The Perfect Storm

accumulations of energy can travel in threes—a phenomenon called “the three sisters”—and are so huge that they can be tracked by radar. There are cases of the three sisters crossing the Atlantic Ocean and starting to shoal along the loo-fathom curve off the coast of France. One hundred fathoms is six hundred feet, which means that freak waves are breaking over the continental shelf as if it were a shoreline sandbar. Most people don’t survive encounters with such waves, and so firsthand accounts are hard to come by, but they do exist. An Englishwoman named Beryl Smeeton was rounding Cape Horn with her husband in the 1960s when she saw a shoaling wave behind her that stretched away in a straight line as far as she could see. “The whole horizon was blotted out by a huge grey wall,” she writes in her journal. “It had no curling crest, just a thin white line along the whole length, and its face was unlike the sloping face of a normal wave. This was a wall of water with a completely vertical face, down which ran white ripples, like a waterfall.”

The wave flipped the forty-six-foot boat end over end, snapped Smeeton’s harness, and threw her overboard.

Tommy Barrie had a similar experience off Georges Bank. He was laying-to in a storm when a wave clobbered him out of nowhere, imploding his windows. “There was this ‘boom’ and the Lexan window was blown right off,” he says. “The window hit the clutch and so the clutch was pinned and we couldn’t get her into gear. The boat’s over a bit, layin’ in a beam sea and shit flyin’ everywhere—things that have never moved on that boat before goin’ all over the place. The wave ripped the life raft off its mount and blew the front hatch open. It was dogged down, but there was so much water it blew it open anyway. I came up quick and radioed the Miss Millie: ‘Larry we took a hell of a wave, stand by, I’m here.’ I took the boat downsea and about ten minutes later the same wave hit him. His bird came out of the water and the hull took a big dent.”

If a wave takes Billy’s windows out, it would be similar to the one experienced by Smeeton or Barrie—big, steep, and unexpected. It’s an awful scene to imagine: water knee-deep in the wheelhouse, men scrambling up the companionway, wind screaming through the blown-out window. If enough water gets in, it can make its way down to the engine room, soak the wiring, and take on an electric charge. The entire boat gets electrified; anyone standing in water gets electrocuted. A boat that loses her windows can start filling up with water in minutes, so two men tie safety lines to their waists and crawl out onto the whaleback deck with sheets of marine plywood. “The plywood acts like a kite, you have to manhandle the sonofabitch,” says Charlie Reed. “It’s a horrible thought, someone out there in that weather. As captain, it’s your worst fear, someone goin’ over the side.”

It’s hard to find a more dangerous job than venturing onto the whaleback during a storm to do a little carpentry. On land a loo-knot wind reduces people to a crawl; at sea it knocks you flat. The decks are awash, the boat is rolling, the spray is raking you like grapeshot. You work in the calm of the wave troughs and flatten yourself at the crests to keep from being blown off the boat. One man holds the plywood against the window while the other lines up a power drill with the holes in the wheelhouse and starts drilling. He drills one hole, hammers a bolt through, and then someone in the wheelhouse threads on the nut while the men on the outside keep drilling and bolting, drilling and bolting until the plywood is screwed down tight. Some captains put a piece of inner tube between the wood and steel to make it waterproof.

Although it’s a suicidal job, crews that lose their windows almost always manage to get some plywood up, even if it means turning downsea to do it. After the plywood is bolted down, the crew starts bucket-bailing the wheelhouse and putting the cabin back in order. Maybe someone tries to wire the loran or radio up to a battery to see if he can get a signal. Billy starts shifting fuel from one tank to another, trying to trim the boat. Someone probably checks the engine room and work deck—are the scuppers clearing their water? Are the birds down? Is the fish hatch secure?

There’s not much they can do at this point but head into the storm and hope they don’t take any more big waves. If waves keep taking out their windows they could turn around and go downsea, but that generates a whole new set of problems. Several large waves could simply bury them, or the lazarette could flood, or sediment could get stirred up in the tanks and clog the fuel filters. If the ship motion is violent enough, the crew has to change the filters nonstop—pull them out, flush the sediment, put them back in again, over and over, as fast as they can. Or the engine stops and the boat goes over.

There’s no question Billy would radio for help now if he had the capability. All he’d have to do is say “mayday,” on channel 16 or 2182 kilohertz, and give his coordinates. Sixteen and 2182 are monitored by the Coast Guard, the military, and all oceangoing vessels; according to maritime law, any vessel that picks up a mayday must respond immediately, unless their own lives would be put in danger. The Coast Guard would send out an Aurora rescue plane to locate the Andrea Gail and circle her. A rescue-swimmer and helicopter crew would be placed on standby at the airbase outside Halifax. The Canadian Coast Guard cutter Edward Cornwallis would start steaming east out of Halifax on what would probably be a thirty-six-hour trip. The Triumph C, an ocean-going tug based at a drilling platform off Sable Island, would put to sea as well. The Contship Holland, the Zarah, and possibly the Mary T, would all try to converge on Billy. Once there, they wouldn’t be able to leave until the Coast Guard signs them off.

Presumably, then, Billys radios are out. The Coast Guard never receives a call. Now his only link to the rest of the world is his EPIRB, which sits outside in a plastic holster on the whaleback deck. It’s about the size of a bowling pin and has a ring switch that can be set to “off,” “on,” or “armed.” EPIRBs are kept permanently in the “armed” position, and if the boat goes down, a water-sensitive switch triggers a radio signal that gets relayed by satellite to listening posts on shore. The Coast Guard immediately knows the name of the boat, the location, and that something has gone disastrously wrong. If a boat loses her radios before actually sinking, though, the captain can send a distress signal by just twisting the ring switch to the “on” position. It’s the same as screaming “mayday” into the radio.

Billy doesn’t do it, though; he never trips the switch. This can only mean one thing: that he’s hopeful about their chances right up until the moment when they have no chance at all. He must figure that the kind of sea that took out their windows probably won’t hit again—or that, if it does, they’ll be able to take it. Statistically a forty- knot wind generates thirty- or forty-foot breaking sea every six minutes or so—greenwater over the bow and whitewater over the house. Every hour, perhaps, Billy might get hit by a breaking fifty-footer. That’s probably the kind of wave that blew out the windows. And every 100 hours, Billy can expect to run into a nonnegotiable wave—a breaking seventy-footer that could flip the boat end over end. He’s got to figure the storm’s going to blow out before his hundred hours are up.

Everyone on a sinking boat reacts differently. A man on one Gloucester boat just curled up and started to cry while his shipmates worked untethered on deck. The Andrea Gail crew, all experienced fishermen, are probably trying to shrug it off as just another storm—they’ve been through this before, they’ll go through it again, and at least they’re not puking. Billy’s undoubtedly working too hard at the helm to give drowning much thought. Ernie Hazard claims it was the last thing on his mind. “There was no conversation, just real businesslike,” he says of going down off Georges Bank. “You know, ‘Let’s just get this thing done.’ Never any overwhelming sense of danger. We were just very, very busy.”

Be that as it may, certain realities still must come crashing in. At some point Tyne, Shatford, Sullivan, Moran, Murphy, and Pierre must realize there’s no way off this boat. They could trigger the EPIRB, but a night rescue in these conditions would be virtually impossible. They could deploy the life raft, but they probably wouldn’t survive the huge seas. If the boat goes down, they go down with it, and no one on earth can do anything about it. Their lives are utterly and completely in their own hands.

That fact must settle into Bobby Shatford’s stomach like a bad meal. It was he, after all, who had those terrible misgivings the day they left. That last afternoon on the dock he came within a hair’s breadth of saying no— just telling Chris to start up the car and drive. They could have gone back to her place, or up the coast, or anywhere at all. It wouldn’t have mattered; he wouldn’t be in this storm right now, and neither would the rest of them. It would have taken Billy at least a day to replace him, and right now they’d still be east with the rest of the fleet.

The previous spring Bobby and Chris rented a movie called The Fighting Sullivans, about five brothers who died on a U.S. Navy boat during World War Two. It was Ethel’s favorite movie. Sitting there with Chris, watching the movie, and thinking about his brothers, Bobby started to cry. He was not a man who cried easily and Chris was unsure what to do. Should she say something? Pretend not to notice? Turn off the TV? Finally, Bobby said that he was upset by the idea of all his brothers fishing, and that if anything happened to him, he wanted to be buried at sea. Chris said that nothing was going to happen to