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

by Sebastian Junger

Hessel touches down at 4:40 at Air Station Cape Cod, and the other H-3 comes in a few minutes later. (While landing at Noman’s, as it turned out, the rotor wash flipped the raft over and knocked one of the fishermen unconscious. He was taken off in a Stokes litter.) It’s almost dark; rain flashes down diagonally through the airfield floodlights and scrub pine stretches away darkly for miles in every direction. The six survivors are ushered past the television cameras and led into a changing rooms upstairs. Stimpson and Bylander pull off their survival suits, and Bylander curls up on a couch while Stimpson goes back downstairs. The simple fact of being alive has her so wired she can hardly sit still. The Coast Guardsmen are gathered with the reporters in a small television room, and Stimpson wanders in and finds Leonard sitting miserably on the floor, back to the wall. He’s not saying a word.

  He didn’t want to leave the boat, Stimpson explains to a local reporter. It was his home, and everything he owned was on it.

  Dave Coolidge, the Falcon pilot that flew the previous night, walks up to Stimpson and shakes her hand. Camera bulbs flash. Boy, are we glad to see you two, he says. It was a long night, I was afraid you weren’t going to make it. Stimpson says graciously, When we heard you on the radio we said, Yes, we’re going to make it. We’re not just going to perish out here without anyone knowing.

  The reporters gradually drift off, and Leonard retires to an upstairs room. Stimpson stays and answers questions for the rescue crew, who are very interested in the relationship between Leonard and the two women. His reactions weren’t quite what we expected, one of the Guardsmen admits. Stimpson explains that she and Bylander don’t know Leonard very well, they met him through their boss.

  Sue and I had been working several months without a break, she says. This trip was going to be our vacation.

  While they’re talking, the phone rings. One of the Falcon pilots goes to answer it. What time was that? the pilot says, and everyone in the room stops talking. How many were they? What location?

  Without a word the Coast Guardsmen get up and leave, and a minute later Stimson hears toilets flushing. When they come back, one of them asks the Falcon pilot where they went down.

  South of Montauk, he says.

  The Guardsmen zip up their flight suits and file out the door. A rescue helicopter has just ditched fifty miles offshore and now five National Guardsmen are in the water, swimming.

  INTO THE ABYSS

  The Lord bowed the heavens and came down, thick darkness under his feet. The channels of the sea were seen, and the foundations of the world were laid bare.

  —SAMUEL 22

  “I DIDN’T know there was a problem, I just knew the Andrea Gail was supposed to be in any day,” says Chris Cotter, Bobby’s Shatford’s girlfriend. “I went to bed and just before dawn I had this dream. I’m on the boat and it’s real grey and ugly out and it’s rollin’ and rockin’ and I’m screaming, BOBBY! BOBBY! There’s no answer so I walk around the boat and go down into the fishhole and start digging. There’s all this slime and weeds and slimy shit and I’m hysterical and crazy and screaming for Bobby and finally I get down and there’s one of his arms. I find that and grab him and I know he’s gone. And then the wake-up comes.”

  It’s the morning of October 30th; there’s been no word from the Andrea Gail in over 36 hours. The storm is so tightly packed that few people in Gloucester—only a few hundred miles from the storm’s center—have any idea what’s out there. Chris lies in bed for a while, trying to shake off the dream, and finally gets up and shuffles into the kitchen. Her apartment looks out across Ipswich Bay, and Christine can see the water, itself cold and grey as granite, piling up against the granite shores of Cape Ann. The air is warm but an ill wind is backing around the compass, and Chris sits down at her kitchen table to watch it come. No one has said anything about a storm, there was nothing about it on the news. Chris smokes one cigarette after another, watching the weather come in off the sea, and she’s still there when Susan Brown knocks on the door.

  Susan is Bob Brown’s wife. She issues the paychecks for the Seagale Corporation, as Brown’s company is called, and the week before she’d given Christine the wrong check by mistake. She’d given her Murph’s check, which was larger than Bobby Shatford’s, and now she’s come back to rectify the mistake. Chris invites her in and immediately senses that something is wrong. Susan seems uncomfortable, glancing around and refusing to look Chris in the eye.

  Listen, Chris, Susan says finally, I’ve got some bad news. I’m not sure how to say this. We don’t seem to be able to raise the Andrea Gail.

  Chris sits there, stunned. She’s still in the dream—still in the dark slimy stink of the fishhole—and the news just confirms what she already knows: He’s dead. Bobby Shatford is dead.

  Susan tells her they’re still trying to get through and that the boat probably just lost her antennas, but Chris knows better; in her gut she knows it’s wrong. As soon as Susan leaves, Chris calls Mary Anne Shatford, Bobby’s sister. Mary Anne tells her it’s true, they can’t raise Bobby’s boat, and Chris drives down to the Nest and rushes in through the big heavy door. It’s only ten in the morning but already people are standing around with beers in their hands, red-eyed and shocked. Ethel is there, and Bobby’s other sister, Susan, and his brother, Brian, and Preston, and dozens of fishermen. Nothing’s sure yet—the boat could still be afloat, or the crew could be in a life raft or drunk in some Newfoundland bar—but people are quietly assuming the worst.

  Chris starts drinking immediately. “People didn’t want to give me the details because I was totally out of my mind,” she says. “Everybody was drunk cause that’s what we do, but the crisis made it even worse, just drinkin’ and drinkin’ and cryin’ and drinkin’, we just couldn’t conceive that they were gone. It was in the paper and on the television and this is my love, my friend, my man, my drinking partner, and it just couldn’t be. I had pictures of what happened, images: Bobby and Sully and Murph just bug-eyed, knowing this is the final moment, looking at each other and this jug of booze goin’ around real fast because they’re tryin’ to numb themselves out, and then Bobby goes flyin’ and Sully goes under. But what was the final moment? What was the final, final thing?”

  The only person not at the Crow’s Nest is Bob Brown. As owner of the boat he may well not feel welcome there, but he’s also got work to do—he’s got a boat to find. There’s a single sideband in his upstairs bedroom, and he’s been calling on 2182 since early yesterday for both his boats. Neither Billy Tyne nor Linda Greenlaw will come in. Oh boy, he thinks. At nine-thirty, after trying a few more times, Brown drives twenty miles south along Route 128 through the grey rocky uplands of the North Shore. He parks at the King’s Grant Inn in Danvers and walks into the conference room for the beginning of a two-day New England Fisheries Management Council meeting. The wind is moving heavily through the treetops now, piling dead leaves up against a chainlink fence and spitting rain down from a steel sky. It’s not a storm yet, but it’s getting there.

  Brown takes a seat at the back of the room, notebook in hand, and endures a long and uninteresting meeting. Someone brings up the fact that the Soviet Union has disintegrated into different countries, and U.S. fishing laws need to be changed accordingly. Another person cites a Boston Globe article that says that cod, haddock, and flounder populations are so low that regulations are useless—the species are beyond saving. The National Marine Fisheries Service is not the sole institution with scientific knowedge on pelagic issues, a third person counters. The meeting finally adjourns after an hour of this, and Bob Brown gets up to talk with Gail Johnson, whose husband, Charlie, is out on the Banks at that moment. Charlie owns the Seneca, which had put into Bay Bulls, Newfoundland, a few weeks earlier with a broken crankshaft.

  Did you hear anything from your husband? Brown asks.

  Yeah, but I could hardly get him. He’s east of the Banks, and they’ve got bad weather out there.

  I know they do, Brown says. I know they do.

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sp; Brown asks her to call him if Charlie hears anything about either of his boats. Then he hurries home. As soon as he arrives he goes up to his bedroom and tries the single sideband again, and this time—thank God—Linda comes through. He can hear her only faintly though the static.

  I haven’t been able to reach Billy in a couple of days, Linda shouts. I’m worried about them.

  Yeah, I’m worried too, says Brown. Keep trying him. I’ll check back.

  At six o’clock that night, the time he generally checks in with his boats, Brown tries one last time to raise the Andrea Gail. Not a sign. Linda Greenlaw hasn’t been able to raise her, either, nor has anyone else in the fleet. At 6:15 on October 30th, two days to the hour after Billy Tyne was last heard from, Brown calls the Coast Guard in Boston and reports the vessel missing. I’m afraid my boat’s in trouble and I fear the worst, he says. He adds that there have been no distress calls from her and no signals from her EPIRB. She has disappeared without a trace. In some senses that’s good news because it may just mean she’s lost her antennas; a distress call or EPIRB signal would be a different matter entirely. It would mean absolutely that something has gone wrong.

  Meanwhile, the news media have picked up on the story. Rumors are flying around Gloucester that the Allison has gone down along with the Andrea Gail, and that even the Hannah Boden may be in trouble. A reporter from News Channel Five calls Tommie Barrie’s wife, Kimberly, and asks her about the Allison. Kimberly answers that she talked to her husband the night before by single sideband and that, although she could barely hear him, he seemed to be fine. Channel Five broadcasts that tidbit on the evening news, and suddenly every fisherman’s wife on the East Coast is calling Kimberly Barrie to ask if she has any news about the fleet. She just repeats that she talked to her husband on the 29th, and that she could barely hear him. “As soon as the storms move offshore the weather service stops tracking them,” she says. “The fishermen’s wives are left hanging, and they panic. The wives always panic.”

  In fact the eastern fleet fared relatively well; they heave-to under heavy winds and a long-distance swell and just wait it out. Barrie even contemplates fishing that night but decides against it; no one knows where the storm is headed and he doesn’t want to get caught with his gear in the water. Barrie keeps trying Billy every couple of hours throughout the night of the 28th and the following day, and by October 30th he thinks Billy may have drifted out of range. He radios Linda and tells her that something is definitely wrong, and Bob Brown should get a search going. Linda agrees. That night, after the boats have set their gear out, the captains get together on channel 16 to set up a drift model for the Andrea Gail. They have an extremely low opinion of the Coast Guard’s ability to read ocean currents, and so they pool their information, as when tracking swordfish, to try to figure out where a dead boat or a life raft would have gone. “The water comes around the Tail and wants to go up north,” Barrie says. “By talking to boats at different places and putting them together, you can get a pretty detailed map of what the Gulf Stream is doing.”

  Late on the night of the 30th, Bob Brown calls the Canadian Coast Guard in Halifax and says that the Andrea Gail is probably proceeding home along a route that cuts just south of Sable Island. He adds that Billy usually doesn’t call in during his thirty-day trips. The Canadian cutter Edward Cornwallis—already at sea to help the Eishin Maru—starts calling for the Andrea Gail every quarter hour on channel 16. “No joy on indicated frequency for contacting Andrea Gail,” she reports later that morning. Halifax initiates a communications search as well, on every frequency in the VHF spectrum, but also meets with failure. The fishing vessel Jennie and Doug reports hearing a faint “Andrea Gail” at 8294 kilohertz, and for the next twelve hours Halifax tries that frequency but cannot raise her. Judith Reeves on the Eishin Maru thinks she hears someone with an English accent radioing the Andrea Gail that he’s coming to their aid, but she can’t make out the name of the vessel. She never hears the message again. A SpeedAir radar search picks up an object that might possibly be the Andrea Gail, and Halifax tries to establish radio contact, without success. At least half a dozen vessels around Sable Island—the Edward Cornwallis, the Lady Hammond, the Sambro, the Degero, the Yankee Clipper, the Melvin H. Baker, and the Mary Hitchins—are conducting communications searches, but no one can raise them. They’ve fallen off the edge of the world.

  The Rescue Coordination Center in New York, meanwhile, is still trying to figure out exactly who is on the crew. Bob Brown doesn’t know for sure—often owners don’t even want to know—and even the various friends and family aren’t one hundred percent certain. Finally the Coast Guard gets a call from a Florida fisherman named Douglas Kosco, who says he used to fish on the Andrea Gail and knows who the crew are. He runs down the list of crew as he knows it: Captain Billy Tyne, from Gloucester. Bugsy Moran, also from Gloucester but living in Florida. Dale Murphy from Cortez, Florida. Alfred Pierre, the only black guy on board, from the Virgin Islands but with family in Portland.

  Kosco says that the fifth crew member was from the Haddit—Tyne’s old boat—and that Merrit Seafoods in Pompano has his name. I was supposed to go on this trip, but I got off at the last moment, he says. I don’t know why, I just got a funny feeling and stepped off.

  Kosco gives the Coast Guardsman a phone number in Florida where he gets messages. (He’s offshore so much that he doesn’t have his own phone.) I think they may have gone shorthanded—I hope they did, he says. I don’t think Billy could’ve found anyone else so fast…

  It’s wishful thinking. The morning Kosco left, Billy called up Adam Randall and asked him if he wanted a job. Randall said yes, and Billy told him to get up to Gloucester as fast as possible. Randall showed up with his father-in-law, checked the boat over, and got spooked like Kosco had. He walked off. So Billy called David Sullivan and happened to catch him at home. Sully reluctantly agreed to go, and arrived at the State Fish Pier an hour later with his seabag over his shoulder. The Andrea Gail went to sea with six men, a full crew. Kosco doesn’t know this, though; all he knows is that a last-minute decision five weeks ago probably saved his life.

  At about the same time that Kosco confesses his good luck to the Coast Guard, Adam Randall settles onto the couch in his home in East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, to watch the evening news. It’s a rain-lashed Halloween night, and Randall has just come back from taking his kids out trick-or-treating. His girlfriend, Christine Hansen, is with him. She’s a pretty, highly put-together blonde who drives a sports car and works for AT&T. The local news comes on, and Channel Five reports a boat named the Andrea Gail missing somewhere east of Sable Island. Randall sits up in his seat. That was my boat, honey, he says.

  What?

  That’s the boat I was supposed to go on. Remember when I went up to Gloucester? That’s the boat. The Andrea Gail.

  MEANWHILE, the worst crisis in the history of the Air National Guard has been unfolding offshore. At 2:45 that afternoon—in the midst of the Satori rescue—District One Command Center in Boston receives a distress call from a Japanese sailor named Mikado Tomizawa, who is in a sailboat 250 miles off the Jersey coast and starting to go down. The Coast Guard dispatches a C-130 and then alerts the Air National Guard, which operates a rescue group out of Suffolk Airbase in Westhampton Beach, Long Island. The Air Guard covers everything beyond maritime rescue, which is roughly defined by the fuel range of a Coast Guard H-3 helicopter. Beyond that—and Tomizawa was well beyond that—an Air Guard H-60 has to be used, which can be refueled in midflight. The H-60 flies in tandem with a C-130 tanker plane, and every few hours the pilot comes up behind the tanker and nudges a probe into one of the hoses trailing off each wing. It’s a preposterously difficult maneuver in bad weather, but it allows an H-60 to stay airborne almost indefinitely.

  The Air Guard dispatcher is on the intercom minutes after the mayday comes in, calling for a rescue crew to gather at “ODC,” the Operations Dispatch Center. Dave Ruvola, the helicopter pilot, meets hi
s copilot and the C-130 pilots in an adjacent room and spreads an aeronautical chart of the East Coast on the table. They study the weather forecasts and decide they will execute four midair refuelings—one immediately off the coast, one before the rescue attempt, and two on the way back. While the pilots are plotting their refueling points, a rescue swimmer named John Spillane and another swimmer named Rick Smith jog down the hallway to Life Support to pick up their survival gear. A crewcut supply clerk hands them Mustang immersion suits, wetsuits, inflatable life vests, and mesh combat vests. The combat vests are worn by American airmen all over the world and contain the minimum amount of gear—radio, flare kit, knife, strobe, matches, compass—needed to survive in any environment. They put their gear in duffel bags and leave the building by a side door, where they meet the two pilots in a waiting truck. They get in, slam the doors shut, and speed off across the base.

  A maintenance crew has already towed a helicopter out of the hanger and fueled it up, and flight engineer Jim Mioli is busy checking the records and inspecting the engine and rotors. It is a warm, windy day, the scrub pine twisting and dancing along the edge of the tarmac and sea birds sawing their way back and forth against a heavy sky. The pararescue jumpers load their gear in through the jump door and then take their seats in the rear of the aircraft, up against the fuel tanks. The pilots climb into their angled cockpit seats, go through the preflight checklist, and then fire the engines up. The rotors thud to life, losing the sag of their huge weight, and the helicopter shifts on its tires and is suddenly airborne, tilting nose-down across the scrub. Ruvola bears away to the southeast and within minutes has crossed over to open ocean. The crew, looking down out of their spotters’ windows, can see the surf thundering against Long Island. Up and down the coast, as far as they can see, the shore is bordered in white.