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

by Sebastian Junger

  October 30th, on shore, starts deceptively calm and mild; oak leaves skitter down the street and the midday sun has a thin warmth to it that people won’t feel again until spring. The only sign that something is amiss is along the coast, where huge grey swells start to roll in that can be heard miles inland. Swells are the outriders of sea weather, and if they keep getting bigger, the weather is approaching. The Gloucester Police Department blocks access to the shore but people go anyway, parking their cars half a mile away and walking through the rising wind and rain to hilltops where they can look out to sea. They are greeted by an ocean that has been wholly transformed. Swells march shoreward from the horizon in great, even bands, their white crests streaming sideways in the wind and their ranks breaking, reforming, and breaking again as they close in on Cape Ann. In the shallows they draw themselves up, hesitate, and then implode against the rocks with a force that seems to shake the entire peninsula. Air trapped inside their grey barrels gets blown out the back walls in geysers higher than the waves themselves. Thirty-foot seas are rolling in from the North Atlantic and attacking the town of Gloucester with a cold, heavy rage.

  By midafternoon the wind is hitting hurricane force and people are having a hard time walking, standing up, being heard. Moans emanate from the electric lines that only offshore fishermen have ever heard before. Waves inundate Good Harbor Beach and the parking lot in front of the Stop-n-Shop. They rip up entire sections of Atlantic Road. They deposit a fifteen-foot-high tangle of lobster traps and sea muck at the end of Grapevine Road. They fill the swimming pool of a Back Shore mansion with ocean-bottom rubble. They suck beach cobbles up their huge faces and sling them inland, smashing windows, peppering lawns. They overrun the sea wall at Brace Cove, spill into Niles Pond, and continue into the woods beyond. For a brief while it’s possible to surf across people’s lawns. So much salt water gets pumped into Niles Pond that it overflows and cuts Eastern Point in half. Eastern Point is where the rich live, and by nightfall the ocean is two feet deep in some of the nicest living rooms in the state.

  In several places around the state, houses float off their foundations and out to sea. Waves break through a thirty-foot sand dune at Ballston Beach in Truro and flood the headwaters of the Pamet River. Six-thousand-pound boat moorings drag inside Chatham Harbor. The Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant in Plymouth shuts down because seaweed clogs the condenser intakes. A Delta Airlines pilot at Logan is surprised to see spray from breaking waves top the two-hundred-foot cranes on Deer Island; just sitting on the runway, his airspeed indicator clocks eighty miles an hour. Houses are washed out to sea in Gloucester, Swampscott, and on Cape Cod. Rising waters inundate half of the town of Nantucket. A man is swept off the rocks in Point Judith, Rhode Island, and is never seen again, and a surfer dies trying to ride twenty-foot shore-break in Massachusetts. Plum Island is cut in half by the waves, as is Hough’s Neck and Squantum, in Quincy. Over one hundred houses are destroyed in the town of Scituate, and the National Guard has to be called out to help the inhabitants evacuate. One elderly woman is taken from her house by a backhoe while surf breaks down her front door.

  The winds have set so much water in motion that the ocean gets piled up against the continent and starts blocking the rivers. The Hudson backs up one hundred miles to Albany and causes flooding, and the Potomac does the same. Tides are five feet above normal in Boston Harbor, within one inch of an all-time Boston record. Had the storm occurred a week earlier, during the highest tides of the month, water levels would be a foot and a half higher, flooding downtown Boston. Storm surge and huge seas extinguish Isle of Shoals and Boone’s Island lighthouses off the coast of Maine. Some Democrats are cheered to see waves obliterate the front of President Bush’s summer mansion in Kennebunkport. Damage along the East Coast surpasses one and a half billion dollars, including millions of dollars in lobster pots and other fixed fishing gear.

  “The only light I can shed on the severity of the storm is that until then, we had never—ever—had a lobster trap move offshore,” says Bob Brown. “Some were moved thirteen miles to the west. It was the worst storm I have ever heard of, or experienced.”

  BY nightfall on the 30th—with wave heights at their peak and the East Coast bearing the full brunt of the storm—the Coast Guard finds itself with two major search-and-rescue operations on its hands. In Boston, a Coast Guardsman starts telephoning every harbormaster in New England, asking if the Andrea Gail is in port. If the town is too small to have a harbormaster, they ask a town selectman to walk down to the waterfront and take a look. Coast Guard cutters also poke their way along the coast checking every harbor and cove they can find. In Maine’s Jonesport area a cutter checks Sawyers Cove, Roque Harbor, Black Cove, Moose Peak Light, Chandler and Englishman Bay, Little Machias Bay, Machias Bay East Side, Machias Bay West Side, and Mistaken Harbor, all without success. The entire coast from Lubec, Maine, to eastern Long Island is scrutinized without turning up any sign of the Andrea Gail.

  The search for Rick Smith is in some ways simpler than for the Andrea Gail because the pilots know exactly where he went down, but a single human being—even with a strobe light—is extremely hard to spot in such conditions. (One pilot missed a five-hundred-foot freighter because it was obscured by waves during one leg of his search.) As a result, the combined assets of half a dozen East Coast airbases are thrown into the search. Smith has a wife and three daughters at home and he knows, personally, a significant proportion of the people who are looking for him. He’s one of the most highly trained survival swimmers in the world and if he hits the water alive, he’ll probably stay that way. He might eventually die of thirst, but he’s not going to drown.

  The first thing the Coast Guard does is drop a radio marker buoy where the other Guardsmen were picked up; the buoy drifts the way a person would, and the search area shifts continuously southwestward. Planes fly thirty-mile trackline searches five hundred feet above the water, but in these conditions the chances of spotting a man are only one in three, so some areas get flown over and over again. There are so many planes in the air, and the search area is so limited, that it’s a virtual certainty they’ll find him. And indeed, they find almost everything. They find the nine-man life raft pushed out of the helicopter by Jim Mioli. A Guard diver is dropped from a helicopter to knife it so it won’t throw off other searchers. They find the Avon raft abandoned by the Tamaroa, and rafts from other boats they didn’t even know about. And then, just before dusk on the 31st, a Coast Guard plane spots a stain of Day-Glo green dye in the water.

  PJs are known to carry dye for just such emergencies, and this undoubtably comes from Rick Smith. The pilot circles lower and sees a dark shape at the center—probably Rick Smith himself. The search plane crew drop a marker buoy, life raft, and flare kit, and the pilot radios the coordinates in to Boston. A helicopter is diverted to the scene and the cutter Tamaroa, two and a half hours away, changes course and starts heading for the spot. An H-60 launches from Elizabeth City, escorted by a tanker plane, and a Navy jet equipped with forward-looking infrared is readied for takeoff. If the rescuers can’t get Smith by helicopter, they’ll get him by ship; if they can’t get him by ship, they’ll drop a life raft; if he’s too weak to get into the life raft, they’ll drop a rescue swimmer. Smith is one of their own, and they’re going to get him one way or another.

  It’s full dark when the first helicopter, zeroed-in by the marker buoy, arrives on-scene. There’s no sign of Smith. The Coast Guard pilot who spotted him, debriefed back on-base, says the dye was fresh and he was “awful sure” there was a man in the middle of it. The seas were too rough to tell whether he swam to the life raft that was dropped to him, though. Three hours later one of the helicopter pilots radios that they’ve spotted Smith near the radio marker buoy. Another H-60 and tanker plane prepare to launch from Suffolk, but no sooner are those orders given than the pilot on-scene corrects himself: He didn’t spot a person, he spotted a life raft. It was probably dropped by the Coast Guard earlier that day. T
he Suffolk aircraft stand down.

  Throughout that night the storm slides south along the coast and then doubles back on itself, heading toward Nova Scotia and dissipating by the hour. The convective engine of the storm that sucks warm moist air off the ocean is finally starting to break down in cold northern water. By the morning of November 1st the conditions are stable enough to evacuate John Spillane, and he’s strapped into a rescue litter and carried out of his room and onto the aft deck of the Tamaroa. He’s hoisted up into the belly of an H-3 and flown to Atlantic City, where he’s rushed into intensive care and given two units of blood. A few hours later a Coast Guards man tracks down a search pilot who says that he dropped green dye into the water to mark a line he’d seen. That explains the dye but not the person spotted at the center of it. A Coast Guard survival specialist named Mike Hyde says that Smith could stay warm virtually forever in a quarter-inch wetsuit, but that he might drown by inhaling water into his lungs. There aren’t any charts or graphs for survival time in the conditions he was in, Hyde says.

  If Smith made it through the storm, though, Hyde’s personal guess is that he could survive another four days. Eventually, he’ll die of dehydration. The sea is much calmer now, but the search has been going full-bore for seventy-two hours without turning up anything; chances are almost nonexistent that Smith is alive. On the morning of November 2nd—the storm now over Prince Edward Island and failing fast—the cutter Tamaroa makes port at Shinnecock Inlet, Long Island, and Ruvola, Buschor, and Mioli are taken off by motor launch. Rick Smith’s wife, Marianne, is at Suffolk Airbase for the event, and several people express concern over her watching the airmen reunited with their families.

  What do they think, that I want those women to lose their husbands, too? she wonders. She takes John Brehm, the PJ supervisor, aside and says, Look, John, if they haven’t found Rick by now, they’re not going to. As far as I’m concerned, I’m a widow and I need to know what’s going to happen.

  Brehm expresses the hope that they might still find him, but Marianne just shakes her head. If he were alive, he’d signal, she says. He’s not alive.

  Marianne Smith, who’s nursing a three-week-old baby, practically hasn’t slept since the ditching. She found out about it late the first night, when someone from the airbase called and woke her up out of an exhausted sleep. It took her a minute to even understand what the person was saying, and when she did, he reassured her that it was a controlled ditching and everything would be fine. Things were not fine, though. First they wouldn’t tell her which four crew members had been picked up by the Tamaroa (she understandably assumed one of them was her husband), and then they said they’d spotted him at the center of some green dye, and then they lost him again. Now she’s between worlds, treated as a widow by everyone on base but still reassured that her husband will be found alive. No one, it seems, can openly face the fact that Rick Smith is dead. The planes keep going out, the grids keep getting flown.

  Finally, after nine days of round-the-clock flights, the Coast Guard suspends its search for Rick Smith. The consensus is that he must have hit the water so hard that he was knocked unconscious and drowned. Another possibility is that Spillane hit him when he landed, or that the life raft hit him, or that he jumped with his gunner’s strap on. The gunner’s strap is used to keep crewmen from falling out of helicopters, and if Smith jumped with it on, he’d have just dangled below the helicopter until Ruvola set it down.

  John Spillane prefers to believe that Smith was knocked out on impact. He was weighed down by a lot of gear, and he must have lost position during his fall and hit the water flat. Spillane’s only memory of the fall is exactly that: starting to flail and thinking, “My God, what a long way down.” Those words, or something very like them, are probably the last thoughts that went through Rick Smith’s mind.

  WHILE aircraft are crisscrossing the waters off the coast of Maryland, an even larger search continues for the Andrea Gail. Fifteen aircraft, including a Navy P-3 transferred from the Smith search, are flying grids southwest of Sable Island, where a life raft would most likely have drifted. A rumor ripples through Gloucester that Billy Tyne called someone on a satellite phone the night of the 29th, but Bob Brown chases the rumor down and tells the Coast Guard it’s bogus. Half the boats in the sword fleet—the Laurie Dawn 8, Mr. Simon, Mary T, and Eishin Maru—sustain considerable damage and cut their trips short. The eastern half of the fleet misses the full fury of the storm (“Oh, we only had about seventy-knot winds,” Linda Greenlaw recalls), but such extreme weather generally ruins the fishing for days, and most of the eastern boats head in as well.

  Nothing is seen or heard of the Andrea Gail until November 1st when Albert Johnston, steaming for home, plows straight through a cluster of blue fuel barrels. They’re a hundred miles southwest of Sable, and they all have AG stencilled on the side. “The barrels went down either side of the hull, I didn’t even have to change course,” says Johnston. “It was spooky. You know, just a few fuel barrels, that’s all that was left.”

  An hour later Johnston passes another cluster, then a third, and calls their position in to the Coast Guard. The barrels don’t, by themselves, mean the Andrea Gail went down—they could have just washed off the deck—but they’re not a good sign. The Canadian and American Coast Guards keep widening the search area without finding anything; finally, on November 4th, things start to turn up. A Coast Guardsman on a routine beach patrol around Sable Island finds a propane tank and radio beacon with Andrea Gail painted on them. The beacon is for locating fishing gear and has been switched on, which may have been a desperate attempt to surround the stricken boat with as many electronically active objects as possible. Normally they’re stowed in the “off” position.

  And then, on the afternoon of November 5th, an EPIRB washes up on Sable Island. It’s an orange 406-megahertz model, built by an American company named Koden, and the ring switch has been turned off. That means that it can’t signal even if it hits the water. The serial number is 986. It’s from the Andrea Gail.

  Like the bottled note thrown overboard from the schooner Falcon a century ago, the odds of something as small as an EPIRB winding up in human hands are absurdly small. And the odds of Billy Tyne disarming his EPIRB—there’s no reason to, it wouldn’t even save batteries—are even smaller. Bob Brown, Linda Greenlaw, Charlie Reed, no one who knows Billy can explain it. The fourteen-page incident log kept by the Canadian Coast Guard records the discovery of the propane tank and the radio beacon, but not of the EPIRB. The entire day, in fact, that the EPIRB is found—November 5th, 1991—is missing from the log. Rumors start creeping around Gloucester that the Coast Guard did pick up an EPIRB signal when the Andrea Gail was in trouble, but conditions were too severe to go out. And when, against all odds, the EPIRB washes up on Sable Island, the Coast Guard switches it off to cover themselves.

  Whether the rumors are fair or not, they’re in some ways beside the point. Conditions severe enough to frighten the Coast Guard are severe enough to prevent a rescue, and by the time the EPIRB started signalling—if it ever did—the crew of the Andrea Gail were probably doomed anyway. Judging by the rescue attempts off Long Island, even a helicopter hovering directly over the Andrea Gail crew would have been powerless to help them. Regardless, the EPIRB is duly transported back to the United States for inspection by the Federal Communications Commission.

  On November 6th, a Canadian pilot spots an uninflated life raft just off the Nova Scotia coast, but there’s no one inside it, and he loses sight of it before it can be recovered. Two days later the Hannah Boden, steaming home after three weeks at sea, spots another cluster of fuel barrels marked AG on the side, but there’s still no sign of the boat. Finally, a half hour before midnight on November 8th, the search for the Andrea Gail is permanently suspended. She’s been missing for almost two weeks, and planes have searched 116,000 square miles of ocean without finding any survivors. All they turned up was a little deck gear.

  “I WENT down to the f
ish pier a lot after the search ended,” says Chris Cotter. “I went there a lot, I went there alone and I’d go through these things—you know, picturing what happened to their bodies, that kind of horror. I’d reject it from my mind and my soul as soon as it blew in, and then I’d remember the good things, he’d come back to me and it would be okay. I miss him immensely, though, I fight it all the time. Later, I tell myself. I’ll see him later on.”

  The memorial service is held several days later at St. Ann’s Church, just up the hill from the Crow’s Nest. It’s the first service in thirteen years for Gloucestermen lost at sea, and it brings people out who don’t even know the men who died. The sea was their domain, they knew it well, Reverend Casey says quietly to the thousand people packed into his church for the service. I urge you to mourn not just for these three men, but for all the other brave people who gave their lives for Gloucester and its fishing industry.

  Mary Anne and Rusty Shatford read a poem about fishing, and Sully’s brother speaks, and some of the Tyne family speak. Bob and Susan Brown are at the service, but they say very little and leave as soon as it’s over. This is the third time men have died on one of Bob Brown’s boats and, regardless of fault, people in town are not inclined to forget it. After the service the mourners drive and walk down the steep hill to Rogers Street and pile into the Crow’s Nest and the Irish Mariner, where a wake is held for the next couple of days. Food is brought and people go to Sully’s brother’s apartment, then back to the Crow’s Nest, then over to the Tynes’, and back to the Nest again, endlessly, all weekend long.