The Perfect Storm

off that boat!

Stimpson is horrified; she pushes the money at him, but he just waves her away. No, no, it’s on us. Just thank God you’re alive.

Thank God you’re alive… She hadn’t thought about it like that but, yes, she could well be swirling around in the freezing black depths off Georges right now. She grabs her coffee and runs out the door, sobbing.

TWO weeks after the search for Rick Smith has been called off, Marianne gets a telephone call from a man named John Monte of Westhampton Beach, Long Island, who says that he’s a psychic and that Rick Smith is still alive. He tells her that he talked to Suffolk Airbase and that they want to resume searching for him.

Marianne’s heart sinks. It’s taken her two weeks to accept the fact that her husband is dead, and now she’s supposed to start hoping all over again. There’s no way Rick could still be alive, but she’s afraid of what people might think if she discourages a search, so she gives her okay. The PJs at the base are worried about the same thing—what Marianne will think—so they give their okay as well. Monte gets a local lawyer named John Jiras interested in the case, and Jiras drafts a letter to New York State Representative George Hochbrueckner demanding that the search be resumed. Hochbrueckner passes the letter along to Admiral Bill Kime, Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, and the case filters through the command structure back to Di Comcen in Boston. A response is drawn up explaining how thorough the search was and how unlikely it would be that a man could survive twenty-six days at sea, and that is sent back up the ladder to Kime. Meanwhile, Monte gives Marianne a list of press contacts to call to publicize the case—and himself. “It’s the only time in my life I thought I was going crazy,” she says. “I finally told him to get lost. I couldn’t take it anymore.”

After almost a month, Marianne Smith is able to start absorbing the loss of her husband. As long as the planes are going out she holds on to some shred of hope, and that keeps her in a ghastly kind of limbo. Several weeks after Rick’s death, she dreams that he comes up to her with a sad look on his face and says, I’m sorry, and then gives her a hug. It’s the only dream she ever has of him, and it constitutes a goodbye of sorts. Marianne takes her children to a memorial service in Rick’s hometown in Pennsylvania, but not to the one on Long Island, because she knows there are going to be a lot of television cameras there. (“Children don’t grieve in front of crowds—they grieve in bed saying, ‘I want Daddy to read me a book,’” she says.) George Bush sends her a letter of sympathy, as does Governor Mario Cuomo. Marianne discovers that, as a widow, she makes people extremely uncomfortable; either they avoid her or treat her like a cripple. Marianne Smith, who started out as an avionics technician for an F- 16 squadron, decides to face her widowhood by going to law school and becoming a lawyer.

John Spillane gets a job as a New York City fireman, in addition to his PJ status. One night he’s half awakened by the station alarm, and for some reason the room lights don’t go on. He’s terrified. He finds himself by the exit pole thinking, “It’s okay, you’ve been through this before, just keep your head.” All he knows is that it’s dark, there’s not much time, and he’s got to go downward—exactly the same situation as in the helicopter. By the time he finally understands where he is, he’s put on all his fire-fighting clothes. He’s fully cocked and ready to go.

The storm hasn’t yet finished with people, though; hasn’t stopped reverberating through people’s lives. Eighteen months after the ditchings, a nor’easter roars up the coast that, even before it’s fully formed, meteorologists are referring to as the “Mother of All Storms.” It has a distinct eye, just like a hurricane, and a desperately low central barometric pressure. One ship in its path watches wave heights jump from three feet to twenty feet in less than two hours. The storm drops fifty inches of snow on the mountains of North Carolina and sets all-time barometric records from Delaware to Boston. Winds hit no miles an hour in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Coast Guard rescues 235 people off boats during the first two days alone. Wave heights surpass sixty feet off much of the East Coast and creep up toward one hundred feet off Nova Scotia. Data buoys record significant wave heights—the average of the top third—only a few feet lower than in the storm that sank the Andrea Gail. By the narrowest of margins the “Halloween Gale,” as that storm has come to be known, retains the record for most powerful nor’easter of the century.

Caught in the worst of this is the 584-foot Gold Bond Conveyor, the freighter that, two years earlier, had relayed the Satori’s mayday to Boston. The Gold Bond Conveyor has a regular run between Halifax and Tampa carrying gypsum ore, and on March 14th, about a hundred miles southeast of where Billy Tyne went down, she runs into the Mother of All Storms. She’s the only vessel of any kind to encounter both storms at their height, and they happen to be two of the most powerful nor’easters of the century. One could say the vessel was marked. That evening the captain radios Halifax that waves are breaking over their upper decks, and shortly after midnight he calls again to say that they’re abandoning ship. The seas are a hundred feet and the snow is driving down sideways in the dark. Thirty-three men go over the side and are never seen again.

But it’s still not over; the Halloween Gale has one last shoulder to tap. Adam Randall has been working steadily on the Mary T, but in February, Albert Johnston hauls her out for repairs and Randall has to find another job. He finds one on the Terri Lei, a tuna longliner out of Georgetown, South Carolina. The Terri Lei is a big, heavily built boat with a highly experienced crew, and she’s due to go out at the end of March. Chris Hansen, Randall’s girlfriend, drives him to Logan Airport for the flight south, but all the planes are grounded because of the blizzard—the Mother of All Storms. He gets a flight out the next day, but when he talks with Chris Hansen on the phone from South Carolina, she tells him she’s worried about him. Are you okay? There’s a funny sound in your voice, she says.

Yeah, I’m fine, he says. I don’t really want to go on this trip. It’ll be good, though—maybe I’ll make some money.

The night before leaving, the crew of the Terri Lei go to a local bar and get into a fight with the crew of another boat. Several men wind up in the hospital, but the next day, bruised and sore, the crew of the Terri Lei cut their lines and head out to sea. They’re going to work the deep waters just off the continental shelf, due east of Charleston. It’s spring, the fish are working their way up the Gulf Stream, and with a little luck they’ll make their trip in ten or twelve sets. On the night of April 6th they finish setting their gear and then Randall calls Chris Hansen on the ship-to-shore radio. They talk for over half an hour—ship to shore isn’t cheap, Randall’s phone bill is regularly five hundred dollars—and he tells Chris that they’d had some bad weather but it’s passed and all their gear is in the water. He says he’ll call her soon.

Randall’s a tough one to categorize. He’s an expert fisherman and marine welder but has also, at various times, considered hairdressing or nursing as careers. He has a tattoo of a clipper ship on one arm, an anchor on the other, and a scar on his hand where he once stitched himself up with a needle and thread. He has the sort of long blond hair that one associates with English rock stars, but he also has the muscled build of a man who works hard. (“You can hit him with a hammer and he won’t bruise,” Chris Hansen says.) Randall says that at times he can feel ghosts swirling around the boat, the ghosts of men who died at sea. They’re not at peace. They want back in.

The next morning the crew of the Terri Lei start hauling their gear in choppy seas and gusty winds. They’re 135 miles offshore and there are a lot of boats in the area, including a freighter en route from South America to Delaware. At 8:45 AM the Charleston Coast Guard pick up an EPIRB distress signal, and they immediately send out two aircraft and a cutter to investigate. It might be a false alarm—the weather is moderate and no ships have reported trouble—but they have to respond anyway. They home in on the radio signal and immediately spot the EPIRB amidst a scattering of deck gear. A short distance away floats a life raft with the canopy up and Terri Lei stencilled on one side.

The boat herself has vanished and no one signals from the raft, so a swimmer drops into the water to investigate. He strokes over and hauls himself up on one of the grab lines. The raft is empty. No one got off the Terri Lei alive.

AFTERWORD

“I’M SORRY the way I was when I first met you,” Ricky Shatford told me in a Gloucester bar not long ago. The book had been out for about three months, and the Shatford family—and