The Perfect Storm

him, but he insisted. Just bury me at sea, he said. Promise me that.

And now here he is, getting buried at sea. The conditions have degenerated from bad to unspeakable, Beaufort Force 10 or 11. The British Manual of Seamanship describes a Force 10 gale as: “Foam is in great patches and is blown in dense white streaks along the direction of the wind. The rolling of the sea becomes heavy and shock-like.” Force 11 is even worse: “Exceptionally high waves, small or medium-sized ships might be lost from view behind them. The sea is completely covered with long patches of white foam.” Hurricane Grace is still working her way north, and when she collides with the Sable Island storm—probably in a day or so— conditions will get even more severe, maybe as high as Force 12. Very few boats that size can withstand a Force 12 gale.

Since Billy presumably can’t use his radio, there’s no way to know how things are going aboard the Andrea Gail. A fairly good idea, though, can be had from the Eishin Maru 78, the Japanese longliner two hundred miles to the southwest. The Eishin Maru has a Canadian observer on board, Judith Reeves, who is charged with making sure the vessel abides by Canadian fishing regulations. The storm hits the Eishin Maru around the same time as the Andrea Gail, but not as abruptly; buoy #44137, sixty miles to the south, shows a slow, gradual increase in windspeed starting at five PM on the 28th. By dawn on the 29th, the wind is forty knots gust-ing to fifty, and peak wave heights are only forty-five feet. That’s considerably less than what Billy is experiencing, but it just keeps getting worse. By midnight sustained wind-speeds are fifty knots, gusts are hitting sixty, and peak wave heights are over one hundred feet. At ten past eight at night, October 29th, the first big wave hits the Eishin Maru.

It blows out a portside window with the sound of a shotgun going off. Water inundates the bridge and barrels down the hallway into Reeves’s room. She hears panicked shouts from the crew and then orders that she doesn’t understand. Men scramble to board up the window and bail out the water, and within an hour the captain has regained control of the bridge. The boat is taking a horrific beating, though. She’s 150 feet long—twice the size of the Andrea Gail—and waves are completely burying her decks. There are no life jackets on hand, no survival suits, and no EPIRB. Just before dawn, the second wave hits.

It blows out four windows this time, including the one with plywood over it. “All the circuits went, there was smoke and wires crackling,” says Reeves. “We crippled the ship. The VHF, the radar, the internal communication system, the navigation monitors, they were all rendered inoperable. That’s when the radio operator came to me and said—in sign language—that he wanted me to go into the radio room.”

The radio operator had managed to contact the ship’s agent by satellite phone, and Reeves is put on the line to explain what kind of damage they’ve sustained. While she’s talking, Coast Guard New York breaks in; they’ve been listening in on the conversation and want to know if the Eishin Maru needs help. Reeves says they’ve lost most of their electronics and are in serious trouble. New York patches her through to the Coast Guard in Halifax, and while they’re discussing how to get people off the boat, the radio operator interrupts her. He’s pointing to a sentence in an English phrase book. Reeves leans in close to read it: “We are helpless and drifting. Please render all assistance.” (Unknown to Reeves, the steering linkage has just failed, although the radio operator doesn’t know how to explain that to her.) Its at this moment that Reeves realizes she’s going down at sea.

“We had no steerage and we were right in the eye of the storm,” she says. “It was a confused sea, all the waves were coming from different directions. The wind was picking up the tops of the waves and slinging them so far that when the search-and-rescue plane arrived, we couldn’t even see it. The whole vessel would get shoved over on its side, so that we were completely upside-down. If you get hit by one wave and then hit by another, you can drive the vessel completely down into the water. And so that second before the vessel starts to come up you’re just holding your breath, waiting.”

They’re dead in the water, taking the huge waves broadside. According to Reeves, they are doing 360-degree barrel rolls and coming back up. Four boats try to respond to her mayday, but three of them have to stand down because of the weather. They cannot continue without risking their own lives. The ocean-going tug Triumph C leaves Sable Island and claws her way southward, and the Coast Guard cutter Edward Cornwallis is on her way from Halifax. The crew of the Eishin Maru, impassive, are sure they’re going to die. Reeves is too busy to think about it; she has to look for the life jackets, work the radio and satellite phone, flip through the Japanese phrase book. Eventually she has a moment to consider her options.

“Either I jump ship, or I go down with the ship. As for the first possibility, I thought about it for a while until I realized that they’d hammered all the hatches down. I thought, ‘God, I’ll never get off this friggin’ boat, it will be my tomb.’ So I figured I’d do whatever I had to do at the time, and there was no point in really thinking about it because it was just too frightening. I was just gripped by this feeling that I was going to have to do something very unpleasant. You know, like drowning is not going to be pleasant. And it wasn’t until the moment we lost steerage that I actually thought we were going to die. I mean, I knew there was a real possibility, and I was going to have to face that.”

Soon after losing steerage, a communications officer in New York asks Reeves how it’s going. Not too well, she says. Is your survival suit out? Yeah, it’s here, she says. Well, how many Japanese can you fit into it? Reeves laughs; even that slight joke is enough to ease the desperateness of the situation. A couple of hours later the satellite phone rings. Improbably, it’s a Canadian radio reporter who wants to interview her. His name is Rick Howe.

Miss Reeves, is it rough out there? Howe asks, over the static and wind- shriek.

It’s pretty rough.

What about the trawler, what’s the problem?

It’s not a trawler, it’s a longliner. The problem is we took three windows out of the bridge earlier this morning and lost all our instrumentation.

Are you in any danger or are you confident everything’s going to work out all right?

Well, we’re in danger, definitely we’re in danger. We’re drifting in twelve meter swells and between fifty and sixty knot winds. If we get any more water coming through the bridge that’s gonna wipe out any communication that we have left. So we’re definitely in danger right now.

Do you know how dose the nearest ship to you is?

We’re looking at about a hundred miles. If we have to abandon ship there are helicopters that can be here in three-and-a-half hours. Unfortunately they won’t be able to come in the dark, so if anything happens in the dark, we’re goners.

You mentioned that you expect the weather to clear up later in the day. What more can you tell us about that?

The swell size is supposed to go down to five to eight meters and the winds come around to the east, twenty-five to thirty-five knots. So that will take a lot of the edge off the fear I have right now, which is of sustaining a direct hit. If we take a direct hit, and the boat goes over, and we take another hit, the boat goes down. And we’re all shored up here, everything is battened down, hatched and practically nailed shut. If she goes over there’s no way anybody’s gonna get out, over.

Now is there a point where you may have to abandon ship, and is the crew and yourself prepared for that eventuality?

Well, to tell you the absolute truth I don’t think the crew is very prepared for an emergency. They have no emergency beacon and don’t seem very up on their emergency procedure, which is a little frightening. I’m the only one who has a survival suit. But, in a swell like we have today, it wouldn’t do me much good.

Yeah, right. Well, listen, I thank you for talking to us, and the whole of the province is praying for your safe return.

Thank you.

With that, Reeves turns back to the business at hand.

AFTER talking to Tommy Barrie, Billy is probably able to steam northwest another two or three hours before the seas get too rough to take on his stern. That would place him just north of data buoy