The Perfect Storm

you’re looking for enlightenment it’s not going to happen on a oil tanker”—but she’s deeply in love with the ocean. She’s not married and has no children. She’s the perfect crew for a late-season run south.

So, Ray, have you listened to a weather forecast lately? she asked at one point during dinner.

Leonard nodded his head.

Did you hear there’s a front coming through?

It shouldn’t be a problem, he says. We can always cut into Buzzard’s Bay.

Buzzard’s Bay is at the western end of the Cape Cod Canal. One could, if the weather were bad enough, go nearly all the way from Boston to New York City by protected waterways. It’s not particularly beautiful, but it’s safe. “Ray was used to sailing solo, so having me on board may have made him feel more invulnerable,” Stimpson says. “And there’s a point at which you’re so far out that you don’t want to turn back, you just run offshore. In the future I will listen to the weather forecast, I will decide, as crew, whether I’m willing to keep sailing. It will be immaterial to me the level of experience of the owner-captain.”

The date was October 26th. The lives of Stimpson, Bylander, and Leonard were about to converge with several dozen others off the New England coast.

BILLY, like Leonard, has undoubtedly heard the forecast, but he’s even less inclined to do anything about it than Leonard is. The lead time for an accurate forecast is only two or three days, and it takes twice that long for a sword boat to make port. Weather reports are vitally important to the fishing, but not so much for heading home; when the end of the trip comes, captains generally just haul their gear and go. Because errors compound, the longer the trip, the more careful the captain has to be when he sets his initial heading for home. An error of just one degree puts a boat thirty miles off-course by the time she gets back to Gloucester; a captain could add a day to each trip with a month of such errors. When Billy Tyne starts for home, a bearing of 260 degrees would run him straight into Cape Ann, but it would also shave too close to Sable Island, which presents a ghastly hazard to shipping. (“I try to avoid it by at least forty or fifty miles,” says Charlie Reed.) The channel between Sable and Nova Scotia is blessed with a good, cold countercurrent that starts in Labrador and hugs the coast all the way down to Hatteras, but for some reason Billy decides not to take it. He decides to cross the Tail around 44 degrees north—his “way-point”—and then, once clear of Sable, shoot a course almost due west for Gloucester.

Fishing boats use a global positioning system for bluewater navigation. GPS, as it’s called, fixes a position relative to military satellites circling the earth and then converts it to longitude and latitude. It’s accurate to within fifteen feet. The Department of Defense intentionally distorts the signals because they’re worried about the misuse of such precise information, but the standards of accuracy on a sword boat are loose enough so that it doesn’t matter. Fishermen generally use GPS to back up a loran system, which works by measuring the time it takes for two separate low-frequency radio signals to reach the vessel from broadcasting stations on shore. Charts are printed with numbered lines radiating out from the signal sources, and a loran reading identifies which lines correspond to the vessel’s position.

Even with two electronic systems, though, mistakes happen—iron-bearing landmass, electrical interference, all kinds of things skew the output. Furthermore, the plotter gives you a pure direction, as if you could slice right through the curvature of the earth, but boats must follow an arc from point to point—the “Great Circle” route. The Great Circle route requires a correction of about eleven degrees north between Gloucester and the Flemish Cap. On the night of October 24th, Billy Tyne punches in the loran coordinates for his waypoint on the Tail of the Banks and reads a bearing of 250 degrees on his video plotter. On a Great Circle route, the compass heading and the actual heading are identical at the start of a trip, gradually diverge until the halfway point, and then converge again as the boat nears its destination.

Having determined his Great Circle route and plugged the heading into the autopilot, Tyne then goes over to the chart drawer and pulls out a ten-dollar nautical chart called INT 109. He lines up a course of 250 degrees to his waypoint on the Tail and then walks his way down the map with a set of hinged parallel rules. He rechecks the bearing at the compass rose at the bottom and then adjusts by twenty degrees for the local magnetic variation. (The earth’s magnetic field doesn’t line up exactly with the axis of the earth; in fact it doesn’t even come close.) That should bring him to his way-point on the Tail in about three days. From there he’ll come up fourteen degrees and take another Great Circle route into Gloucester.

INT 109 is one of the few charts that shows the full width and breadth of the summer swordfishing grounds, and is carried by every sword boat in the Banks. It has a scale of one to three-and-a-half-million; on a diagonal it stretches from New Jersey almost to Greenland. Land on 109 is depicted the way mariners must see it, a blank, featureless expanse with a scattering of towns along a minutely rendered coast. The lighthouses are marked by fat exclamation points and jut from every godforsaken headland between New York City and South Wolf Island, Labrador. Water depth is given in meters and shallow areas are shaded in blue. Georges Bank is clearly visible off Cape Cod, an irregular shape about the size of Long Island and rising to a depth of nine feet. To the west of Georges is the Great South Channel; beyond are the Nan-tucket Shoals and an area peppered with old ordnance: Submerged torpedo, Unexploded depth charges, Unexploded bombs.

The Two Hundred Fathom line is the chart’s most prominent feature, echoing the coastline in broad strokes like a low-angle shadow. It swings north around Georges, skirts Nova Scotia a hundred miles offshore, and then runs deep up the St. Lawrence Seaway. East of the Seaway are the old fishing grounds of Burgeo and St. Pierre Banks, and then the line makes an enormous seaward loop to the southeast. The Grand Banks.

The Banks are a broad flat plateau that extend hundreds of miles southeast from Newfoundland before plunging off the continental shelf. A clump of terrors known as the Virgin Rocks lurk seventy miles east of St. Johns, but otherwise there are no true shoals to speak of. A sheet of cold water called the Labrador Current flows over the northern edge of the Banks, injecting the local food chain with plankton; and a sluggish warm-water flow called the North Atlantic Current creeps toward Europe east of the Flemish Cap. Bending around the Tail of the Banks is something called Slope Water, a cold half-knot current that feeds into the generally eastward movement of the area. Below Slope Water is the Gulf Stream, trundling across the Atlantic at speeds of up to three or four knots. Eddies sometimes detach themselves from the Gulf Stream and spin off into the North Atlantic, dragging entire ecosystems with them. These eddies are called warm core rings. When the cores fall apart, the ecosystems die.

Billy wants to run a slot between the Gulf Stream to the south and Sable Island to the north. It’s a relatively straight shot that doesn’t buck the warm headcurrent or come too close in to Sable. Steaming around the clock, he’s looking at a one-week trip; maybe he even takes one bird out of the water to speed things up. The diesel engine has been throbbing relentlessly for a month now and, without the distraction of work, it suddenly seems hellishly loud. There’s no way to escape the noise—it gets inside your skull, shakes your stomach lining, makes your ears ring. If the crew weren’t so sleep-deprived it might even bother them; as it is they just wallow in their bunks and stand watch at the helm twice a day. After two-and-a-half days the Andrea Gail has covered about 450 miles, right to the edge of the continental shelf. The weather is fair and there’s a good rolling swell from the northeast. At 3:15 on the afternoon of October 27th, Billy Tyne raises the Canadian Coast Guard on his single sideband to tell them he’s entering Canadian waters. This is the American fishing vessel Andrea Gail, WYC 6681, he says. We’re at 44.25 north, 49.05 west, bound for New England. All our fishing gear is stowed.

The Canadian Coast Guard at St. Johns gives him the go-ahead to proceed. Most of the sword fleet is a couple of hundred miles to the east, and Albert Johnston is the same distance to the south. Sable Island is no longer in the way, so Billy comes up fourteen degrees and puts Gloucester right in his gunsights. They’re heading almost due west and running a Great Circle route on autopilot. Around nightfall a Canadian weather map creaks out of the satellite fax. There’s a hurricane off Bermuda, a cold front coming down off the Canadian Shield, and a storm brewing over the Great Lakes. They’re all heading for the Grand Banks. A few minutes after the fax, Linda Greenlaw calls.

Billy, you seen the chart? she asks.

Yeah I saw it, he says.

What do you think?

Looks like it’s gonna be wicked.

They agree to talk the next day so Billy can give her a list of supplies he’s going to need. He has no desire at all to talk to Bob Brown. They sign off, and then Billy hands the helm off to Murph and goes below for dinner.