The Perfect Storm

frighten the Coast Guard are severe enough to prevent a rescue, and by the time the EPIRB started signalling—if it ever did—the crew of the Andrea Gail were probably doomed anyway. Judging by the rescue attempts off Long Island, even a helicopter hovering directly over the Andrea Gail crew would have been powerless to help them. Regardless, the EPIRB is duly transported back to the United States for inspection by the Federal Communications Commission.

On November 6th, a Canadian pilot spots an uninflated life raft just off the Nova Scotia coast, but there’s no one inside it, and he loses sight of it before it can be recovered. Two days later the Hannah Boden, steaming home after three weeks at sea, spots another cluster of fuel barrels marked AG on the side, but there’s still no sign of the boat. Finally, a half hour before midnight on November 8th, the search for the Andrea Gail is permanently suspended. She’s been missing for almost two weeks, and planes have searched 116,000 square miles of ocean without finding any survivors. All they turned up was a little deck gear.

“I WENT down to the fish pier a lot after the search ended,” says Chris Cotter. “I went there a lot, I went there alone and I’d go through these things—you know, picturing what happened to their bodies, that kind of horror. I’d reject it from my mind and my soul as soon as it blew in, and then I’d remember the good things, he’d come back to me and it would be okay. I miss him immensely, though, I fight it all the time. Later, I tell myself. I’ll see him later on.”

The memorial service is held several days later at St. Ann’s Church, just up the hill from the Crow’s Nest. It’s the first service in thirteen years for Gloucestermen lost at sea, and it brings people out who don’t even know the men who died. The sea was their domain, they knew it well, Reverend Casey says quietly to the thousand people packed into his church for the service. I urge you to mourn not just for these three men, but for all the other brave people who gave their lives for Gloucester and its fishing industry.

Mary Anne and Rusty Shatford read a poem about fishing, and Sully’s brother speaks, and some of the Tyne family speak. Bob and Susan Brown are at the service, but they say very little and leave as soon as it’s over. This is the third time men have died on one of Bob Brown’s boats and, regardless of fault, people in town are not inclined to forget it. After the service the mourners drive and walk down the steep hill to Rogers Street and pile into the Crow’s Nest and the Irish Mariner, where a wake is held for the next couple of days. Food is brought and people go to Sully’s brother’s apartment, then back to the Crow’s Nest, then over to the Tynes’, and back to the Nest again, endlessly, all weekend long.

If the men on the Andrea Gail had simply died, and their bodies were lying in state somewhere, their loved ones could make their goodbyes and get on with their lives. But they didn’t die, they disappeared off the face of the earth and, strictly speaking, it’s just a matter of faith that these men will never return. Such faith takes work, it takes effort. The people of Gloucester must willfully extract these men from their lives and banish them to another world.

“The night before I found out about the boat, I had this dream,” says Debra Murphy, Murph’s ex-wife. “Murph was supposed to be home for my birthday, and in my dream—I don’t know if he’s standing there or if he’s calling me—he says, ‘I’m sorry, I’m not going to make it this time.’ Then I wake up, and the phone call comes. It’s from Billy’s new girlfriend, who says there was a big storm out there and the Andrea Gail hasn’t been heard from in a couple of days.”

The first thing Debra does is drive over to Murph’s parents’ house to give them the bad news. They’ve never liked his fishing much—his father’s in real estate, they live a quiet suburban life—and they sit there in shock while Debra tells them the boat is missing. She doesn’t know much more than that one fact, and when she calls Bob Brown, all he can tell her is that the boat was last heard from on the 28th and that a search has been launched. Brown refuses to return her calls after that, so she starts talking to the Coast Guard every day asking how many flights went out, whether they see anything, what they plan to do next. Finally, after ten days of hell, Debra sits her three-year-old son, Dale Jr., down and explains that his father’s not coming back. Her son doesn’t understand, and wants to know where he is.

He’s fishing, honey, she answers. He’s fishing in heaven.

Dale knows his father fishes lots of places—Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Massachusetts. Heaven must be just another place where his father fishes. Well, when’s he coming back from fishing in heaven? he asks.

A couple of months later, as far as young Dale is concerned, his father does come back from fishing in heaven. Dale wakes up screaming in the middle of the night, and Debra rushes into his room, panicked. What’s wrong, honey, what’s wrong? she says.

Daddy’s in the room, Dale answers. Daddy was just here.

What do you mean, Daddy was just here? Debra asks.

Daddy was here and told me what happened on the boat.

Three-year-old Dale, stumbling over the language, goes on to repeat what his father told him. The boat rolled over and caught his father on a “hook” (one of the gaff hooks for grabbing fish). The hook snagged his shirt and Murph wasn’t able to free himself in time. He got dragged under, and that was it.

“My son has a lot of anger in him from losing his father,” says Debra. “There’ll be days where he’ll just be really depressed and I’ll say, ‘What’s the matter, Dale?’ And he’ll say, ‘Nothin’, Mom, I’m just thinking about my dad.’ Oh, God, he’ll look at me with these big brown eyes, the tears running down his cheeks and it kills me because there’s nothing I can do. Not one thing.”

Others, too, are visited. Murph’s mother looks out the bedroom window one day and sees Murph ambling down their street in huge deck boots. Someone else spots him in traffic in downtown Bradenton. From time to time Debra dreams that she sees him and runs up and says, “Dale, where’ve you been?” And he won’t answer, and she’ll wake up in a cold sweat, remembering.

Back in Gloucester, Chris Cotter has a similar dream. Bobby appears before her, all smiles, and she says to him, “Hey, Bobby, where you been?” He doesn’t tell her, he just keeps smiling and says, “Remember, Christina, I’ll always love you,” and then he fades away. “He’s always happy when he goes and so I know he’s okay,” says Chris. “He’s absolutely okay.”

Chris, however, is not okay. Some nights she finds herself down at the State Fish Pier, waiting for the Andrea Gail to come in; other times she tells her friends, “Bobby’s coming home tonight, I know it.” She dates other men, she continues with her life, but she cannot accept that he is gone. They never find a body, they never find a piece of the boat, and she holds on to these things as proof that maybe the whole crew is safe on an island somewhere, drinking margaritas and watching the sun go down. Once Chris dreams that Bobby is living below the sea with a beautiful blond woman. The woman is a mermaid, and Bobby’s with her, now. Chris wakes up and heads back to the Crow’s Nest.

WITHIN weeks of the tragedy, families of the dead men get a letter from Bob Brown asking them to exonerate him from responsibility. The letter is polite and to the point, saying that the Andrea Gail was “tight, strong, fully manned, equipped and supplied, and in all respects seaworthy and fit for the service in which she was engaged.” Unfortunately, she was also overwhelmed by the sea. For several of the bereaved—Jodi Tyne, Debra Murphy—this is the only letter they get from Bob Brown. He doesn’t write a sympathy card, he doesn’t offer financial help; he just sends a letter protecting himself from future legalities. It’s possible that he’s too shy, or embarrassed, to deal intimately with the bereaved, but they don’t see it that way. They see Bob “Suicide” Brown as a businessman who has made hundreds of thousands of dollars off men like their husbands. To a woman, they decide to sue.

The deaths of the six Andrea Gail crew fall under the Death on the High Seas Act, a law passed by Congress in the early 1970s and then amended by the Supreme Court in 1990. A suit involving wrongful death on the high seas is limited to “pecuniary” loss, meaning the amount of money the deceased was earning for his dependents. Bobby Shatford, for example, was paying $325 a month in child support. Under the High Seas Act his ex-wife could—and does—sue Bob Brown for that money, but Ethel Shatford cannot sue. She has lost a son, not a legal provider, and has suffered no pecuniary loss.

The High Seas Act is a vestige of the hard-nosed English Common Law, which saw death at sea as an act of God that shipowners couldn’t possibly be held liable for. Where would it end? How could they possibly do business? Had these men died in a logging accident, say, the family members could sue their employer for the loss of a loved one. But not on the high seas. On the high seas—defined as more than a marine league, or three miles, from