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

by Sebastian Junger

  At the stern of the boat is the setting-out house, a frame-and-plywood shed that gives some shelter to the men when they’re baiting the line. A big sea across the stern might take out the setting-out house; otherwise it would probably be protected by the pilothouse up front. The deck is steel and covered with no-skid tiles. The gunwales are waist-high and have gaps in them, called scuppers, or freeing ports, that allow boarding seas to drain off the deck. The scuppers are normally blocked by scupper plates that prevent fish and gear from sliding out to sea, but when the weather gets dangerous the plates are taken out. Or should be.

  The ability of a boat to clear her decks is one of the most crucial aspects of her design. A boarding sea is like putting a swimming pool on the deck; the boat wallows, loses her steerage, and for a few moments is in extreme danger. One longline fisherman, a Gloucester local named Chris, was almost lost in such a situation. The boat he was on was running downsea when she took “one wicked sea from hell.” The stern lifted, the bow dropped, and they started surfing down the face of the wave. When they got to the bottom there was nowhere to go but down, and the crest of the breaking wave drove them like a piling. Chris looked out the porthole, and all he could see was black.

  If you look out the porthole and see whitewater, you’re still near the surface and relatively safe. If you see greenwater, at least you’re in the body of the wave. If you see blackwater, you’re a submarine. “I felt the boat come to a complete stop,” says Chris. “I thought, ‘My God we’re goin’ down.’ We hung there a moment and then the buoyancy caught and it was as if she’d been thrown into reverse. We plowed right back out the way we came.”

  Any number of things could have happened to Chris’s boat at that moment. The breather pipes could have gotten stuffed and killed the engine. The fish hatch could have given way and filled the hold. A tool could have gotten loose and knocked out some machinery. The wheelhouse windows could have exploded, a bulkhead could have failed, or thirty tons of ice and fish could have shifted in the hold. But even assuming the boat popped up like a cork, she would still be laboring under a crushing load of water. If anything were caught in the scuppers—a hatch cover, an old sleeping bag—the water would have been impeded as it drained off. All it takes is a moment of vulnerability for the next wave to roll you over: props in the air, crew on their ass, cargo avalanching. It’s the end.

  Every boat has a degree of roll from which she can no longer recover. The Queen Mary came within a degree or two of capsizing off Newfoundland when a rogue wave burst her pilothouse windows ninety feet up; she sagged on her beam ends for an agonizing minute before regaining her trim. Two forces are locked in combat for a ship like that: the downward push of gravity and the upward lift of buoyancy. Gravity is the combined weight of the vessel and everything on it—crew, cargo, fishing gear—seeking the center of the earth. Buoyancy is the force of all the enclosed air in the hull trying to rise above water level.

  On a trim and stable ship, these two forces are equal and cancel each other out along the centerline; but all this changes when a boat gets shoved over onto her side. Instead of being lined up, the two forces are now laterally offset. The center of gravity stays where it is, but the center of buoyancy migrates to the submerged side, where proportionally more air has been forced below the waterline. With gravity pushing down at the center and buoyancy pushing up from the submerged side, the ship pivots on her center and returns to an even keel. The more the ship heels, the farther apart the two forces act and the more leverage the center of buoyancy has. To greatly simplify, the lateral distance between the two forces is called the righting arm, and the torque they generate is called the righting moment. Boats want a big righting moment. They want something that will right them from extreme angles of heel.

  The righting moment has three main implications. First of all, the wider the ship, the more stable she is. (More air is submerged as she heels over, so the righting arm is that much longer.) The opposite is also true: The taller the ship, the more likely she is to capsize. The high center of gravity reduces what is called the metacentric height, which determines the length of the righting arm. The lower the metacentric height, the less leverage there is with which to overcome the downward force of gravity. Finally, there always comes a point where the boat can no longer right herself. Logically, this would happen when her decks have gone past vertical and the center of gravity falls outside the center of buoyancy—the “zero-moment” point. But in reality, boats get into trouble a lot sooner than that. Depending on the design, an angle of about sixty or seventy degrees starts to put a vessel’s lee gunwales underwater. That means there’s greenwater on deck, and the righting moment has that much more weight to overcome. The boat may eventually recover, but she’s spending more and more time underwater. The deck is subject to the full fury of the waves and a hatch might come loose, a bulkhead might fail, a door might burst open because someone forgot to dog it down. Now she’s not just sailing, she’s sinking.

  The problem with a steel boat is that the crisis curve starts out gradually and quickly becomes exponential. The more trouble she’s in, the more trouble she’s likely to get in, and the less capable she is of getting out of it, which is an acceleration of catastrophe that is almost impossible to reverse. With the boat’s bilge partially flooded, she sits lower in the water and takes more and more prolonged rolls. Longer rolls mean less steerage; lower buoyancy means more damage. If there’s enough damage, flooding may overwhelm the pumps and short out the engine or gag its air intakes. With the engine gone, the boat has no steerageway at all and turns broadside to the seas. Broadsides exposes her to the full force of the breaking waves, and eventually a part of her deck or wheelhouse lets go. After that, downflooding starts to occur.

  Downflooding is the catastrophic influx of ocean water into the hold. It’s a sort of death rattle at sea, the nearly vertical last leg of an exponential curve. In Portland, Maine, the Coast Guard Office of Marine Safety has a video clip of a fishing boat downflooding off the coast of Nova Scotia. The boat was rammed amidship by another boat in the fog, and the video starts with the ramming boat backing full-screw astern. It’s all over in twenty seconds: the crippled vessel settles in her stern, rears bow-up, and then sinks. She goes down so fast that it looks as if she’s getting yanked under by some huge hand. The last few moments of the film show the crew diving off the upended bow and trying to swim to the other boat fifty feet away. Half of them make it, half of them don’t. They’re sucked down by the vacuum of a large steel boat making for the deep.

  Very few boats ever get to that point, of course. They might take water in the hold or lose their antennas or windows, but that’s it. The result, fortunately, is that their stability limits are rarely tested in a real-life situation. The only way to know the stability profile for each boat is to perform a standard dockside test on her. A 5,000-pound weight is put on deck, ten feet off the centerline, and the resulting angle of heel is run through a standard formula that gives the righting moment. So many things can affect the stability of a boat, though, that even the Coast Guard considers these tests to be of limited value. Load a few tons of gear onto the deck, take a little water in her bilge, shift from longlining to dragging to gillnetting, and the dynamics of the ship change completely. As a result, stability tests are mandatory only for vessels over 79 feet. At deck height, the Andrea Gail measures seventy-two.

  When the Andrea Gail was overhauled in 1986, Bob Brown simply pulled her out of the water and started welding; no stability tests were performed, no marine architect was consulted. In the trade this is known as “eyeball engineering,” and it includes the Andrea Gail in an overwhelming majority of the commercial fleet that has been altered without plans. The work was done at St. Augustine Trawlers in St. Augustine, Florida; in all, eight tons of machinery and structural changes were added to the boat, including the fuel and water drums on her whaleback deck.

  After the work was finished, marine surveyor James Simonitsch—whose brother
, Mark, would propose shutting down Georges Bank the following year—flew to Florida to reinspect the Andrea Gail. Two years earlier he’d appraised both the Hannah Boden and Andrea Gail for the settlement of Bob Brown’s divorce, and the Andrea Gail had been valued at $400,000. Simonitsch surveyed her again in January, 1987, and wrote a letter to Bob Brown with some minor suggestions: Loosen the dogs on one of the watertight doors and provide flotation collars and lights for the survival suits. Otherwise the vessel seemed shipshape. “The modifications and additional furnishings will increase the vessel’s ability to make longer trips and return with a high-quality product,” Simonitsch concluded. The question of stability never came up.

  In 1990, St. Augustine Shipyards was sold by the Internal Revenue Service for nonpayment of taxes. In October of that year Simonitsch visited the Andrea Gail in Gloucester and made a few more suggestions: professionally service the six-man life raft, replace a dead battery in the Class B EPIRB, and install a flare kit in the wheelhouse. Again, there was no mention of stability tests, but the vessel was well within the law. Bob Brown also neglected to refile documentation for the Andrea Gail after altering her hull, although neither discrepancy was Simonitsch’s problem. He was paid to look at a boat and evaluate what he saw. In November, 1990, the principal surveyor for Marine Safety Consultants, Inc., the company that employed Simonitsch, inspected the Andrea Gail one last time. “The vessel is well suited for its purpose,” he wrote. “Submitted without prejudice, David C. Dubois.”

  If Billy Tyne were inclined to worry, though, there were a number of things about the Andrea Gail that might have given him pause. First of all, according to Tommy Barrie of the Allison, she had a boxy construction and a forward wheelhouse that took the seas hard. She was a rugged boat that didn’t concede much to the elements. And then there were the St. Augustine alterations. The extended whaleback deck was burdened with the weight of an icemaker and three dozen 55-gallon drums, so her center of gravity had been raised and she would recover from rolls a little more slowly. Only a couple of other boats in the fleet—the Eagle Eye, the Sea Hawk—store fuel oil on their upper decks. The portside bulwark on the Andrea Gail could be a problem, too. It had been raised and extended to protect the fishing gear, but it also tended to hold water on deck. A few years earlier, she’d taken a big sea over the stern and was pushed so far over that her rudder came partway out of the water. Bob Brown was on board, and he sprinted up to the wheelhouse and put the helm around; at the same moment the boat rode up the face of another big sea. Slowly, the Andrea Gail righted herself and cleared her decks; everything was fine except that the bulwark had been flattened like a tin can.

  One could argue that if a wave takes a piece of a boat out, maybe it shouldn’t be there. Or one could argue that that’s just what waves do—tear down what men put up. Either way, the incident was unsettling. Brown blamed it on the inexperience of the man at the helm and said that it was his own quick action that saved the boat. The crew didn’t see it that way. They saw a boat pinned on her port side by a mass of water and then righted by freak wave action. In other words, they saw bad luck briefly followed by good. The bulwark was replaced as soon as they got in, and nobody mentioned it again.

  Bob Brown’s reputation in Gloucester is a complex one. On the one hand he’s a phenomenally successful businessman who started with nothing and still works as hard as any crew member on any of his boats. On the other hand, it’s hard to find a fisherman in town who has anything good to say about him. Fishing’s a marginal business, though, and people don’t succeed in it by being well liked, they succeed by being tough. Some—such as Gloucester fisherman “Hard” Bob Millard—are tough on themselves, and some are tough on their employees. Brown is tough on both. When he was a young man, people called him Crazy Brown because he took such horrific risks, tub-trawling for cod and haddock in an open wooden boat all winter long. He had no radio, loran, or fathometer and worked alone because no one would go with him. He remembers winter days when he had to slide a skiff out across the harbor ice just to get to his mooring. “I had a family to feed and I was intent upon doing that,” he says.

  Only once in his life did he work for someone else, a six-month stint with a company that was exploring the lobster population on the continental shelf. That was in 1966; three years later he was working two hundred miles offshore in a forty-foot wooden boat. “Never so much as cracked a pane of glass,” he says. “Bigger doesn’t always mean better.” Eventually he was running four or five sword boats out of Gloucester and pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. One winter he and his son started accumulating ice on deck on their way back from Georges Bank. “If you’re making ice on Georges you know you’re going to be in real trouble closer to land,” he says. “We went back out and that night it blew a hundred from the northwest and snowed. The wind gauge only goes to a hundred and it was pegged for three days straight—pegged like it was broken. We were in a steel boat and it didn’t seem so bad, we were comfortable enough. Steel is tough compared to wood, don’t let anyone tell you different. Anyone tells you different, they’re a romanticist. Steel goes down faster, though. It goes down…well, like a load of steel.”

  The bad feeling between Bob Brown and the town of Gloucester hit bottom in 1980, when Brown lost a man off a boat named the Sea Fever. The Sea Fever was a fifty-foot wooden boat with a crew of three that was hauling lobster traps off Georges Bank. It was late November and the Weather Service predicted several days of moderate winds, but they were catastrophically wrong. One of the worst storms on record had just drawn a deep breath off the Carolinas. It screamed northward all night and slammed into Georges Bank around dawn, dredging up seventy-foot waves in the weird shallows of the continental shelf. To make matters worse, a crucial offshore data buoy had been malfunctioning for the past two and a half months, and the Weather Service had no idea what was going on out there. The men on the Sea Fever and on another boat, the 55-foot Fair Wind, woke up to find themselves in a fight for their lives.

  The Fair Wind got the worse end of the deal. She flipped end over end in an enormous wave and her four crew were trapped in the flooded pilothouse. One of them, a shaggy 33-year-old machinist named Ernie Hazard, managed to gulp some air and pull himself through a window. He burst to the surface and swam to a self-inflating life raft that had popped up, tethered, alongside the boat. The Fair Wind continued to founder, hull-up, for another hour, but the rest of the crew never made it out, so Hazard finally cut the tether and set himself adrift. For two days he scudded through the storm, capsizing over and over, until a Navy P-3 plane spotted him and dropped an orange smoke marker. He was picked up by a Coast Guard cutter and then rushed by helicopter to a hospital on Cape Cod. He had survived two days in his underwear on the North Atlantic. Later, when asked how long it took him to warm up after his ordeal, he said, without a hint of irony, “Oh, three or four months.”

  The Sea Fever fared a little better, but not much. She took a huge sea and lost all her windows; the half-inch safety glass burst as if it had been hit by a wrecking ball. The captain, who happened to be Bob Brown’s son, turned downsea to avoid any more flooding, but the wave put them on their beam ends and swept one of the crew out of the wheelhouse and over the side. The man’s name was Gary Brown (no relation); while one of the remaining crew scrambled below deck to restart the engine, the other threw a lifesaver overboard to save Brown. It dropped right in front of him but he made no attempt to grab it. Brown just drifted away, a dazed look in his eyes.

  The other two men called a mayday, and an hour later a Coast Guard helicopter was pounding overhead in the wild dark. By then the two men on board the Sea Fever had righted her and pumped her out. Do you wish to remain with your vessel, or do you wish to be taken off by hoists? the helicopter pilot asked over the radio. We’ll stay with the boat, they radioed back. The pilot lowered a bilge pump and then veered back towards shore because he was running out of fuel. On the way back he turned on his “Night Sun” searchli
ght to look for Gary Brown, but all he could see were the foam-streaked waves. Brown had long since gone under.

  Four years later, U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro in Boston ruled that the National Weather Service was negligent in their failure to repair the broken data buoy. Had it been working, he wrote, the Weather Service might have predicted the storm; and furthermore, they failed to warn fishermen that they were making forecasts with incomplete information. This was the first time the government had ever been held responsible for a bad forecast, and it sent shudders of dread through the federal government. Every plane crash, every car accident could now conceivably be linked to weather forecasting. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration appealed the decision, and it was quickly overturned by a higher court.

  None of this was Bob Brown’s fault, of course. There’s nothing irresponsible about going to Georges in November—he’d done it his whole life, and worse—and the storm was completely unforecast. Moreover, a larger steel-hulled boat sank while the Sea Fever remained afloat; that said a lot about her crew and general state of repair. Still, a man had died on one of Bob Brown’s boats, and that was all a lot of people needed to know. A story went around about how Bob Brown once spotted the biggest wave of his life—an enormous Grand Banks rogue—and didn’t even stop fishing, he just kept hauling his gear. People started calling him “Suicide” Brown, because working for him meant risking your life. And then it happened again.

  It was the mid-eighties and boats were making a million dollars a year. Brown was out on the Grand Banks on the Hannah Boden, and he found himself having to haul back a full set of gear in a sixty-knot breeze. At one point a wave swept the deck, and when the boat climbed back out of the whitewater, two men had gone overboard. They were wearing rain gear and thigh-high rubber boots and could hardly move in the freezing Newfoundland water. One of them went under immediately, but the other man was smashed back against the hull, and a quick-thinking member of the crew extended a gaff hook over the side for him to grab. The hook went through the man’s hand, but the situation was too desperate to worry about it and they hauled him on board anyway. They had to steam four hundred miles just to get him to within helicopter range to be taken to a hospital.