The Perfect Storm

the side. They run up to the wheelhouse and ask, ‘Hey, what’s goin’ on, Cap?’ and Billy says something like, ‘Well, we’re gettin’ there, boys, we’re gettin’ there.’ If Billy’s goin’ downsea it has to be an awful frightening ride. Sometimes you come off the top of one of those waves and it just kinda leaves out from under you. The boat just drops. It’s better to take the seas head-on—at least that way you can see what’s comin’ at you. That’s about all you can do.”

Of the men on the boat, Bugsy, Murph, and Billy have the most time at sea—thirty-four years, all told, much of it together. At home Billy has a photo of the three of them at sea with a gigantic swordfish. He has hip boots on, rolled down to his shins, and he’s sitting on a hatchcover pulling open the fish’s mouth with a steel hook. He’s staring straight into the camera. Bugsy’s just behind Billy, head cocked to one side, looking as gaunt and ethereal as Christ on the Shroud of Turin. Murph’s in back, squinting into the sea glare and noticeably huge even beneath a bulky pair of Farmer John waders.

All these men have seen their share of close calls at sea, but Murph’s record is the worst. He’s six-foot-two, 250 pounds, covered in tattoos and, apparently, extremely hard to kill. Once a mako shark clamped its jaws around his arm on deck and his friends had to beat it to death. The Coast Guard helicoptered him out. Another time he was laying out the longline when an errant hook went into his palm, out the other side and into a finger. No one saw it happen, and he was dragged off the back of the boat and down into the sea. All he could do was watch the hull of his boat get smaller and smaller above him and hope someone noticed he was gone. Luckily another crew member turned around a few seconds later, understood what was happening, and hauled him in like a swordfish. I thought I was gone, Mom, he told his mother later. I thought I was dead.

The worst accident occurred on a sticky, windless night off Cape Canaveral. Murph tried sleeping up on deck but it was too hot, so he went below to see if it was any better down there. The air-conditioning was broken, though, so he went back up on deck. He was half asleep when a tremendous shriek of metal brought him to his feet. The boat lurched to one side and water started pouring into the hold. A sleek dark shape loomed in the water off their bow. After the bilge pumps kicked in and the boat stabilized, they turned their searchlights on it: they’d been run down by the conning tower of a British nuclear submarine. It had ripped a hole in the hull and crushed Murph’s bunk like a beer can.

With all this catastrophe in his life Murph had two choices—decide either that he was blessed or that his death was only a matter of time. He decided it was only a matter of time. When he met his wife, Debra, he told her flat-out he wasn’t going to live past thirty; she married him anyway. They had a baby, Dale Junior, but the marriage broke up because Dale Senior was always at sea. And a few weeks before signing onto the Andrea Gail, Murph had stopped by his parents’ house in Bradenton for a somewhat unsettling goodbye. His mother reminded him that he needed to keep up on his life insurance policy—which included burial coverage—and he just shrugged.

Mom, I wish you’d quit worryin’ about burying me, he said. I’m going to die at sea.

His mother was taken aback, but they talked a bit longer, and at one point he asked whether she still had his high school trophies. Of course I do, she said.

Well, make sure you keep them for my son, he said, and kissed her goodbye.

“It took my breath away,” says his mother. “And then he was gone—I mean one minute he was there, the next he was out the door. I didn’t even have time to think. He was a rough, tough man. He wasn’t exactly a house person.”

Murph left for Boston in late June by train. (He was scared of flying.) He brought with him The Joy of Cooking, which his mother had given him, because he loved to cook on board the boats. He had taken his sea blanket to Debra’s to wash but forgot to retrieve it, and so Debra folded it and put it up for his return. He’d told her he’d be home by November 2nd to take her out to dinner on her birthday. You’d better be, she said. After the first trip he called her and said he’d made over six thousand dollars and that he was going to send a package down for Dale Junior. He didn’t call his parents because Debra said she’d call for him. He talked to his son for a while and then said goodbye to Debra and hung up the phone.

That was September 23rd. The Andrea Gail was due to leave within hours.

BY ten o’clock average windspeed is forty knots out of the north-northeast, spiking to twice that and generating a huge sea. The Andrea Gail is a square-transom boat, meaning the stern is not tapered or rounded, and she tends to ride up the face of a following sea rather than slice through it. Every time a large sea rises to her stern, the Andrea Gail slews to one side and Billy must fight the wheel to keep from broaching. Broaching is when the boat turns broadside to the seas and rolls over. Fully loaded steel boats don’t recover from broachings; they downflood and sink.

If Billy’s still running with the weather, he’s taking seas almost continually over his stern and running a real risk of having a hatchcover or watertight door tear loose. And to make matters worse, the waves have an exceptionally short period; instead of coming every fifteen seconds or so, the waves now come every eight or nine. The shorter the period, the steeper the wave faces and the closer they are to breaking; forty-five-foot breaking waves are much more destructive than rolling swells twice that size. According to buoy #44139, maximum wave heights for October 28th coincide with exceptionally low periods right around ten o’clock. It’s a combination that a boat the size of the Andrea Gail couldn’t take for long. Certainly by ten—if not earlier, but no later than ten—Billy Tyne must have decided to bring his boat around into the seas.

If there’s a maneuver that raises the hairs on the back of a captain’s neck, it’s coming around in large seas. The boat is broadside to the waves—“beam-to”—for half a minute or so, which is easily long enough to get rolled over. Even aircraft carriers are at risk when they’re beam-to in a big sea. If Billy attempts to come around that late in the storm, he’d make sure the decks were cleared and give her full power on the way around. The Andrea Gail would list way over and Billy would peer out of the windows to see what was bearing down on them. With luck, he’d pick a lull between the waves and they’d round up into the weather without any problem.

Billy’s been through a lot of storms, though, and he’s probably brought her around earlier in the evening, maybe even before talking to Barrie. Either way, it’s a significant moment; it means they’ve stopped steaming home and are simply trying to survive. In a sense Billy’s no longer at the helm, the conditions are, and all he can do is react. If danger can be seen in terms of a narrowing range of choices, Billy Tyne’s choices have just ratcheted down a notch. A week ago he could have headed in early. A day ago he could have run north like Johnston. An hour ago he could have radioed to see if there were any other vessels around. Now the electrical noise has made the VHF practically useless, and the single sideband only works for long range. These aren’t mistakes so much as an inability to see into the future. No one, not even the Weather Service, knows for sure what a storm’s going to do.

There are distinct drawbacks to heading into the weather, though. The windows are exposed to breaking seas, the boat uses more fuel, and the bow tends to catch the wind and drag the boat to leeward. The Andrea Gail has a high bow that would force Billy to oversteer simply to stay on course. One can imagine Billy standing at the helm and gripping the wheel with the force and stance one might use to carry a cinder block. It would be a confused sea, mountains of water converging, diverging, piling up on themselves from every direction. A boat’s motion can be thought of as the instantaneous integration of every force acting upon it in a given moment, and the motion of a boat in a storm is so chaotic as to be almost without pattern. Billy would just keep his bow pointed into the worst of it and hope he doesn’t get blind-sided by a freak wave.

The degree of danger Billy’s in can be gauged from the beating endured by the Contship Holland, two hundred or so miles to the east. The Holland is a big ship—542 feet and 10,000 tons—and capable of carrying almost seven hundred land/sea containers on her decks. She could easily take the Andrea Gail as cargo. From her daily log, October 29th-30th:

0400—Ship labors hard in very high following seas.

1200—Ship labors in very high stormy seas (hurricane gusts), water over deck and deck cargo. Ship strains heavily, travel reduced.

0200—Steering weather-dependent course. Ship no longer obeys rudder. Ship strains hard and lurches heavily.

0400—Containers are missing from Bay 6.

In other words, Billy’s riding out a storm that has forced a 10,000-ton containership to abandon course and