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

by Sebastian Junger

  When consciousness returned, I found myself at the surface, and managed to get a dozen good inspirations. Land was about four hundred yards distant, and I used a bale of silk and then a long wooden plank to assist me to shore. On landing, and getting behind a sheltering rock, no effort was required to produce copius emesis. After the excitement, sound sleep set in, and this sleep lasted three hours, when a profuse diarrhea came on, evidently brought on by the sea water ingested. Until morning broke all my muscles were in a constant tremor which could not be controlled. (Several weeks later) I was sleeping in a comfortable bed and, late in the evening, a nightmare led to my having a severe struggle with the bedroom furniture, finally taking a “header” out of the bed and coming to grief on the floor.

  Lowson guesses that laryngospasm prevented water from entering his lungs when he was unconscious. The crew of the Andrea Gail either have laryngospasms or completely inundated lungs. They are suspended, open-eyed and unconscious, in the flooded enclosures of the boat. The darkness is absolute and the boat may already be on her way to the bottom. At this point only a massive amount of oxygen could save these men. They have suffered, at most, a minute or two. Their bodies, having imposed increasingly drastic measures to keep functioning, have finally started to shut down. Water in the lungs washes away a substance called surfactant, which enables the alveoli to leach oxygen out of the air. The alveoli themselves, grape-like clusters of membrane on the lung wall, collapse because blood cannot get through the pulmonary artery. The artery has constricted in an effort to shunt blood to areas of the lungs where there is more oxygen. Unfortunately, those don’t exist. The heart labors under critically low levels of oxygen and starts to beat erratically—“like a bag full of worms,” as one doctor says. This is called ventricular fibrillation. The more irregularly the heart beats, the less blood it moves and the faster life functions decline. Children—who have proportionally stronger hearts than adults—can maintain a heartbeat for up to five minutes without air. Adults die faster. The heart beats less and less effectively until, after several minutes, there’s no movement at all. Only the brain is alive.

  The central nervous system does not know what has happened to the body; all it knows is that not enough oxygen is getting to the brain. Orders are still being issued—Breathe! Pump! Circulate!—that the body cannot obey. If the person were defibrillated at that moment, he might possibly survive. He could be given cardiopulmonary resuscitation, put on a respirator, and coaxed back to life. Still, the body is doing everything it can to delay the inevitable. When cold water touches the face, an impulse travels along the trigeminal and vagus nerves to the central nervous system and lowers the metabolic rate. The pulse slows down and the blood pools where it’s needed most, in the heart and skull. It’s a sort of temporary hibernation that drastically reduces the body’s need for oxygen. Nurses will splash ice water on the face of a person with a racing heart to trigger the same reaction.

  The diving reflex, as this is called, is compounded by the general effect of cold temperature on tissue—it preserves it. All chemical reactions, and metabolic processes, become honey-slow, and the brain can get by on less than half the oxygen it normally requires. There are cases of people spending forty or fifty minutes under lake ice and surviving. The colder the water, the stronger the diving reflex, the slower the metabolic processes, and the longer the survival time. The crew of the Andrea Gail do not find themselves in particularly cold water, though; it may add five or ten minutes to their lives. And there is no one around to save them anyway. The electrical activity in their brain gets weaker and weaker until, after fifteen or twenty minutes, it ceases altogether.

  The body could be likened to a crew that resorts to increasingly desperate measures to keep their vessel afloat. Eventually the last wire has shorted out, the last bit of decking has settled under the water. Tyne, Pierre, Sullivan, Moran, Murphy, and Shatford are dead.

  THE WORLD OF THE LIVING

  The sea had kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and his shipmates called him mad.

  —HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby-Dick

  ALBERT JOHNSTON, fifty miles south of the Tail on the Mary T, gets hit a few hours after the Andrea Gail but just as hard. The first sign of the storm is a massive amount of static over the VHF, and then the wind comes: thirty, forty, fifty knots, and finally it tears the anemometer off buoy #44138. The buoy is about fifty miles northwest of Johnston’s position and pegs 56 knots before flatlining at the bottom of the chart. Wind speeds above the interference of the wave crests are probably half again as high. The center of the low slides past Johnston late on the 28th and continues curving back around toward the coast throughout the next day. That motion spares Johnston the worst of the storm. It also, as far as he’s concerned, spares him his life.

  Johnston jogs into the wind and seas until night falls and then turns around and goes with it. He doesn’t want to take the chance of running into a rogue wave in the dark and blowing his windows out. Throughout the early hours of October 29th, he surfs downwind on the backs of the huge seas, following a finger of cold Labrador Current, and when dawn breaks he turns around and fights his way northward again. He wants to gain enough sea room so that he won’t hit the Gulf Stream when he runs south again the following night. On the second day the crew fight their way onto the deck to check the fishhold and lazarette hatches and tighten the anchor fastenings. The sun has come out, glancing dully off the green ocean, and the wind screams out of the east, setting the cables to moaning and sending long streaks of foam scudding through the air. Radio waves become so bogged down in the saturated air that the radar stops working; at one point an unidentified Japanese sword boat appears out of nowhere, searchlight prying into the gloom, and passes within a few hundred yards of the Mary T. On the steeper seas she can’t get her bow up in time and plunges straight through the wall of water. Nothing but her wheelhouse shows and then slowly, unstoppably, her bow rises back up. The two vessels pass by each other without a word or a sign, unable to communicate, unable to help each other, navigating their own courses through hell.

  Except for that one expedition on deck to check the fishhold, the crew keep to their bunks and Johnston stays bolted to the wheelhouse floor, wrestling the helm and jotting down notes in the ship log. His entries are terse, bullet descriptions of the unending chaos outside. “NE 80-100 winds came on as we passed through west side of eye,” he records on the 29th. “Seas 20-30 feet. Dangerous Storm to move E 15 kts become station drift SW & merge with Grace.” Johnston is one of the most meteorologically inclined captains of the sword fleet, and he’s been keeping a weather eye on Hurricane Grace, which has been quietly slipping up the coast. At 8 AM on the 29th, Grace collides with the cold front, as predicted, and goes reeling back out to sea. She’s moving extremely fast and packing eighty-knot winds and thirty-foot seas. She’s a player now, an important—if dying—element in the atmospheric machinery assembling itself south of Sable. Grace crosses the 40th parallel that afternoon, and at 8 PM on October 29th, Hurricane Grace runs into the Sable Island storm.

  The effect is instantaneous. Tropical air is a sort of meteorological accelerant that can blow another storm system through the roof, and within hours of encountering Hurri cane Grace, the pressure gradient around the storm forms the equivalent of a cliff. Weather charts plot barometric pressure the way topographical maps plot elevation, and in both cases, the closer together the lines are, the steeper the change. Weather charts of the Grand Banks for the early hours of October 30th show isobaric lines converging in one black mass on the north side of the storm. A storm with tightly packed isobaric lines is said to have a steep pressure gradient, and the wind will rush downhill, as it were, with particular violence. In the case of the storm off Sable Island, the wind starts rushing into the low at speeds up to a hundred miles an hour. As a NOAA disaster report put it blandly a year later, “The dangerous storm previously forecast was no
w fact.”

  The only good thing about such winter gales, as far as coastal residents are concerned, is that they tend to travel west-to-east offshore. That means their forward movement is subtracted from their windspeed: A seventy-knot wind from a storm moving away at twenty knots effectively becomes a fifty-knot wind. The opposite is also true—forward movement is added to wind speed—but that almost never happens on the East Coast. The atmospheric movement is all west-to-east in the midlatitudes, and it’s nearly impossible for a weather system to overcome that. Storms may wobble northeast or southeast for a while, but they never really buck the jet stream. It takes a freakish alignment of variables to permit that to happen, a third cog in the huge machinations of the sky.

  Generally speaking, it takes a hurricane.

  By October 30th, the Sable Island storm is firmly imbedded between the remnants of Hurricane Grace and the Canadian high. Like all large bodies, hurricanes have a hard time slowing down, and her counterclockwise circulation continues long after her internal structures have fallen apart. The Canadian high, in the meantime, is still spinning clockwise with dense, cold air. These two systems function like huge gears that catch the storm between their teeth and extrude it westward. This is called a retrograde; it’s an act of meteorological defiance that might happen in a major storm only every hundred years or so. As early as October 27th, NOAA’s Cray computers in Maryland were saying that the storm would retrograde back toward the coast; two days later Bob Case was in his office watching exactly that happen on GOES satellite imagery. Meteorologists see perfection in strange things, and the meshing of three completely independent weather systems to form a hundred-year event is one of them. My God, thought Case, this is the perfect storm.

  As a result of this horrible alignment, the bulk of the sword fleet—way out by the Flemish Cap—is spared the brunt of the storm, while everyone closer to shore gets pummeled. The 105-foot Mr. Simon, a hundred miles west of Albert Johnston, gets her aft door blown in, her wheelhouse flooded, and her anchor fastenings torn off. The anchor starts slamming around on deck and a crewman has to go out and cut it free. The Laurie Dawn 8 loses her antennas and then takes a wave down her breather pipes that stuffs one of her engines. Farther south down the coast the situation is even worse. A bulk carrier named the Eagle finds herself in serious trouble off the Carolinas, along with a freighter named the Star Baltic, and both struggle into port badly damaged. The 90-foot schooner Anne Khristine, built 123 years ago, sinks off the coast of Delaware and her crew has to be saved by Coast Guard helicopters. The bulk carrier Zarah, just fifty miles south of the Andrea Gail, takes ninety-foot seas over her decks that shear off the steel bolts holding her portholes down. Thirty tons of water flood the crew mess, continue into the officer’s mess, explode a steel bulkhead, tear through two more walls, flood the crew’s sleeping quarters, course down a companionway, and kill the ship’s engine. The Zarah is 550 feet long.

  And the sailing vessel Satori, alone at the mouth of the Great South Channel, is starting to lose the battle to stay afloat. Karen Stimpson crouches miserably by the navigation table and listens to the Tuesday morning NOAA forecast: ONE OF THE WORST STORMS SINCE THE BLIZZARD OF ’78, ALREADY THREE DOZEN BOATS BEACHED OR SUNK AT NAUSET BEACH. SHIP REPORTS OF 63 FOOT SEAS, WHICH IS PROBABLY HIGH BUT A SIGN OF PROBLEMS UPCOMING. HEAVY SURF ADVI-SORY BEING ISSUED DESPITE TEMPORARY LULL IN THE WIND FIELD.

  Instead of abating, as Leonard insisted, the storm just keeps getting worse; the seas are thirty feet and the winds are approaching hurricane force. The boat rolls helplessly on her beam-ends every time a wave catches her on the side. “We were taking such a hammering—real neck-snapping violence,” says Stimpson. “Things were flying, every wave was knocking us across the cabin. It was only a matter of time before the boat started to break up.” Bylander refuses to go on deck, and Leonard curls up on his bunk, sullen and silent, sneaking gulps off a whiskey bottle. Stimpson puts on every piece of clothing she has, climbs the narrow companionway and clips herself onto the lifeline.

  No matter what she does—lashing the tiller, running downwind, showing less jib—she can’t control the boat. Several times she’s snapped to the end of her tether by boarding seas. Stimpson knows that if they don’t keep their bow to the weather they’ll roll, so she decides they have no choice but to run the engine. She goes belowdeck to ask Leonard how much fuel they have, but he gives a different answer each time she asks. That’s a bad sign for both the fuel level and Leonard’s state of mind. But fuel isn’t their only problem, Leonard points out; there’s also the propeller itself. In such chaotic seas the prop keeps lifting out of the water and revving too high; eventually the bearings will burn out.

  While Leonard is explaining the subtleties of prop cavitation, the first knockdown occurs. A wave catches the Satori broadsides and puts her mast in the water; the entire crew crashes against the far wall. Canned food rockets across the galley and water starts pouring into the cabin. At first Stimpson thinks the hull has opened up—a death sentence—but the water has just burst through the main hatch. Debris and splintered glass litter the cabin, and the nav table is drenched. The single sideband is dead, and the VHF looks doubtful.

  Most of Stimpson’s experience is with wooden boats; in rough weather they tend to spring their caulking and sink. Fiberglass is a lot stronger but it, too, has limits. Stimpson just doesn’t know what those limits are. There seems to be no way to keep the boat pointed into the seas, no way to minimize the beating they’re taking. Even if the VHF can transmit a mayday—and it’s impossible to know that for sure—it only has a range of several miles. They’re fifty miles out at sea. Between waves, between slammings, Stimpson shouts, I think we should prepare a survival bag! In case we have to abandon ship!

  Bylander, grateful for something to do, sorts through the wreckage on the floor and stuffs tins of food, bottled water, clothes, and a wire cheese slicer into a sea bag. Sue, we don’t need the slicer, we can bite the cheese! Stimpson says, but Bylander just shakes her head. I’ve read about this and it’s the little niceties that make the difference! Ray, where are the boat cushions? While preparing their emergency bag, they get knocked over a second time. This one is even more violent than the first, and the boat is a long time in coming back up. Stimpson and Leonard pick themselves off the floor, bruised and dazed, and Bylander sticks her head out the hatch to check for damage on deck. My God, Karen! she screams. The life raft’s gone!

  “I was in a corner and I covered myself with soft things,” says Stimpson, “and with a flashlight I took about ten minutes and wrote some goodbyes and stuck it in a ziplock bag and put it in my clothing. That was the lowest point. We had no contact with anyone, it was the dark of the night—which brings its own kind of terror—and I had a sense that things were going to get worse. But it’s a strange thing. There was no sentiment there, no time for fear. To me, fear is two AM, walking down a city street and someone’s following me—that to me is a terror beyond words. What was happening was not a terror beyond words. It was a grim sense of reality, a scrambling to figure out what to do next, a determination to stay alive and keep other people alive, and an awareness of the dark noisy slamming of the boat. But it wasn’t a terror beyond words. I just had an overwhelming sense of knowing we weren’t going to make it.”

  Stimpson doesn’t know it, but Bylander tapes her passport to her stomach so her body can be identified. Both women, at this point, are prepared to die. After Stimpson finishes writing her goodbyes, she tells Leonard that it’s time to issue a mayday. Mayday comes from the French venez m’aider—come help me!—and essentially means that those on board have given up all hope. It’s up to someone else to save them. Leonard is motionless on his berth. Okay, he says. Stimpson forces her way out to the cockpit and Bylander sits down at the nav table to see if she can coax the VHF back to life.

  At 11:15 PM, October 29th, a freighter off Long Island picks up a woman’s terrified voice on the VHF: This is the Satori, the Satori, 39:49 nort
h and 69:52 west, we are three people, this is a mayday. If anyone can hear us, please pass our position on to the Coast Guard. Repeat, this is a mayday, if anyone can hear us, pass our position on to the Coast Guard…

  The freighter, the Gold Bond Conveyor, relays the message to Coast Guard operations in Boston, which in turn contacts the Coast Guard cutter Tamaroa in Provincetown Harbor. The Tamaroa has just come off Georges Bank, where she was conducting spot checks on the fishing fleet, and now she’s waiting out the weather inside Cape Cod’s huge flexed arm. A small Falcon jet scrambles from Air Station Cape Cod and the Tamaroa, 1,600 tons and 205 feet, weighs anchor at midnight and heads down the throat of the storm.

  The crew of the Satori have no way of knowing whether the radio is working, they just have to keep repeating the mayday and hope for the best. And even if the radio is working, they still have to be within two or three miles of another vessel for the signal to be heard. That’s a lot to ask for on a night like this. Bylander, wedged behind the nav table, broadcasts their name and position intermittently for half an hour without any response at all; they’re alone out there, as far as she can tell. She keeps trying—what else is there to do?—and Stimpson goes back on deck to try to keep the Satori pointed into the seas. She’s not there long when she hears the sound of an airplane fading in and out through the roar of the storm. She looks around frantically in the darkness, and a minute later a Falcon jet, flying low under the cloud cover, shrieks overhead and raises Bylander on the VHF. “Sue was so excited she was giddy,” Stimpson says, “but I wasn’t. I remember not feeling elated or relieved so much as like, instantly, I’d rejoined the world of the living.”

  The Falcon pilot circles just below cloud level and discusses what to do next over the VHF with Bylander. The Tamaroa won’t be there for another twelve hours, and they’ve got to keep the boat afloat until then, even if that means burning out the engine. They can’t afford to risk any more knockdowns. Bylander, against Leonard’s wishes, finally toggles the starter switch, and to her amazement it turns over. With the storm jib up and the prop turning away they can now get a few degrees to the weather. It’s not a lot, but it’s enough to keep from getting broached by the seas.