The Perfect Storm

look in his eyes.

The other two men called a mayday, and an hour later a Coast Guard helicopter was pounding overhead in the wild dark. By then the two men on board the Sea Fever had righted her and pumped her out. Do you wish to remain with your vessel, or do you wish to be taken off by hoists? the helicopter pilot asked over the radio. We’ll stay with the boat, they radioed back. The pilot lowered a bilge pump and then veered back towards shore because he was running out of fuel. On the way back he turned on his “Night Sun” searchlight to look for Gary Brown, but all he could see were the foam-streaked waves. Brown had long since gone under.

Four years later, U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro in Boston ruled that the National Weather Service was negligent in their failure to repair the broken data buoy. Had it been working, he wrote, the Weather Service might have predicted the storm; and furthermore, they failed to warn fishermen that they were making forecasts with incomplete information. This was the first time the government had ever been held responsible for a bad forecast, and it sent shudders of dread through the federal government. Every plane crash, every car accident could now conceivably be linked to weather forecasting. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration appealed the decision, and it was quickly overturned by a higher court.

None of this was Bob Brown’s fault, of course. There’s nothing irresponsible about going to Georges in November—he’d done it his whole life, and worse—and the storm was completely unforecast. Moreover, a larger steel-hulled boat sank while the Sea Fever remained afloat; that said a lot about her crew and general state of repair. Still, a man had died on one of Bob Brown’s boats, and that was all a lot of people needed to know. A story went around about how Bob Brown once spotted the biggest wave of his life—an enormous Grand Banks rogue—and didn’t even stop fishing, he just kept hauling his gear. People started calling him “Suicide” Brown, because working for him meant risking your life. And then it happened again.

It was the mid-eighties and boats were making a million dollars a year. Brown was out on the Grand Banks on the Hannah Boden, and he found himself having to haul back a full set of gear in a sixty-knot breeze. At one point a wave swept the deck, and when the boat climbed back out of the whitewater, two men had gone overboard. They were wearing rain gear and thigh-high rubber boots and could hardly move in the freezing Newfoundland water. One of them went under immediately, but the other man was smashed back against the hull, and a quick-thinking member of the crew extended a gaff hook over the side for him to grab. The hook went through the man’s hand, but the situation was too desperate to worry about it and they hauled him on board anyway. They had to steam four hundred miles just to get him to within helicopter range to be taken to a hospital.

Brown’s reputation is no concern of Billy’s, though. Brown’s not on the boat, he’s twelve hundred miles away in Gloucester, and if Billy doesn’t want him in his life, he just doesn’t pick up the radio mike. Furthermore, Billy’s making money hand over fist on his boat, and that makes Brown’s scruples—or his judgment—or his lack of empathy—all but irrelevant. All Billy needs is five men, a well-maintained boat, and enough fuel to get to and from the Flemish Cap.

The first five sets of Johnston’s trip are on what’s called the “frontside” of the moon, the quarters leading up to full. Boats that fish the frontside tend to get small males on the line; boats that fish the backside get large females. Johnston’s record is twenty-seven consecutive hooks with a fish on each, mostly small males. On the day of the full moon the catch abruptly switches over to huge females and stays that way for a couple of weeks. “You might go from an average weight of seventy pounds, all males, to four or five 800-pounders, all females,” Johnston says. “They lose their heads on the full moon, they feed with reckless abandon.”

The full moon is on October 23rd, and Johnston has timed his trip to straddle that date. There are captains who will cut a good trip short just to stay on the lunar cycle. The first four or five sets of Johnston’s trip are spare, but then he starts to get into the fish. By the 21st, he’s landing six or seven thousand pounds of bigeye a day, enough to make his trip in a week. The weather has been exceptionally good for the season, and Johnston gets on the VHF every night to give the rest of the fleet a quick update. As the westernmost boat, the fleet relies on him to decide how much gear to fish. They don’t want forty miles of line hanging out there with a storm coming on. On October 22nd, the Laurie Dawn 8, a converted oil boat captained by a quiet Texan named Larry Davis, leaves New Bedford for the Grand Banks. She’s the last boat of the season to head out to the fishing grounds. The same day a containership named the Contship Holland leaves the port of Le Havre, France, for New York City. Her voyage is a classic rhumbline course from the English Channel straight through the fishing grounds. Scattered south of the Flemish Cap are the Hannah Boden, the Allison, the Miss Millie, and the Seneca. The Mary T and the Mr. Simon are southwest of the Tail, right on the edge of the Gulf Stream, and Billy Tyne is nearly 600 miles to the east.

Billy’s been out through the dark of the moon, which may explain his bad luck, but things start to change around the 18th. The whole fleet, in fact, starts to get into a little more fish with the approach of the full moon. Tyne doesn’t tell anyone how much he’s catching, but he’s rapidly making up for three weeks of thin fishing. He’s probably pulling in swordfish at the same rate Johnston’s pulling in bigeye, five or six thousand pounds a day. By the end of the month he has 40,000 pounds of fish in his hold, worth around $160,000. “I talked with Billy on the 24th and he said he’d hatched his boat,” Johnston says. “He was headed in while the rest of us were just starting our trips. You could just tell he was happy.”

Billy finishes up his last haul around noon on the 25th and—the crew still stowing their gear—turns his boat for home. They’ll be one of the only boats in port with a load of fish, which means a short market and a high price. Captains dream of bringing 40,000 pounds into a short market. The weather is clear, the blue sky brushed with cirrus and a solid northwest wind spackling the waves with white. A long heavy swell rolls under the boat from a storm that passed far off to the south. Billy has a failing ice machine and a 1,200-mile drive ahead of him. He’ll be heading in while the rest of the fleet is still in mid-trip, and he’ll make port just as they’re finishing up. He’s two weeks out of synch. Ultimately, one could blame some invisible contortion of the Gulf Stream for this: The contortion disrupts the swordfish, which adds another week or two to the trip, which places the Andrea Gail on the Flemish Cap when she should already be heading in. The circumstances that place a boat at a certain place at a certain time are so random that they can’t even be catalogued, much less predicted, and a total of fifty or sixty more people—swordfishermen, mariners, sailors—are also converging on the storm grounds of the North Atlantic. Some of these people have been heading there, unavoidably, for months; others made a bad choice just a few days ago.

IN EARLY September, a retired sailor named Ray Leonard started asking around Portland, Maine, for a crew to help him sail his thirty-two-foot Westsail sloop to Bermuda. Portland is a big sailing town—people race J-boats in the summer, crew on in the Caribbean in the winter, squeeze in a little skiing between seasons—and Leonard was quickly introduced to Karen Stimpson, one of the most experienced sailors in the harbor. Stimpson, forty-two, started crewing on boats as a teenager, graduated from maritime academy in her thirties, and has crossed the ocean several times on oil tankers. Between sailing trips she and another woman, Sue Bylander, thirty-eight years old, worked as graphic designers for a friend of Leonard’s. Leonard offered them both a place on his boat if they would fly themselves home from Bermuda, and their boss said that they were free to take the time off if they wanted. They accepted, and a departure date was set for the last weekend in October. One month later the sloop Satori cast off from the Great Bay Marina in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and motored slowly down the Piscataqua River toward open ocean.

The weather was so warm that the crew were in t-shirts on deck and the sky was the watery blue of Indian summer. A light wind came in from the west, a backing wind. The Satori ran down the Piscataqua under power, rendezvoused with another boat, cleared Kittery Point, and then bore away to the east. The two boats were headed for the Great South Channel between Georges Bank and Cape Cod, and from there they would sail due south for Bermuda. Bylander stayed below to sort out the mountain of food and gear in the cabin while Stimpson and Leonard sat above deck and talked. Fog rolled in before they’d even cleared Isle of Shoals, and by dark the Satori was alone on a strangely quiet sea.

When Bylander finished stowing the supplies, the crew squeezed around a small dinette table in the cabin and ate lasagna baked by Stimpson’s mother. Stimpson has straw-blonde hair and a sort of level, grey-eyed look that seems to assess a situation, run the odds, and make a decision all in the same moment. She’s no romantic—“if