The Perfect Storm

They’re in a big steel boat with 40,000 pounds of fish in the hold, plus ice. It takes a lot to sink a boat like that. Around nine o’clock, a half-moon emerges off their port quarter. The air is calm, the sky is full of stars. Two thousand miles away, weather systems are starting to collide.

THE BARREL OF THE GUN

The men could only look at each other through the falling snow, from land to sea, from sea to land, and realize how unimportant they all were.

—SHIP ON THE ROCKS, NEWBURYPORT, MASSACHUSETTS, 1839, NO SURVIVORS.

(SIDNEY PERLEY, Historic Storms of New England, 1891)

THERE’S a certain amount of denial in swordfishing. The boats claw through a lot of bad weather, and the crews generally just batten down the hatches, turn on the VCR, and put their faith in the tensile strength of steel. Still, every man on a sword boat knows there are waves out there that can crack them open like a coconut. Oceanographers have calculated that the maximum theoretical height for wind-driven waves is 198 feet; a wave that size could put down a lot of oil tankers, not to mention a seventy-two-foot sword boat.

Once you’re in the denial business, though, it’s hard to know when to stop. Captains routinely overload their boats, ignore storm warnings, stow their life rafts in the wheelhouse, and disarm their emergency radio beacons. Coast Guard inspectors say that going down at sea is so unthinkable to many owner-captains that they don’t even take basic precautions. “We don’t need an EPIRB because we don’t plan on sinking,” is a sentence that Coast Guard inspectors hear a lot. One of the videos on file with the Portland Coast Guard—shown as often as possible to local fishermen—was shot from the wheelhouse of a commercial boat during a really bad blow. It shows the bow rising and falling, rising and falling over mammoth, white-streaked seas. At one point the captain says, a little smugly, “Yep, this is where you wanna be, right in your wheelhouse, your own little domain—”

At that moment a wall of water the size of a house fills the screen. It’s no bigger than the rest of the waves but it’s solid and foaming and absolutely vertical. It engulfs the bow, the foredeck, the wheelhouse, and then blows all the windows out. The last thing the camera sees is whitewater coming at it like a big wet fist.

The farther you work from shore, the less smug you can afford to be. Any weekend boater knows the Coast Guard will pluck him out of whatever idiocy he gets himself into, but sword boats don’t have that option. They’re working four or five hundred miles from shore, way beyond helicopter range. So Billy—any bluewater fisherman—has a tremendous respect for the big wet fist. When Billy receives the weather chart off the fax machine, he undoubtedly tells the crew that there’s something very heavy on the way. There are specific things you can do to survive a storm at sea and whether the crew does them, and how well they do them, depends on how jaded they all are. Billy has fished his whole life. Maybe he thinks nothing can sink him; or maybe the sea is every nightmare he’s ever had.

A good, worried crew starts by dogging down every hatch, porthole, and watertight door on the boat. That keeps breaking waves from busting things open and flooding the hold. They check the hatches on the lazarette, where the steering mechanism is housed, and make sure they’re secure. A lot of boats founder when the lazarette floods. They check the bilge pump filters and fish out any debris floating in the bilgewater. They clear everything off the deck—fishing gear, gaff pikes, oil slickers, boots—and put them down the fishhole. They remove the scupper plates so the boat can clear her decks. They tighten the anchor fastenings. They double-lash the fuel and water barrels on the whaleback. They shut off the gas cocks on the propane stove. They lash down anything in the engine room that might break loose and cause damage. They press down the fuel tanks so that some are empty and others are as full as possible. That reduces something called free surface effect—liquid sloshing around in tanks, changing the center of gravity.

Some boats pay one crew member a bit extra to oversee the engine, but the Andrea Gail doesn’t have such a position; Billy takes care of it himself. He climbs down the engine room companionway and runs through the checklist: engine oil, hydraulics, batteries, fuel lines, air intakes, injectors. He makes sure the fire and high-water alarms are on and the bilge pumps are working. He tests the backup generator. He hands out seasick pills. If one of the steel birds is out of the water, he puts it back in. He fixes his position on the chart and calculates how the weather will affect his drift. He reckons their course in his head in case a wave takes out their electronics. He checks the emergency lighting. He checks the survival suits. He checks the photos of his daughters. And then he settles down to wait.

So far the weather has been overcast but calm, light winds out of the northwest and a little bit of sea. Before the Portland Gale of 1898, one captain reported that it was “the greasiest evening you ever saw,” and a few hours later 450 people were dead. It’s not quite that calm, but almost. The wind hovers around ten knots and a six-foot swell rolls lazily under the boat. The Andrea Gail passes just north of Albert Johnston during the night, and by dawn they’ve almost made the western edge of the Banks, around 52 degrees west. They’re halfway home. Dawn creeps in with a few shreds of salmon-pink sky, and the wind starts to inch into the southeast. That’s called a backing wind; it goes counterclockwise around the compass and usually means bad weather is coming. A backing wind is an ill wind; it’s the first distant touch of a low-pressure system going into its cyclonic spin.

Then another weather fax comes in:

HURRICANE GRACE MOVING WILL TURN NE AND ACCELERATE. DEVELOPING DANGEROUS STORM MOVING E 35 KTS WILL TURN SE AND SLOW BY 12 HOURS. FORECAST WINDS 50 TO 65 KTS AND SEAS 22 TO 32 FEET WITHIN 400 NM SEMICIRCLE.

It reads like an inventory of things fishermen don’t want to hear. An accompanying chart shows Hurricane Grace as a huge swirl around Bermuda, and the developing storm as a tightly jammed set of barometric lines just north of Sable Island. Every boat in the swordfish fleet receives this information. Albert Johnston, south of the Tail, decides to head northwest into the cold water of the Labrador Current. Cold water is heavier, he says, and seems to lay better in the wind; it doesn’t produce such volatile seas. The rest of the sword fleet stays far to the east, waiting to see what the storm does. They couldn’t make it into port in time anyway. The Contship Holland, a hundred miles south of Billy, heads straight into the teeth of the thing. Two hundred miles east, another containership, the Liberian-registered Zarah, also heads for New York. Ray Leonard on the sloop Satori has decided not to head for port; he holds to a southerly course for Bermuda. The Laurie Dawn 8 keeps plowing out to the fishing grounds and the Eishin Maru 78, 150 miles due south of Sable Island, makes for Halifax harbor to the northeast. Billy can either waste several days trying to get out of the way, or he can stay on-course for home. The fact that he has a hold full of fish, and not enough ice, must figure into his decision.

“He did what ninety percent of us would’ve done—he battened down the hatches and hung on,” says Tommy Barrie, captain of the Allison. “He’d been gone well over a month. He probably just said, ‘Screw it, we’ve had enough of this shit,’ and kept heading home.”

THE Boston office of the National Weather Service occupies the ground floor of a low brick building along a gritty access road in back of Logan Airport. Heavy glass windows allow a tinted view of the USAir shuttle terminal and a wasteland of gravel piles and rebar. Weather Service meteorologists can look up from their radar screens and watch USAir jets taxi back and forth behind a grey jet-blast barrier. Only their stabilizers stick up above it; they cruise like silver sharks across a concrete sea.

Weather generally moves west-to-east across the country with the jet stream. In a very crude sense, forecasting simply means calling up someone to the west of you and asking them to look out their window. In the early days—just after the Civil War—the National Weather Service was under the auspices of the War Department, because that was the only agency that had the discipline and technology to relay information eastward faster than the weather moved. After the novelty of telegraph wore off, the Weather Service was shifted over to the