simply steer to survive. The next High Seas report comes in at eleven PM, and Tommy Barrie mulls it over while waiting for Billy to call. The storm is supposed to hit just west of the Tail, around the 42 and the 55, but the Weather Service doesn’t always know everything. The 42 and the 55 are only about a hundred miles southeast of Billy, so he’s a much more reliable source for local conditions than the weather radio. It’s possible, Barrie thinks, that the Allison could get away with fishing a little gear that night. Two sections, maybe eight miles of line. Barries the westernmost boat of the main fleet, so whatever is on the way is going to hit him first; but first of all it’s going to hit Billy Tyne. Barrie waits twenty, thirty minutes, but Billy never calls. That’s not as bad as it sounds—we’re all big boys out there, as Barrie says, and can take care of ourselves. Maybe Billy’s got his hands full, or maybe he went below to take a nap, or maybe he simply forgot.
Finally, around midnight, Barrie tries to raise Billy himself. He can’t get through, though, which is more serious. It means the Andrea Gail has sunk, has lost her antennas, or there’s such pandemonium on board that no one can get to the radio. Barrie guesses it’s the antennas—they’re bolted to a steel mast behind the wheelhouse, and although they’re high up, they’re fragile. Most sword boats have lost them at one point or another, and there’s not much that can be done about it until the weather calms down. You can’t even survive a walk across the deck during Force 12 conditions, much less a trip up the mast.
Losing the antennas would seriously affect the Andrea Gail: it would mean they’d lost their GPS, radio, weatherfax, and loran. And a wave that had taken out their antennas may well have also stripped them of their radar, running lights, and floodlight. Not only would Billy not know where he was, he wouldn’t be able to communicate with anyone or detect other boats in the area; he’d basically be back in the nineteenth century. There’s not much he could do at this point but keep the Andrea Gail pointed into the seas and hope the windows don’t get blown out. They’re half-inch Lexan, but there’s a limit to what they can take; the Contship Holland took waves over her decks that peeled land/sea containers open like sardine cans, forty feet above the surface. The Andrea Gail’s pilothouse is half that high.
Around midnight a curious thing happens: The Sable Island storm eases up a bit. The winds drop a few knots and maximum wave heights fall about ten feet. Their periods lengthen as well, meaning there are fewer breaking waves; instead of crashing through walls of water, the Andrea Gail rises up the face of each wave and plunges down its backside.
Forty-five-foot waves have an angled face of sixty or seventy feet, which is nearly the length of the boat. On exceptionally big waves, the Andrea Gail has her stern in the trough and her bow still climbing toward the crest.
The lull, such as it is, lasts until one AM. At that point the center of the low is directly over the Andrea Gail. It’s possible that the low, with its ferocious winds and extremely tight pressure gradient, has developed an eye similar to that of a hurricane. Two days later, satellite photographs will show clouds swirling into its center like water down a drain. Dry Arctic air wraps one-and-a-half times around the low before finally making it into the center—an indication of how fast the system is spinning. On October 28 th the center isn’t that well defined, but it may serve to take the edge off the conditions just a bit. The reprieve doesn’t last long, though; within a couple of hours the waves are back up to seventy feet. A seventy-foot wave has an angled face of well over a hundred feet. The sea state has reached levels that no one on the boat, and few people on earth, have ever seen.
When the Contship Holland finally limped into port several days later, one of her officers stepped off and swore he’d never set foot on another ship again. She’d lost thirty-six land/sea containers over the side, and the ship’s owners promptly hired an American meteorological consultant to help defend them against lawsuits. “The storm resulted in large-scale destruction of offshore shipping and coastal installations from Nova Scotia to Florida,” wrote Bob Raguso of Weathernews New York. “It was called an extreme nor’easter by U.S. scientists and ranked as one of the five most intense storms from 1899-1991. It had the highest significant wave heights either arrived at by measurement or calculation. Some scientists termed it the hundred year storm.”
The Andrea Gail is at the epicenter of this storm and almost on top of the Sable Island shoals. It’s very likely she has lost her antennas, or Billy would have radioed Tommy Barrie that things looked bad—and definitely don’t fish any gear that night. On the other hand, it’s debatable whether the sea state could have overwhelmed Billy’s boat that early in the evening; the fifty-five-foot Fair Wind didn’t flip until winds hit a hundred knots and the waves were running seventy feet. A more likely scenario is that Billy manages to get through the ten o’clock spike in weather conditions but takes a real beating—the windows are out, the electronics are dead, and the crew is terrified.
For the first time they are completely, irrevocably on their own.
GRAVEYARD OF THE ATLANTIC
In a few days the El Dorado expedition went into the patient wilderness, that closed upon it like the sea closes over a diver. Long afterwards the news came back that all the donkeys were dead.
—JOSEPH CONRAD, Heart of Darkness ALBERT JOHNSTON:
I was the first one to know how bad it was really gonna be. Halifax called for twenty meter seas and when we heard that we thought, Oh boy. You don’t really have time to run to land so we tried to get into the coldest water we could find. The colder the water, the denser it is and the waves don’t get as big. Also, I knew we’d get a northeast-northwest wind. I wanted to make as much headway as possible ’cause the Gulf Stream was down south and that’s where the warm water and fast current are.
There was an awful lot of electrical noise along the leading edge of this thing, there was so much noise you couldn’t hear anything on the radio. I was up in the wheelhouse, when it’s bad like that I usually stay up there. If it looks like it’s settlin’ down a bit and I can grab a little sleep, then I will. The crew just racks out and watches videos. Everybody acknowledged this was the worst storm they’d ever been in—you can tell by the size of the waves, the motion of the boat, the noise, the crashing. There’s always a point when you realize that you’re in the middle of the ocean and if anything goes wrong, that’s it. You see so much bad weather that you kind of get used to it. But then you see really bad weather. And that, you never get used to.
They had ship reports of thirty meter seas. That’s ninety feet. I would imagine—truthfully, in retrospect—that if the whole U.S. swordfish fleet had been caught in the center of that thing, everybody would’ve gone down. We only saw, I don’t know, maybe fifty foot waves, max. We went into it until it started to get dark, and then we turned around and went with it. You can’t see those rogue waves in the dark and you don’t want to get blasted and knock your wheelhouse off. We got the RPM tuned in just right to be in synch with the waves; too fast and we’d start surfing, too slow and the waves would just blast right over the whole boat. The boat was heavy and loaded with fish, very stable. It made for an amazingly good ride.
JOHNSTON had finished his last haul late in the afternoon of the 28th: nineteen swordfish, twenty bigeye, twenty-two yellowfin, and two mako. He immediately started steaming north and by morning he was approaching the Tail of the Banks, winds out of the northeast at one hundred knots and seas twenty to thirty feet. Several hundred miles to the west, though, conditions have gone off the chart. The Beaufort Wind Scale defines a Force 12 storm as having seventy-three-mile-an-hour winds and forty-five-foot seas. Due south of Sable Island, data buoy #44137 starts notching seventy-five-foot waves on the afternoon of the 29th and stays up there for the next seventeen hours. Significant wave height—the average of the top third, also known as HSig—tops fifty feet. The first hundred-foot wave spikes the graph at eight PM, and the second one spikes it at midnight. For the next two hours, peak wave heights stay at a hundred feet and winds hit eighty miles an hour. The waves are blocking the data buoy readings, though, and the wind is probably hitting 120 or so. Eighty-mile-an-hour wind can suck fish right out of bait barrels. Hundred-foot waves are fifty percent higher than the most extreme sizes predicted by computer models. They are the largest waves ever recorded on the Scotian Shelf. They are among the
