The Perfect Storm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE FLEMISH CAP

And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled with fire…

—REVELATION 15

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