through the big heavy door. It’s only ten in the morning but already people are standing around with beers in their hands, red-eyed and shocked. Ethel is there, and Bobby’s other sister, Susan, and his brother, Brian, and Preston, and dozens of fishermen. Nothing’s sure yet—the boat could still be afloat, or the crew could be in a life raft or drunk in some Newfoundland bar—but people are quietly assuming the worst.
Chris starts drinking immediately. “People didn’t want to give me the details because I was totally out of my mind,” she says. “Everybody was drunk ’cause that’s what we do, but the crisis made it even worse, just drinkin’ and drinkin’ and cryin’ and drinkin’, we just couldn’t conceive that they were gone. It was in the paper and on the television and this is my love, my friend, my man, my drinking partner, and it just couldn’t be. I had pictures of what happened, images: Bobby and Sully and Murph just bug-eyed, knowing this is the final moment, looking at each other and this jug of booze goin’ around real fast because they’re tryin’ to numb themselves out, and then Bobby goes flyin’ and Sully goes under. But what was the final moment? What was the final, final thing?”
The only person not at the Crow’s Nest is Bob Brown. As owner of the boat he may well not feel welcome there, but he’s also got work to do—he’s got a boat to find. There’s a single sideband in his upstairs bedroom, and he’s been calling on 2182 since early yesterday for both his boats. Neither Billy Tyne nor Linda Greenlaw will come in. Oh boy, he thinks. At nine-thirty, after trying a few more times, Brown drives twenty miles south along Route 128 through the grey rocky uplands of the North Shore. He parks at the Bang’s Grant Inn in Danvers and walks into the conference room for the beginning of a two-day New England Fisheries Management Council meeting. The wind is moving heavily through the treetops now, piling dead leaves up against a chainlink fence and spitting rain down from a steel sky. It’s not a storm yet, but it’s getting there.
Brown takes a seat at the back of the room, notebook in hand, and endures a long and uninteresting meeting. Someone brings up the fact that the Soviet Union has disintegrated into different countries, and U.S. fishing laws need to be changed accordingly. Another person cites a Boston Globe article that says that cod, haddock, and flounder populations are so low that regulations are useless—the species are beyond saving. The National Marine Fisheries Service is not the sole institution with scientific knowledge on pelagic issues, a third person counters. The meeting finally adjourns after an hour of this, and Bob Brown gets up to talk with Gail Johnson, whose husband, Charlie, is out on the Banks at that moment. Charlie owns the Seneca, which had put into Bay Bulls, Newfoundland, a few weeks earlier with a broken crankshaft.
Did you hear anything from your husband? Brown asks.
Yeah, but I could hardly get him. He’s east of the Banks, and they’ve got bad weather out there.
I know they do, Brown says. I know they do.
Brown asks her to call him if Charlie hears anything about either of his boats. Then he hurries home. As soon as he arrives he goes up to his bedroom and tries the single sideband again, and this time—thank God—Linda comes through. He can hear her only faintly though the static.
/ haven’t been able to reach Billy in a couple of days, Linda shouts. I’m worried about them.
Yeah, I’m worried too, says Brown. Keep trying him. I’ll check back.
At six o’clock that night, the time he generally checks in with his boats, Brown tries one last time to raise the Andrea Gail. Not a sign. Linda Greenlaw hasn’t been able to raise her, either, nor has anyone else in the fleet. At 6:15 on October 30th, two days to the hour after Billy Tyne was last heard from, Brown calls the Coast Guard in Boston and reports the vessel missing. I’m afraid my boat’s in trouble and I fear the worst, he says. He adds that there have been no distress calls from her and no signals from her EPIRB. She has disappeared without a trace. In some senses that’s good news because it may just mean she’s lost her antennas; a distress call or EPIRB signal would be a different matter entirely. It would mean absolutely that something has gone wrong.
Meanwhile, the news media have picked up on the story. Rumors are flying around Gloucester that the Allison has gone down along with the Andrea Gail, and that even the Hannah Boden may be in trouble. A reporter from News Channel Five calls Tommy Barries wife, Kimberly, and asks her about the Allison. Kimberly answers that she talked to her husband the night before by single sideband and that, although she could barely hear him, he seemed to be fine. Channel Five broadcasts that tidbit on the evening news, and suddenly every fisherman’s wife on the East Coast is calling Kimberly Barrie to ask if she has any news about the fleet. She just repeats that she talked to her husband on the 29th, and that she could barely hear him. “As soon as the storms move offshore the weather service stops tracking them,” she says. “The fishermen’s wives are left hanging, and they panic. The wives always panic.”
In fact the eastern fleet fared relatively well; they heave-to under heavy winds and a long-distance swell and just wait it out. Barrie even contemplates fishing that night but decides against it; no one knows where the storm is headed and he doesn’t want to get caught with his gear in the water. Barrie keeps trying Billy every couple of hours throughout the night of the 28th and the following day, and by October 30th he thinks Billy may have drifted out of range. He radios Linda and tells her that something is definitely wrong, and Bob Brown should get a search going. Linda agrees. That night, after the boats have set their gear out, the captains get together on channel 16 to set up a drift model for the Andrea Gail. They have an extremely low opinion of the Coast Guard’s ability to read ocean currents, and so they pool their information, as when tracking swordfish, to try to figure out where a dead boat or a life raft would have gone. “The water comes around the Tail and wants to go up north,” Barrie says. “By talking to boats at different places and putting them together, you can get a pretty detailed map of what the Gulf Stream is doing.”
Late on the night of the 30th, Bob Brown calls the Canadian Coast Guard in Halifax and says that the Andrea Gail is probably proceeding home along a route that cuts just south of Sable Island. He adds that Billy usually doesn’t call in during his thirty-day trips. The Canadian cutter Edward Cornwallis—already at sea to help the Eishin Maru—starts calling for the Andrea Gail every quarter hour on channel 16. “No joy on indicated frequency for contacting Andrea Gail” she reports later that morning. Halifax initiates a communications search as well, on every frequency in the VHF spectrum, but also meets with failure. The fishing vessel Jennie and Doug reports hearing a faint “Andrea Gail’’ at 8294 kilohertz, and for the next twelve hours Halifax tries that frequency but cannot raise her. Judith Reeves on the Eishin Maru thinks she hears someone with an English accent radioing the Andrea Gail that he’s coming to their aid, but she can’t make out the name of the vessel. She never hears the message again. A SpeedAir radar search picks up an object that might possibly be the Andrea Gail, and Halifax tries to establish radio contact, without success. At least half a dozen vessels around Sable Island—the Edward Cornwallis, the Lady Hammond, the Sambro, the Degero, the Yankee Clipper, the Melvin H. Baker, and the Mary Hitchins—are conducting communications searches, but no one can raise them. They’ve fallen off the edge of the world.
The Rescue Coordination Center in New York, meanwhile, is still trying to figure out exactly who is on the crew. Bob Brown doesn’t know for sure—often owners don’t even want to know—and even the various friends and family aren’t one hundred percent certain. Finally the Coast Guard gets a call from a Florida fisherman named Douglas Kosco, who says he used to fish on the Andrea Gail and knows who the crew are. He runs down the list of crew as he knows it: Captain Billy Tyne, from Gloucester. Bugsy Moran, also from Gloucester but living in Florida. Dale Murphy from Cortez, Florida. Alfred Pierre, the only black guy on board, from the Virgin Islands but with family in Portland.
Kosco says that the fifth crew member was from the Haddit—Tyne’s old boat—and that Merrit Seafoods in Pompano has his name. I was supposed to go on this trip, but I got off at the last moment, he says. I don’t know why, I just got a funny feeling and stepped off.
Kosco gives the Coast Guardsman a phone number in Florida where he gets messages. (He’s offshore so much that he doesn’t have his own phone.) I think they may have gone shorthanded—I hope they did, he says. I don’t think Billy could’ve found anyone else so fast…
It’s wishful thinking. The morning Kosco left, Billy called up Adam Randall and asked him if he wanted a job. Randall said yes, and Billy told him to get up to Gloucester as fast as possible. Randall showed up with his father-
