The Perfect Storm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To a fisherman, the Grand Banks are as distinct and recognizable as, say, the Arizona deserts or the swamps