sucked down by the vacuum of a large steel boat making for the deep.
Very few boats ever get to that point, of course. They might take water in the hold or lose their antennas or windows, but that’s it. The result, fortunately, is that their stability limits are rarely tested in a real-life situation. The only way to know the stability profile for each boat is to perform a standard dockside test on her. A 5,ooo- pound weight is put on deck, ten feet off the centerline, and the resulting angle of heel is run through a standard formula that gives the righting moment. So many things can affect the stability of a boat, though, that even the Coast Guard considers these tests to be of limited value. Load a few tons of gear onto the deck, take a little water in her bilge, shift from longlining to dragging to gillnetting, and the dynamics of the ship change completely. As a result, stability tests are mandatory only for vessels over seventy-nine feet. At deck height, the Andrea Gail measures seventy-two.
When the Andrea Gail was overhauled in 1986, Bob Brown simply pulled her out of the water and started welding; no stability tests were performed, no marine architect was consulted. In the trade this is known as “eyeball engineering,” and it includes the Andrea Gail in an overwhelming majority of the commercial fleet that has been altered without plans. The work was done at St. Augustine Trawlers in St. Augustine, Florida; in all, eight tons of machinery and structural changes were added to the boat, including the fuel and water drums on her whale-back deck.
After the work was finished, marine surveyor James Simonitsch—whose brother, Mark, would propose shutting down Georges Bank the following year—flew to Florida to reinspect the Andrea Gail. Two years earlier he’d appraised both the Hannah Boden and Andrea Gail for the settlement of Bob Browns divorce, and the Andrea Gail had been valued at $400,000. Simonitsch surveyed her again in January, 1987, and wrote a letter to Bob Brown with some minor suggestions: Loosen the dogs on one of the watertight doors and provide flotation collars and lights for the survival suits. Otherwise the vessel seemed shipshape. “The modifications and additional furnishings will increase the vessel’s ability to make longer trips and return with a high-quality product,” Simonitsch concluded. The question of stability never came up.
In 1990, St. Augustine Shipyards was sold by the Internal Revenue Service for nonpayment of taxes. In October of that year Simonitsch visited the Andrea Gail in Gloucester and made a few more suggestions: professionally service the six-man life raft, replace a dead battery in the Class B EPIRB, and install a flare kit in the wheelhouse. Again, there was no mention of stability tests, but the vessel was well within the law. Bob Brown also neglected to refile documentation for the Andrea Gail after altering her hull, although neither discrepancy was Simonitsch’s problem. He was paid to look at a boat and evaluate what he saw. In November, 1990, the principal surveyor for Marine Safety Consultants, Inc., the company that employed Simonitsch, inspected the Andrea Gail one last time. “The vessel is well suited for its purpose,” he wrote. “Submitted without prejudice, David C. Dubois.”
If Billy Tyne were inclined to worry, though, there were a number of things about the Andrea Gail that might have given him pause. First of all, according to Tommy Barrie of the Allison, she had a boxy construction and a forward wheelhouse that took the seas hard. She was a rugged boat that didn’t concede much to the elements. And then there were the St. Augustine alterations. The extended whaleback deck was burdened with the weight of an icemaker and three dozen fifty-five-gallon drums, so her center of gravity had been raised and she would recover from rolls a little more slowly. Only a couple of other boats in the fleet—the Eagle Eye, the Sea Hawk—store fuel oil on their upper decks. The portside bulwark on the Andrea Gail could be a problem, too. It had been raised and extended to protect the fishing gear, but it also tended to hold water on deck. A few years earlier, she’d taken a big sea over the stern and was pushed so far over that her rudder came partway out of the water. Bob Brown was on board, and he sprinted up to the wheelhouse and put the helm around; at the same moment the boat rode up the face of another big sea. Slowly, the Andrea Gail righted herself and cleared her decks; everything was fine except that the bulwark had been flattened like a tin can.
One could argue that if a wave takes a piece of a boat out, maybe it shouldn’t be there. Or one could argue that that’s just what waves do—tear down what men put up. Either way, the incident was unsettling. Brown blamed it on the inexperience of the man at the helm and said that it was his own quick action that saved the boat. The crew didn’t see it that way. They saw a boat pinned on her port side by a mass of water and then righted by freak wave action. In other words, they saw bad luck briefly followed by good. The bulwark was replaced as soon as they got in, and nobody mentioned it again.
Bob Brown’s reputation in Gloucester is a complex one. On the one hand he’s a phenomenally successful businessman who started with nothing and still works as hard as any crew member on any of his boats. On the other hand, it’s hard to find a fisherman in town who has anything good to say about him. Fishing’s a marginal business, though, and people don’t succeed in it by being well liked, they succeed by being tough. Some—such as Gloucester fisherman “Hard” Bob Millard—are tough on themselves, and some are tough on their employees. Brown is tough on both. When he was a young man, people called him Crazy Brown because he took such horrific risks, tub-trawling for cod and haddock in an open wooden boat all winter long. He had no radio, loran, or fathometer and worked alone because no one would go with him. He remembers winter days when he had to slide a skiff out across the harbor ice just to get to his mooring. “I had a family to feed and I was intent upon doing that,” he says.
Only once in his life did he work for someone else, a six-month stint with a company that was exploring the lobster population on the continental shelf. That was in 1966; three years later he was working two hundred miles offshore in a forty-foot wooden boat. “Never so much as cracked a pane of glass,” he says. “Bigger doesn’t always mean better.” Eventually he was running four or five sword boats out of Gloucester and pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. One winter he and his son started accumulating ice on deck on their way back from Georges Bank. “If you’re making ice on Georges you know you’re going to be in real trouble closer to land,” he says. “We went back out and that night it blew a hundred from the northwest and snowed. The wind gauge only goes to a hundred and it was pegged for three days straight—pegged like it was broken. We were in a steel boat and it didn’t seem so bad, we were comfortable enough. Steel is tough compared to wood, don’t let anyone tell you different. Anyone tells you different, they’re a romanticist. Steel goes down faster, though. It goes down… well, like a load of steel.”
The bad feeling between Bob Brown and the town of Gloucester hit bottom in 1980, when Brown lost a man off a boat named the Sea Fever. The Sea Fever was a fifty-foot wooden boat with a crew of three that was hauling lobster traps off Georges Bank. It was late November and the Weather Service predicted several days of moderate winds, but they were catastrophically wrong. One of the worst storms on record had just drawn a deep breath off the Carolinas. It screamed northward all night and slammed into Georges Bank around dawn, dredging up seventy-foot waves in the weird shallows of the continental shelf. To make matters worse, a crucial offshore data buoy had been malfunctioning for the past two and a half months, and the Weather Service had no idea what was going on out there. The men on the Sea Fever and on another boat, the fifty-five-foot Fair Wind, woke up to find themselves in a fight for their lives.
The Fair Wind got the worse end of the deal. She flipped end over end in an enormous wave and her four crew were trapped in the flooded pilothouse. One of them, a shaggy thirty-three- year-old machinist named Ernie Hazard, managed to gulp some air and pull himself through a window. He burst to the surface and swam to a self-inflating life raft that had popped up, tethered, alongside the boat. The Fair Wind continued to founder, hull-up, for another hour, but the rest of the crew never made it out, so Hazard finally cut the tether and set himself adrift. For two days he scudded through the storm, capsizing over and over, until a Navy P-3 plane spotted him and dropped an orange smoke marker. He was picked up by a Coast Guard cutter and then rushed by helicopter to a hospital on Cape Cod. He had survived two days in his underwear on the North Atlantic. Later, when asked how long it took him to warm up after his ordeal, he said, without a hint of irony, “Oh, three or four months.”
The Sea Fever fared a little better, but not much. She took a huge sea and lost all her windows; the half-inch safety glass burst as if it had been hit by a wrecking ball. The captain, who happened to be Bob Brown’s son, turned downsea to avoid any more flooding, but the wave put them on their beam ends and swept one of the crew out of the wheelhouse and over the side. The man’s name was Gary Brown (no relation); while one of the remaining crew scrambled below deck to restart the engine, the other threw a lifesaver overboard to save Brown. It dropped right in front of him but he made no attempt to grab it. Brown just drifted away, a dazed
