanches over Moore and buries both him and the lift basket. Vriesman counts to ten before Moore finally pops up through the foam, still inside the basket. It’s no longer attached to the hoist cable, though; it’s been wrenched off the hook and is just floating free. Moore has such tunnel vision that he doesn’t realize the basket has come off; he just sits there, waiting to be hoisted. Finally he understands that he’s not going anywhere, and swims the basket over to the cable and clips it on. He climbs inside, and Vriesman hauls him up.

This time they’re going to do things differently. Hessel banks the helicopter to within fifty feet of the Satori and shows a chalkboard that says, “Channel 16.” Bylander disappears below, and when Hessel has her on the VHF, he tells her they’re going to do an in-the-water pickup. They’re to get into their survival suits, tie the tiller down, and then jump off the boat. Once they’re in the water they are to stay in a group and wait for Moore to swim over to them. He’ll put them into the hoist basket and send them up one at a time.

Bylander climbs back up on deck and gives the instructions to the rest of the crew. Moore, looking through a pair of binoculars, watches them pull on their suits and try to will themselves over the gunwale. First, one of them puts a leg over the rail, then another does, and finally all three of them splash into the water. It takes four or five minutes for them to work up the nerve. Leonard has a bag in one hand, and as he goes over he loses his grip and leaves it on deck. It’s full of his personal belongings. He claws his way down the length of the hull and finally punches himself in the head when he realizes he’s lost it for good. Moore takes this in, wondering if Leonard is going to be a problem in the water.

Moore sheds his hood and gloves because the waters so warm and pulls his mask back down over his face. This is it; if they can’t do it now, they can’t do it at all. Hessel puts the Satori at his six o’clock by lining them up in a little rearview mirror and comes down into a low hover. It’s delicate flying. He finally gives Moore the go-ahead, and Moore breathes in deep and pushes off. “They dropped Moore and he just skimmed over the top of the water, flying towards us,” says Stimpson. “When he gets there he says, ‘Hi, I’m Dave Moore your rescue swimmer, how are you?’ And Sue says, ‘Fine, how are you?’ It was very cordial. Then he asks who’s going first, and Sue says, ‘I will.’ And he grabbed her by the back of the survival suit and skimmed back across the water.”

Moore loads Bylander into the rescue basket, and twenty seconds later she’s in the helicopter. Jump to recovery takes five minutes (avionicsman Ayres is writing everything down in the hoist log). The next recovery, Stimpson’s, takes two minutes, and Leonard’s takes three. Leonard is so despondent that he’s deadweight in the water, Moore has to wrestle him into the basket and push his legs in after him. Moore’s the last one up, stepping back into the aircraft at 2:29. They’ve been on-scene barely two hours.[1]

Moore starts stripping off his gear, and he’s got his wetsuit halfway off when he realizes the helicopter isn’t going anywhere. It’s hovering off the Tamaroa’s port quarter. He puts his flight helmet on and hears the Tamaroa talking to Hessel, telling him to stand by because their Avon crew still needs to be recovered. Oh, Jesus, he thinks. Moore pulls his gear back on and takes up his position at the jump door. Hessel has decided on another in-the-water rescue, and Moore watches the three Coast Guardsmen grab hands and reluctantly abandon ship. Even from a distance they look nervous. Hessel comes in low and puts them at his six o’clock again, barely able to find such a small target in his rearview mirror. Moore gets the nod and jumps for the third time; he’s got the drill down now and the entire rescue takes ten minutes. Each Coast Guardsman that makes it into the aircraft gives Stimpson a thumbs-up. Moore comes up last—“via bare hook,” as the report reads—and Vriesman pulls him in through the door. The H-3 banks, drops her nose, and starts for home.

“When I got up into the helicopter I remember everyone looking in my and Sue’s faces to make sure we were okay,” says Stimpson. “I remember the intensity, it really struck me. These guys were so pumped up, but they were also human—real humanity. They’d take us by the shoulders and look us in the eyes and say, ‘I’m so glad you’re alive, we were with you last night, we prayed for you. We were worried about you.’ When you’re on the rescuing side you’re very aware of life and death, and when you’re on the rescued side, you just have a sort of numb awareness. At some point I stopped seeing the risk clearly, and it just became an amalgam of experience and observation.”

Stimpson has been awake for forty-eight hours now, much of it above deck. She’s starting to get delirious. She slumps into a web seat in the back of the helicopter and looks out at the ocean that almost swallowed her up. “I saw the most amazing things; I saw Egypt and I knew it was Egypt,” she says. “And I saw these clay animals, they were over green pastures like the Garden of Eden. I could see these clay animals and also gorgeous live animals munching on grass. And I kept seeing cities that I recognized as being from the Middle East.”

While Stimpson drifts in and out of hallucinations, the H-3 pounds home through a seventy-knot headwind. It takes an hour and forty minutes to get back to base. Three miles off Martha’s Vineyard the crew look down and see another Coast Guard helicopter settling onto a desolate scrap of land called Noman’s Island. A Florida longliner named the Michelle Lane had run aground with a load of swordfish, and her crew had spent the night under an overturned life raft on the beach. An H-3 was dispatched from Air Station Cape Cod to take them off, and Hessel happens to fly by as they’re landing.

Hessel touches down at 4:40 at Air Station Cape Cod, and the other H-3 comes in a few minutes later. (While landing at Noman’s, as it turned out, the rotor wash flipped the raft over and knocked one of the fishermen unconscious. He was taken off in a Stokes litter.) It’s almost dark; rain flashes down diagonally through the airfield floodlights and scrub pine stretches away darkly for miles in every direction. The six survivors are ushered past the television cameras and led into changing rooms upstairs. Stimpson and Bylander pull off their survival suits, and Bylander curls up on a couch while Stimpson goes back downstairs. The simple fact of being alive has her so wired she can hardly sit still. The Coast Guardsmen are gathered with the reporters in a small television room, and Stimpson wanders in and finds Leonard sitting miserably on the floor, back to the wall. He’s not saying a word.

He didn’t want to leave the boat, Stimpson explains to a local reporter. It was his home, and everything he owned was on it.

Dave Coolidge, the Falcon pilot that flew the previous night, walks up to Stimpson and shakes her hand. Camera bulbs flash. Boy, are we glad to see you two, he says. It was a long night, I was afraid you weren’t going to make it. Stimpson says graciously, When we heard you on the radio we said, Yes, we’re going to make it. We’re not just going to perish out here without anyone knowing.

The reporters gradually drift off, and Leonard retires to an upstairs room. Stimpson stays and answers questions for the rescue crew, who are very interested in the relationship between Leonard and the two women. His reactions weren’t quite what we expected, one of the Guardsmen admits. Stimpson explains that she and Bylander don’t know Leonard very well, they met him through their boss.

Sue and I had been working several months without a break, she says. This trip was going to be our vacation.

While they’re talking, the phone rings. One of the Falcon pilots goes to answer it. What time was that? the pilot says, and everyone in the room stops talking. How many were they? What location?

Without a word the Coast Guardsmen get up and leave, and a minute later Stimpson hears toilets flushing. When they come back, one of them asks the Falcon pilot where they went down.

South of Montauk, he says.

The Guardsmen zip up their flight suits and file out the door. A rescue helicopter has just ditched fifty miles offshore and now five National Guardsmen are in the water, swimming.

“I DIDN’T know there was a problem, I just knew the Andrea Gail was supposed to be in any day,” says Chris Cotter, Bobby’s Shatford’s girlfriend. “I went to bed and just before dawn I had this dream. I’m on the boat and it’s real grey and ugly out and it’s rollin’ and rockin’ and I’m screaming, BOBBY! BOBBY! There’s no answer so I walk around the boat and go down into the fishhole and start digging. There’s all this slime and weeds and slimy shit and I’m hysterical and crazy and screaming for Bobby and finally I get down and there’s one of his arms. I find that and grab him and I know he’s gone. And then the wake-up comes.”

It’s the morning of October 30th; there’s been no word from the Andrea Gail in over thirty-six hours. The storm is so tightly packed that few people in Gloucester—only a few hundred miles from the storm’s center—have any idea what’s out there. Chris lies in bed for a while, trying to shake off the dream, and finally gets up and shuffles into the kitchen. Her apartment looks out across Ipswich Bay, and Christine can see the water, itself cold and grey as granite, piling up against the granite shores of Cape Ann. The air is warm but an ill wind is backing around the compass, and Chris sits down at her kitchen table to watch it come. No one has said anything about a storm, there was nothing about it on the news. Chris smokes one cigarette after another, watching the weather come in off the sea, and she’s still there when Susan Brown knocks on the door.

Susan is Bob Brown’s wife. She issues the paychecks for the Seagale Corporation, as Brown’s company is called, and the week before she’d given Christine the wrong check by mistake. She’d given her Murph’s check, which was larger than Bobby Shatford’s, and now she’s come back to rectify the mistake. Chris invites her in and immediately senses that something is wrong. Susan seems uncomfortable, glancing around and refusing to look Chris in the eye.

Listen, Chris, Susan says finally, I’ve got some bad news. I’m not sure how to say this. We don’t seem to be able to raise the Andrea Gail.

Chris sits there, stunned. She’s still in the dream—still in the dark slimy stink of the fishhole—and the news just confirms what she already knows: He’s dead. Bobby Shatford is dead.

Susan tells her they’re still trying to get through and that the boat probably just lost her antennas, but Chris knows better; in her gut she knows it’s wrong. As soon as Susan leaves, Chris calls Mary Anne Shatford, Bobby’s sister. Mary Anne tells her it’s true, they can’t raise Bobbys boat, and Chris drives down to the Nest and rushes in through the big heavy door. It’s only ten in the morning but already people are standing around with beers in their hands, red-eyed and shocked. Ethel is there, and Bobby’s other sister, Susan, and his brother, Brian, and Preston, and dozens of fishermen. Nothing’s sure yet—the boat could still be afloat, or the crew could be in a life raft or drunk in some Newfoundland bar—but people are quietly assuming the worst.

Chris starts drinking immediately. “People didn’t want to give me the details because I was totally out of my mind,” she says. “Everybody was drunk ’cause that’s what we do, but the crisis made it even worse, just drinkin’ and drinkin’ and cryin’ and drinkin’, we just couldn’t conceive that they were gone. It was in the paper and on the television and this is my love, my friend, my man, my drinking partner, and it just couldn’t be. I had pictures of what happened, images: Bobby and Sully and Murph just bug-eyed, knowing this is the final moment, looking at each other and this jug of booze goin’ around real fast because they’re tryin’ to numb themselves out, and then Bobby goes flyin’ and Sully goes under. But what was the final moment? What was the final, final thing?”

The only person not at the Crow’s Nest is Bob Brown. As owner of the boat he may well not feel welcome there, but he’s also got work to do—he’s got a boat to find. There’s a single sideband in his upstairs bedroom, and he’s been calling on 2182 since early yesterday for both his boats. Neither Billy Tyne nor Linda Greenlaw will come in. Oh boy, he thinks. At nine-thirty, after trying a few more times, Brown drives twenty miles south along Route 128 through the grey rocky uplands of the North Shore. He parks at the Bang’s Grant Inn in Danvers and walks into the conference room for the beginning of a two-day New England Fisheries Management Council meeting. The wind is moving heavily through the treetops now, piling dead leaves up against a chainlink fence and spitting rain down from a steel sky. It’s not a storm yet, but it’s getting there.

Brown takes a seat at the back of the room, notebook in hand, and endures a long and uninteresting meeting. Someone brings up the fact that the Soviet Union has disintegrated into different countries, and U.S. fishing laws need to be changed accordingly. Another person cites a Boston Globe article that says that cod, haddock, and flounder populations are so low that regulations are useless—the species are beyond saving. The National Marine Fisheries Service is not the sole institution with scientific knowledge on pelagic issues, a third person counters. The meeting finally adjourns after an hour of this, and Bob Brown gets up to talk with Gail Johnson, whose husband, Charlie, is out on the Banks at that moment. Charlie owns the Seneca, which had put into Bay Bulls, Newfoundland, a few weeks earlier with a broken crankshaft.

Did you hear anything from your husband? Brown asks.

Yeah, but I could hardly get him. He’s east of the Banks, and they’ve got bad weather out there.

I know they do, Brown says. I know they do.

Brown asks her to call him if Charlie hears anything about either of his boats. Then he hurries home. As soon as he arrives he goes up to his bedroom and tries the single sideband again, and this time—thank God—Linda comes through. He can hear her only faintly though the static.

/ haven’t been able to reach Billy in a couple of days, Linda shouts. I’m worried about them.

Yeah, I’m worried too, says Brown. Keep trying him. I’ll check back.

At six o’clock that night, the time he generally checks in with his boats, Brown tries one last time to raise the Andrea Gail. Not a sign. Linda Greenlaw hasn’t been able to raise her, either, nor has anyone else in the fleet. At 6:15 on October 30th, two days to the hour after Billy Tyne was last heard from, Brown calls the Coast Guard in Boston and reports the vessel missing. I’m afraid my boat’s in trouble and I fear the worst, he says. He adds that there have been no distress calls from her and no signals from her EPIRB. She has disappeared without a trace. In some senses that’s good news because it may just mean she’s lost her antennas; a distress call or EPIRB signal would be a different matter entirely. It would mean absolutely that something has gone wrong.

Meanwhile, the news media have picked up on the story. Rumors are flying around Gloucester that the Allison has gone down along with the Andrea Gail, and that even the Hannah Boden may be in trouble. A reporter from News Channel Five calls Tommy Barries wife, Kimberly, and asks her about the Allison. Kimberly answers that she talked to her husband the night before by single sideband and that, although she could barely hear him, he seemed to be fine. Channel Five broadcasts that tidbit on the evening news, and suddenly every fisherman’s wife on the East Coast is calling Kimberly Barrie to ask if she has any news about the fleet. She just repeats that she talked to her husband on the 29th, and that she could barely hear him. “As soon as the storms move offshore the weather service stops tracking them,” she says. “The fishermen’s wives are left hanging, and they panic. The wives always panic.”

In fact the eastern fleet fared relatively well; they heave-to under heavy winds and a long-distance swell and just wait it out. Barrie even contemplates fishing that night but decides against it; no one knows where the storm is headed and he doesn’t want to get caught with his gear in the water. Barrie keeps trying Billy every couple of hours throughout the night of the 28th and the following day, and by October 30th he thinks Billy may have drifted out of range. He radios Linda and tells her that something is definitely wrong, and Bob Brown should get a search going. Linda agrees. That night, after the boats have set their gear out, the captains get together on channel 16 to set up a drift model for the Andrea Gail. They have an extremely low opinion of the Coast Guard’s ability to read ocean currents, and so they pool their information, as when tracking swordfish, to try to figure out where a dead boat or a life raft would have gone. “The water comes around the Tail and wants to go up north,” Barrie says. “By talking to boats at different places and putting them together, you can get a pretty detailed map of what the Gulf Stream is doing.”

Late on the night of the 30th, Bob Brown calls the Canadian Coast Guard in Halifax and says that the Andrea Gail is probably proceeding home along a route that cuts just south of Sable Island. He adds that Billy usually doesn’t call in during his thirty-day trips. The Canadian cutter Edward Cornwallis—already at sea to help the Eishin Maru—starts calling for the Andrea Gail every quarter hour on channel 16. “No joy on indicated frequency for contacting Andrea Gail” she reports later that morning. Halifax initiates a communications search as well, on every frequency in the VHF spectrum, but also meets with failure. The fishing vessel Jennie and Doug reports hearing a faint “Andrea Gail’’ at 8294 kilohertz, and for the next twelve hours Halifax tries that frequency but cannot raise her. Judith Reeves on the Eishin Maru thinks she hears someone with an English accent radioing the Andrea Gail that he’s coming to their aid, but she can’t make out the name of the vessel. She never hears the message again. A SpeedAir radar search picks up an object that might possibly be the Andrea Gail, and Halifax tries to establish radio contact, without success. At least half a dozen vessels around Sable Island—the Edward Cornwallis, the Lady Hammond, the Sambro, the Degero, the Yankee Clipper, the Melvin H. Baker, and the Mary Hitchins—are conducting communications searches, but no one can raise them. They’ve fallen off the edge of the world.

The Rescue Coordination Center in New York, meanwhile, is still trying to figure out exactly who is on the crew. Bob Brown doesn’t know for sure—often owners don’t even want to know—and even the various friends and family aren’t one hundred percent certain. Finally the Coast Guard gets a call from a Florida fisherman named Douglas Kosco, who says he used to fish on the Andrea Gail and knows who the crew are. He runs down the list of crew as he knows it: Captain Billy Tyne, from Gloucester. Bugsy Moran, also from Gloucester but living in Florida. Dale Murphy from Cortez, Florida. Alfred Pierre, the only black guy on board, from the Virgin Islands but with family in Portland.

Kosco says that the fifth crew member was from the Haddit—Tyne’s old boat—and that Merrit Seafoods in Pompano has his name. I was supposed to go on this trip, but I got off at the last moment, he says. I don’t know why, I just got a funny feeling and stepped off.

Kosco gives the Coast Guardsman a phone number in Florida where he gets messages. (He’s offshore so much that he doesn’t have his own phone.) I think they may have gone shorthanded—I hope they did, he says. I don’t think Billy could’ve found anyone else so fast…

It’s wishful thinking. The morning Kosco left, Billy called up Adam Randall and asked him if he wanted a job. Randall said yes, and Billy told him to get up to Gloucester as fast as possible. Randall showed up with his father-in-law, checked the boat over, and got spooked like Kosco had. He walked off. So Billy called David Sullivan and happened to catch him at home. Sully reluctantly agreed to go, and arrived at the State Fish Pier an hour later with his seabag over his shoulder. The Andrea Gail went to sea with six men, a full crew. Kosco doesn’t know this, though; all he knows is that a last-minute decision five weeks ago probably saved his life.

At about the same time that Kosco confesses his good luck to the Coast Guard, Adam Randall settles onto the couch in his home in East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, to watch the evening news. It’s a rain-lashed Halloween night, and Randall has just come back from taking his kids out trick-or-treating. His girlfriend, Christine Hansen, is with him. She’s a pretty, highly put-together blonde who drives a sports car and works for AT&T. The local news comes on, and Channel Five reports a boat named the Andrea Gail missing somewhere east of Sable Island. Randall sits up in his seat. That was my boat, honey, he says.

What?

That’s the boat I was supposed to go on. Remember when I went up to Gloucester? That’s the boat. The Andrea Gail.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’M SORRY the way I was when I first met you,” Ricky Shatford told me in a Gloucester bar not long ago. The book had been out for about three months, and the Shatford family—and Gloucester—had been rocked by a wave of publicity. Summer people were visiting Cape Pond Ice, tourists were booking rooms at the Crow’s Nest, the Shatfords were being stopped in the street. “You were writing about my baby brother and I couldn’t deal with it,” Ricky went on. “I told people I was going to kill you.”

The first time I’d ever gone into the Crow’s Nest, it had taken me half an hour to work up the nerve. It wasn’t the bar—I’d been in rough bars before—it was what I was going in there for. I was going in there to ask a woman about the death of her son. I wasn’t a fisherman, I wasn’t from Gloucester, and I wasn’t a journalist, at least by my own definition of the word. I was just a guy with a pen and paper and an idea for a book. I slid a steno pad under my belt against the small of my back, where it was hidden by my jacket. I put a tape recorder and a smaller notebook in my jeans pocket in case I needed them. Then I took a long breath and I got out of the car and walked across the street.

The front door was heavier than I expected, the room was darker, and there were a dozen men clutching beers in the indoor gloom. Every single one turned and looked at me when I walked in. I ignored their looks and walked across the room and sat down at the bar. Ethel came over, and after ordering a beer I told her that I was writing about dangerous jobs, particularly fishing, and that I wanted to talk to her. “I know you lost your son a couple of years ago,” I said. “I was living in Gloucester at the time, and I remember the storm. It must have been very hard for you. I can’t imagine how hard that must have been.”

What I didn’t know was that there was a court case going on, and that Ethel’s first thought was that I was working undercover for Bob Brown’s insurance company. She wasn’t suing him, but whenever a boat goes down, there are always people asking questions, looking for an angle. Within weeks of the sinking, in fact, a couple of lawyers had slid into the Nest, trying to interest her in a lawsuit. They were so insistent that some of the boys at the bar felt compelled to help them leave.

Ethel was friendly with me, but guarded. She talked about watching the local news, waiting for word of the Andrea Gail. She talked about the memorial service, and how people had stuck by her after the tragedy. She bought me a beer, and gave me the names of other fishermen who might be able to help out. And then I walked back out of the bar. It was a warm day in early spring, snow lingering in the northern exposures and a rich, loamy smell that mixed with salt air off the ocean. Reefer rigs crawled down Main Street and pickup trucks pulled in and out of Rose’s parking lot, tires spraying gravel. The men in the trucks didn’t smile as they drove.

This isn’t exactly a town that begs to be written about, I remember thinking. These aren’t men who really want to be asked about their lives.

And to an extent, I was right. The guys in those pick-up trucks—and on barstools at the Crow’s Nest, and walking down Main Street in their deck boots and fishing gear—had no particular reason to talk to me. Men in working towns can nurture a harsh kind of pragmatism that weeds out sentimental acts, such as talking to writers, and it’s generally hard to coax them out of that. If I were a Gloucester native, or had worked as a fisherman, perhaps it would have been different.

But I wasn’t, and the only thing I had going in my favor—

other than the fact that Ethel seemed to like me, which counted for more than I realized—was that I worked as a freelance climber for tree companies. I was living on Cape Cod, but did occasional jobs in Boston, and often I’d combine trips into the city with research jaunts up to Gloucester. I’d walk into the Crow’s Nest at the end of the day, tired and dirty from a day of climbing, and settle onto a stool at the bar. “Look, I don’t know a thing about fishing,” I’d say. “So if you don’t tell me about it, I’m going to get it all wrong.”

That seemed to work; gradually, the fishermen started to talk. They told me about their grandfathers dory-fishing for cod on the Grand Banks. They told me about winter gales on Georges. They told me about getting thrown out of their house by their girlfriend for one reason or another, usually good ones. And they told me about the sea. “She’s a beautiful lady,” one guy said, jerking his thumb oceanward out the bar door, “but she’ll kill ya without a second thought.”

Usually the only thing I had in front of me during these conversations was a beer, though occasionally, if the conversation looked promising enough, and I’d established a good rapport with the guy, I’d pull the steno pad out from behind my jacket. Otherwise, I’d periodically excuse myself the men’s room, which—given the evening’s activities—was usually necessary anyway. There I’d scribble down a few stories and then I’d go back out into the bar. When I’d really become friendly with someone, such as Chris Cotter, I’d ask if I could interview them with a tape recorder, out of the bar, someplace where we could talk without being interrupted. Usually they said yes. One guy said yes, but tried to give me the slip while I was following him in my car through town. I finally tracked him down at the Green Tavern, and we ended up talking for three hours. And a few people—like Ricky Shatford—would have nothing to do with me at all.

Ricky was angry about his brother’s death, he told me later, and I was something to focus all that on. He didn’t like me writing about his family, and he didn’t like me writing about something I couldn’t know for sure. The Andrea Gail had been lost without a trace. Why not just let it lie there?

Unfortunately, Ricky was articulating exactly my own insecurities about the project. Every time I ventured into the Crow’s Nest, I felt like an intruder, and I’d had several excruciating dreams about the loss of the Andrea Gail. In one, I dreamed I’d drilled tiny holes in her hull before her last trip to see if she’d still float; and in another I dreamed I was in the wheelhouse with Billy Tyne as she went down. I didn’t have to die, though, because I was a journalist, and I just looked guiltily on as we plunged into the trough of another enormous wave. My God, you never really stopped to think how terrifying this must have been for those guys, I remember thinking. Those were six real men out there, not just names out of a newspaper. Don’t ever forget that.

The one encouraging dream I had was in 1994, when I wrote a magazine article about the Andrea Gail. Most people in Gloucester liked the article, but there were the inevitable dissenting voices, and they traumatized me for months. The idea that you could do as good and thorough a job as possible and still leave people angry at you, shook some long-held illusion about journalism. In the dream I was walking along a deserted beach, and a figure strode towards me down the dunes. It was Bobby Shatford, and he walked up to me and stuck his hand. “So, you’re Sebastian Junger,” he said. “I’ve been wanting to meet you. I liked your article.”

“Thanks, Bobby,” I said. “That means a lot, coming from you.”

We’d never loosened our grip, and we just stood there, holding hands. Down the beach, the rest of the Shatford family was having a cook-out. I was headed there, but Bobby couldn’t come. He had to stay away.

When I finally talked to Ricky, it seemed as close as I was going to get to shaking Bobby Shatford’s hand. Ricky was a fisherman, he was Bobby’s older brother, and he’d wanted to kill me. Those are tough hurdles to clear. One summer night in a Gloucester bar, though, we got to talking, and he told me what it was like to lose his younger brother. To me, Ricky had always been the scary older brother who careened around town looking for trouble; now here he was, telling me about the most painful thing in his life. It wasn’t an easy thing to listen to.

“When we were kids we were a real close family,” says Ricky. “Me and Bobby and Rusty slept in the same bed together. Bobby worked down at the wharf, Bob Brown built the Miss Penny and Looper was running it and I remember one time we were down at Rosie’s doing the last-minute preparations and on the way out I yelled to Bobby on the State Fish Pier, HEY BRO! That trip we hit one of the first storms I ever encountered in my life, it was ’83 and we were crazy, it was December on the southeast part of Georges and the water was still warm, the Rush was right next to us and they lost every window they had. We gave them our loran to get back home.”

A few years later Ricky went down to Florida to run a shark-fishing boat—“I was a highliner back then,” he says, “I was damn pretty good with shark.” When Bobby and his wife split up, Ricky invited him down to Florida to fish and got him a job on another boat. At one point the captain didn’t show up for a trip, so the owner handed the boat over to Bobby. Ricky and Bobby fished side by side for a while, making a lot of money, and then Bobby ran into his own trouble and wound up back in Gloucester. “I always thought it was safer to go fishing on the Grand Banks for thirty days than stay on land for thirty days,” says Ricky. “Bobby and I had some brawls down in Florida, just me against him. We had a club and Bobby and I just destroyed the place—tables, chairs, people.”

From Florida Ricky went on to Hawaii. There was a lot of swordfishing in the Pacific, and Ricky was given a state-of-the-art ninety-foot boat and two salaried Filipino crew. In September, 1991, he called up the Crow’s Nest and asked to speak to Bobby. Bro, he said, I got this big beautiful boat, why don’t you come out and fish with me?

The owner had even offered to pay Bobby’s plane ticket. Bobby declined. “He said he was really in love with this chick,” says Ricky. “So I said, ‘Alright, I love you, bro,’ and he said, ‘I love you too.’ And that was the last thing we said to each other.”

A month later Ricky got the news. He was two days out of Hawaii with all his gear in the water, and he called up the High Seas operator to make contact by satellite phone with the boat’s owner, who was fishing off Samoa. The operator told Ricky there was “stand-by traffic” for him—a call waiting to be patched through—and then she connected Ricky to his boss. The boss said that Bob Brown had been leaving messages on his assistant’s answering machine in California. Uh-oh, Ricky thought, stand-by traffic, a message from Bob Brown… something’s happened to Bobby.

Sure enough, the stand-by call was from his sister, Mary Anne. Ricky, I love you, she started off, and then she said that Bobby’s boat was missing. “I just figured they were gone,” says Ricky. “So I went outside and told my crew, I said, ‘My brother’s boat is missing and I think we’re just gonna haul the line and go in.’ I hauled with tears in my eyes, I was bullshit with God for something like that happening. We got in and got drunk and then I just flew home.”

At the memorial service Ricky saw people he hadn’t seen in twenty years—friends from grade school, old fishing buddies, mothers from the neighborhood. He stayed in Gloucester a couple of weeks and then went right back out to Hawaii, knocking two windows out of the wheelhouse during a storm on the first trip out. All he could think about was how his mother would feel if she lost two sons instead of just one, and he decided to cut down on his risks. He would go to the Grand Banks no later than October, and even October would be subject to Ethel’s approval. “You’ll have a choice in the matter,” he told her. Still, risk was a difficult thing to avoid, and he even found himself seeking it from time to time. After a few more years in Hawaii he moved back to Gloucester with his wife and started fishing with a man whose father had been lost at sea. The two of them, he said, did crazy things on the boat, fishing late in the season through really severe weather.

“We felt untouchable,” was how he explained it. “We felt like there was no way that God could do that to the same families twice.”

By the time I talked with Ricky, the book had—against all expectations—become a bestseller, and I was spending a lot of time in Gloucester, staying at the Crow’s Nest, showing media people around a town. It was an odd feeling: I remembered Gloucester as a grey, rocky town where I supported myself doing treework and wondering, at age thirty, exactly where my life was going. Now here I was, giving television interviews from the Nest while the regulars tried to ignore the lights and keep drinking their beer. When people said I’d put Gloucester on the map, I replied that it was more like Gloucester had put me on the map. There were any number of people—Chris, Ethel, local fishermen—without whom I could not have written this book. Had they not lived the lives they did, and agreed to talk with me about them, the book would not exist. In that sense, I’m indebted to them; in that sense, the book is as much their work as mine. Writers often don’t know much about the world they’re trying to describe, but they don’t necessarily need to. They just need to ask a lot of questions. And then they need to step back and let the story speak for itself.

NEW YORK CITY

January 11, 1998

ONE of the most difficult tasks in writing this book was to get to know—to whatever extent this is possible—the men who died at sea in the Halloween Gale. That required contacting their friends and family and reopening wounds that had only begun to heal. With that in mind, I would like to thank the Shatford family, Chris Cotter, Tammy Cabral, Debra Murphy, Mildred Murphy, Jodi Tyne, Chris Hansen, and Marianne Smith for their willingness to talk about such a painful episode in their lives.

The survivors of the storm also had difficult stories to tell, and I am indebted to Judith Reeves, Karen Stimpson, John Spillane, and Dave Ruvola for talking about their experiences so openly. I would also like to thank all the people who answered my questions about fishing, bought me beers at the Crow’s Nest, got me onto fishing boats, and generally taught me about the sea. They are—in no particular order—Linda Greenlaw, Albert Johnston, Charlie Reed, Tommy Barrie, Alex Bueno, John Davis, Chris Rooney, “Hard” Millard, Mike Seccareccia, Sasquatch, Tony Jackett, and Charlie Johnson. In addition, Bob Brown was kind enough to talk to me despite the obviously delicate issues surrounding the loss of his boat.

This material first appeared as an article in Outside magazine, and I must thank the editors there for their help. Also, Howie Sanders and Richard Green in Los Angeles.

Finally, I must thank my friends and family for reading draft after draft of this manuscript, as well as my editor, Starling Lawrence, his assistant, Patricia Chui, and my agent, Stuart Krichevsky.

The Perfect Storm Foundation, established by Sebastian Junger and friends, provides educational opportunities to children of Gloucester fishermen and other young people. To contribute, send your tax-deductible donation to:

The Perfect Storm Foundation

Post Office Box 1941 Gloucester, MA 01931-1941

http://www.perfectstorm.org

SEBASTIAN JUNGER is a freelance journalist who writes for numerous magazines, including Outside, American Heritage, Men’s Journal, and the New York Times Magazine. He has lived most of his life on the Massachusetts coast and now resides in New York City.