The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

by Sebastian Junger

  I was in a riff downtown.

  Right.

  Someone buys her a wine cooler and she takes a couple of sips. I just came to make sure you were getting on the boat, she says. You shouldn’t be drinking so early in the day.

  Bobby’s a big, rugged kid. He was sickly as a child—he had a twin who died a few weeks after birth—but as he got older he got stronger and stronger. He used to play tackle football in pick-up games where broken bones were a weekly occurrence. In his jeans and hooded sweatshirt he looks like such a typical fisherman that a photographer once took a picture of him for a postcard of the waterfront; but still, Mary Anne’s his older sister, and he’s in no position to contradict her.

  Chris loves you, he says suddenly. I do, too.

  Mary Anne isn’t sure how to react. She’s been angry at Chris lately—because of the drinking, because of the black eye—but Bobby’s candor has thrown her off. He’s never said anything like that to her before. She stays long enough to finish her wine cooler and then heads out the door.

  THE first time Chris Cotter saw the Crow’s Nest she swore she’d never go in; it just looked too far down some road in life she didn’t want to be on. She happened to be friends with Mary Anne Shatford, however, and one day Mary Anne dragged her through the heavy wooden door and introduced her around. It was a fine place: people bought drinks for each other like they said hello and Ethel cooked up a big pot of fish chowder from time to time, and before Chris knew it she was a regular. One night she noticed a tall young man looking at her and she waited for him to come over, but he never did. He had a taut, angular face, square shoulders, and a shy cast to his eyes that made her think of Bob Dylan. The eyes alone were enough. He kept looking at her but wouldn’t come over, and finally he started heading for the door.

  Where are you goin’? she said, blocking his way.

  To the Mariner.

  The Irish Mariner was next door and in Chris’s mind it was really down the road to hell. I’m not crossin’ over, thought Chris, I’m in the Nest and that’s enough, the Mariner’s the bottom of the bucket. And so Bobby Shatford walked out of her life for a month or so. She didn’t see him again until New Year’s Eve.

  “I’m in the Nest,” she says, “and he’s across the bar and the place is packed and insane and it’s gettin’ near the twelve o’clock thing and finally Bobby and I talk and go over to another party. I hung with Bobby, and I did, I brought him home and we did our thing, our drunken thing and I remember waking up the next morning and looking at him and thinking, Oh my God this is a nice man what have I done? I told him, You gotta get out of here before my kids wake up, and after that he started callin’ me.”

  Chris was divorced and had three children and Bobby was separated and had two. He was bartending and fishing to pay off a child-support debt and splitting his time between Haskell Street and his room above the Nest. (There are a dozen or so rooms available, and they’re very cheap if you know the right person. Like your mother, the bartender.) Soon Chris and Bobby were spending every minute together; it was as if they’d known each other their whole lives. One evening while drinking mudslides at the Mariner—Chris had crossed over—Bobby got down on his knees and asked her to marry him. Of course I will! she screamed, and then, as far as they were concerned, a life together was only a matter of time.

  Time—and money. Bobby’s wife had sued him for nonpayment of child support, and it went to court late in the spring of 1991. Bobby’s choice was to make a payment or go to jail right then and there, so Ethel came up with the money, and afterward they all went to a bar to recover. Bobby proposed to Chris again, in front of Ethel this time, and when they were alone he said that he had a site on the Andrea Gail if he wanted it. The Andrea Gail was a well-known sword boat captained by an old friend of the family’s, Billy Tyne. Tyne had essentially been handed the job by the previous skipper, Charlie Reed, who was getting out of swordfishing because the money was starting to dwindle. (Reed had sent three children to private college on the money he made on the Andrea Gail.) Those days were over, but she was still one of the most lucrative boats in the harbor. Bobby was lucky to get a site on her.

  Swordfishing’s a lot of money, it’ll pay off everything I owe, he told Chris.

  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 ash tray 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 Billy’s 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 payphone to his girlfriend in Maine and Bugsy was getting down to business at the bar. The night had achieved a nearly vertical takeoff, 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 70-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 deck-hands 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 swordfisherman off a month at sea is a small typhoon of cash. He cannot get rid of the stuff fast enough. He buys lottery tickets fifty at a time and passes them around the bar. If anything hits he buys fifty more plus drinks for the house. Ten minutes later he’ll tip the bartender twenty dollars and set the house up again; slower drinkers may have two or three bottles lined up in front of them. When too many bottles are lined up in front of someone, plastic tokens are put down instead, so that the beer doesn’t get warm. (It’s said that when someone passes out at the Irish Mariner, arguments break out over who gets his tokens.) A fisherman off a trip gives the impression that he’d hardly bother to bend down and pick up a twenty-dollar bill that happened to flutter to the floor. The money is pushed around the bartop like dirty playing cards, and by closing time a week’s worth of pay may well have been spent. For some, acting like the money means nothing is the only compensation for what it actually must mean.

  “The last night, oh my God, the drunkenness was just unreal,” says Chris. “The bar was jam-packed and Bugsy was in a real bad mood cause he hadn’t gotten laid, he was really losin’ his mind about it. That’s important when you only have six days, you know. They were drinkin’ more and more and it was time to go and they didn’t get enough time on land and didn’t get enough money. The last morning we woke up over the Nest ’cause we were really ruined and Bobby had this big black eye, we’d gotten physically violent a little bit, which was the alcohol, believe me. Now I think about it and I can’t believe I sent him off to sea like that. I can’t believe I sent him off to sea with a black eye.”

  IN the year 1850, Herman Melville wrote his masterpiece, Moby-Dick, based on his own experience aboard a South Seas whaling ship. It starts with the narrator, Ishmael, stumbling through a snowstorm in New Bedford, Massachusetts, looking for a place to spend the night. He doesn’t have much money and passes up one place, called the Crossed Harpoons, because it looks “too expensive and jolly.” The next place he finds is called the Swordfish Inn, but it, too, radiates too much warmth and good cheer. Finally he comes to the Spouter Inn. “As the light looked so dim,” he writes, “and the dilapidated little wooden house itself looked as if it might have been carted here from the ruins of some burnt district, and as the swinging sign had a poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here was the very spot for cheap lodging and the best of pea coffee.”

  His instincts were sound, of course: he was given hot food and a bed to share with a South Seas cannibal called Queequeg. Queequeg became his adopted brother and eventually saved his life. Since the beginning of fishing, there have been places that have taken in the I
shmaels of the world—and the Murphs, and the Bugsys, and the Bobbys. Without them, conceivably, fishing wouldn’t even be possible. One night a swordfisherman came into the Crow’s Nest reeling drunk after a month at sea. Bills were literally falling out of his pocket. Greg, the owner of the bar, took the money—a full paycheck—and locked it up in the safe. The next morning the fisherman came down looking a little chagrined. Jesus what a night last night, he said. And I can’t believe how much money I spent…

  That a fisherman is capable of believing he spent a couple thousand dollars in one night says a lot about fishermen. And that a bartender put the money away for safekeeping says a lot about how fishermen choose their bars. They find places that are second homes because a lot of them don’t have real homes. The older guys do, of course—they have families, mortgages, the rest of it—but there aren’t many older guys on the longline boats. There are mainly guys like Murph and Bobby and Bugsy who go through their youth with a roll of tens and twenties in their pockets. “It’s a young man’s game, a single man’s game,” as Ethel Shatford says.

  As a result, the Crow’s Nest has a touch of the orphanage to it. It takes people in, gives them a place, loans them a family. Some may have just come off a trip to the Grand Banks, others may be weathering a private North Atlantic of their own: divorce, drug addiction, or just a tough couple of years. One night at the bar a thin old man who had lost his niece to AIDS wrapped his arms around Ethel and just held onto her for five or ten minutes. At the other end of the spectrum is a violent little alcoholic named Wally who’s a walking testimony to the effects of child abuse. He has multiple restraining orders against him and occasionally slides into realms of such transcendent obscenity that Ethel has to yell out to him to shut the hell up. She has a soft spot for him, though, because she knows what he went through as a child, and one year she wrapped up a present and gave it to him Christmas morning. (She’s in the habit of doing that for anyone stuck upstairs over the holidays.) All day long Wally avoided opening it, and finally Ethel told him she was going to get offended if he didn’t unwrap the damn thing. Looking a little uneasy, he slowly pulled the paper off—it was a scarf or something—and suddenly the most violent man in Gloucester was crying in front of her.