The Perfect Storm

That’s good, how long do you go out for?

Thirty days.

Thirty days? Are you crazy?

“We were in love and we were jealous and I just couldn’t imagine it,” says Chris. “I couldn’t even imagine half a day.”

SWORD boats are also called longliners because their mainline is up to forty miles long. It’s baited at intervals and paid out and hauled back every day for ten or twenty days. The boats follow the swordfish population like seagulls after a day trawler, up to the Grand Banks in the summer and down to the Caribbean in the winter, eight or nine trips a year. They’re big boats that make big money and they’re rarely in port more than a week at a time to gear up and make repairs. Some boats go as far away as the coast of Chile to catch their fish, and fishermen think nothing of grabbing a plane to Miami or San Juan to secure a site on a boat. They’re away for two or three months and then they come home, see their families, and head back out again. They’re the high rollers of the fishing world and a lot of them end up exactly where they started. “They suffer from a lack of dreams,” as one local said.

Bobby Shatford, however, did happen to have some dreams. He wanted to settle down, get his money problems behind him, and marry Chris Cotter. According to Bobby Shatford, the woman he was separated from was from a very wealthy family, and he didn’t understand why he should owe so much money, but obviously the courts didn’t see it that way. He wasn’t going to be free until everything was paid off, which would be seven or eight trips on the Andrea Gail—a good year of fishing. So in early August, 1991, Bobby left on the first swordfishing trip of his life. When they left the dock his eyes swept the parking lot, but Chris had already gone. It was bad luck, they’d decided, to watch your lover steam out to sea.

Chris had no way of knowing when Bobby was due in, so after several weeks she started spending a lot of time down at Rose’s wharf, where the Andrea Gail takes out, waiting for her to come into view. There are houses in Gloucester where grooves have been worn into the floorboards by women pacing past an upstairs window, looking out to sea. Chris didn’t wear down any floorboards, but day after day she filled up the ashtray in her car. In late August a particularly bad hurricane swept up the coast—Hurricane Bob—and Chris went over to Ethel’s and did nothing but watch the Weather Channel and wait for the phone to ring. The storm flattened entire groves of locust trees on Cape Cod, but there was no bad news from the fishing fleet so, uneasily, Chris went back to her lookout at Rose’s.

Finally, one night in early September, the phone rang in Chris’s apartment. It was Billy Tyne’s new girlfriend, calling from Florida. They’re coming in tomorrow night, she said. I’m flying into Boston, could you pick me up?

“I was a wreck, I was out of my mind,” says Chris. “I picked Billys girlfriend up at Logan and the boat came in while I was gone. We pulled up across the street from the Nest and we could see the Andrea Gail tied up by Rose’s and so I flew across the street and the door opens and it was Bobby. He went, ‘Aaagh,’ and he picked me up in the air and I had my legs wrapped around his waist and we must’ve been there twenty minutes like that, I wouldn’t get off him, I couldn’t, it had been thirty days and there was no way in hell.”

The collected company in the bar watched the reunion through the window. Chris asked Bobby if he’d found a card that she’d hidden in his seabag before he left. He had, he said. He read it every night.

Yeah, right, said Chris.

Bobby put her down in front of the door and recited the letter word for word. The guys were bustin’ my balls so bad I had to hide it in a magazine, he said. Bobby pulled Chris into the Nest and bought her a drink and they clinked bottles for his safe homecoming. Billy was there with his girlfriend hanging off him and Alfred was on the pay phone to his girlfriend in Maine and Bugsy was getting down to business at the bar. The night had achieved a nearly vertical take-off, everyone was drinking and screaming because they were home safe and with people they loved. Bobby Shatford was now crew on one of the best sword boats on the East Coast.

THEY’D been at sea a month and taken fifteen tons of swordfish. Prices fluctuate so wildly, though, that a sword boat crew often has no idea how well they’ve done until after the fish have been sold. And even then there’s room for error: boat owners have been known to negotiate a lower price with the buyer and then recover part of their loss in secret. That way they don’t share the entire profit with their crew. Be that as it may, the Andrea Gail sold her catch to O’Hara Seafoods for $136,812, plus another $4,770 for a small amount of tuna. Bob Brown, the owner, first took out for fuel, fishing tackle, bait, a new mainline, wharfage, ice, and a hundred other odds and ends that added up to over $35,000. That was deducted from the gross, and Brown took home half of what was left: roughly $53,000. The collected crew expenses—food, gloves, shore help—were paid on credit and then deducted from the other $53,000, and the remainder was divided up among the crew: Almost $20,000 to Captain Billy Tyne, $6,453 to Pierre and Murphy, $5,495 to Moran, and $4,537 each to Shatford and Kosco. The shares were calculated by seniority and if Shatford and Kosco didn’t like it, they were free to find another boat.

The week on shore started hard. That first night, before the fish had even been looked at, Brown cut each crew member a check for two hundred dollars, and by dawn it was all pretty much spent. Bobby crawled into bed with Chris around one or two in the morning and crawled out again four hours later to help take out the catch. His younger brother Brian—built like a lumberjack and filled with one desire, to fish like his brothers—showed up to help, along with another brother, Rusty. Bob Brown was there, and even some of the women showed up. The fish were hoisted out of the hold, swung up onto the dock, and then wheeled into the chill recesses of Rose’s. Next they hauled twenty tons of ice out of the hold, scrubbed the decks, and stowed the gear away. It was an eight- or nine- hour day. At the end of the afternoon Brown showed up with checks for half the money they were owed—the rest would be paid after the dealer had actually sold the fish—and the crew went across the street to a bar called Pratty’s. The partying, if possible, reached heights not attained the night before. “Most of them are single kids with no better thing to do than spend a lot of dough,” says Charlie Reed, former captain of the boat. “They’re high rollers for a couple of days. Then they go back out to sea.”

High rollers or not, the crew is still supposed to show up at the dock every morning for work. Inevitably, something has broken on the trip—a line gets wound around the drive shaft and must be dove on, the antennas get snapped off, the radios go dead. Depending on the problem, it can take anywhere from an afternoon to several days to fix. Then the engine has to be overhauled: change the belts and filters, check the oil, fill the hydraulics, clean the injectors, clean the plugs, test the generators. Finally, there’s the endless task of maintaining the deck gear. Blocks have to be greased, ropes have to be spliced, chains and cables have to be replaced, rust spots have to be ground down and painted. One ill-kept piece of gear can kill a man. Charlie Reed saw a hoisting block fall on someone and shear his arm right off; another crew member had forgotten to tighten a shackle.

The crew isn’t exactly military in their sense of duty, though. Several times that week Bobby woke up at the Nest, looked out the window, and then crawled back into bed. One can hardly blame him: from now on his life would unfold in brutally short bursts between long stretches at sea, and all he’d have to tide him over would be photos taped to a wall and maybe a letter in a seabag. And if it was hard on the men, it was even harder on the women. “It was like I had one life and when he came back I had another,” says Jodi Tyne, who divorced Billy over it. “I did it for a long time and I just got tired of it, it was never gonna change, he was never gonna quit fishin’, though he said he wanted to. If he had to pick between me and the boat he picked the boat.”

Billy was an exception in that he really, truly loved to fish. Charlie Reed was the same way; it was one reason the two men got along so well. “It’s wide open—I got all the solitude in the world,” says Reed. “Nobody pressurin’ me about nothin’. And I see things other people don’t get to see—whales breaching right beside me, porpoises followin’ the boat. I’ve caught shit they don’t even have in books—really weird shit, monstrous-looking things. And when I walk down the street in town, everyone’s respectful to me: ‘Hi, Cap, how ya doin’ Cap.’ It’s nice to sit down and have a seventy-year-old man say, ‘Hi, Cap.’ It’s a beautiful thing.”

Perhaps you’d have to be a skipper to really fall in love with the life. (A $20,000 paycheck must help.) Most deckhands have precious little affection for the business, though; for them, fishing is a brutal, dead-end job that they try to get clear of as fast as possible. At memorial services in Gloucester people are always saying things like, “Fishing was his life,” or “He died doing what he loved,” but by and large those sentiments are to comfort the living. By and large, young men from Gloucester find themselves at sea because they’re broke and need money fast.

The only compensation for such mind-numbing work, it would seem, is equally mind-numbing indulgence. A sword-fisherman off a month at sea is a small typhoon of cash. He cannot get rid of the stuff fast enough. He buys