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

by Sebastian Junger

  The storm hasn’t yet finished with people, though; hasn’t stopped reverberating through people’s lives. Eighteen months after the ditchings, a nor’easter roars up the coast that, even before it’s fully formed, meteorologists are referring to as the “Mother of All Storms.” It has a distinct eye, just like a hurricane, and a desperately low central barometric pressure. One ship in its path watches wave heights jump from three feet to twenty feet in less than two hours. The storm drops fifty inches of snow on the mountains of North Carolina and sets all-time barometric records from Delaware to Boston. Winds hit 110 miles an hour in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Coast Guard rescues 235 people off boats during the first two days alone. Wave heights surpass sixty feet off much of the East Coast and creep up toward one hundred feet off Nova Scotia. Data buoys record significant wave heights—the average of the top third—only a few feet lower than in the storm that sank the Andrea Gail. By the narrowest of margins the “Halloween Gale,” as that storm has come to be known, retains the record for most powerful nor’easter of the century.

  Caught in the worst of this is the 584-foot Gold Bond Conveyor, the freighter that, two years earlier, had relayed the Satori’s mayday to Boston. The Gold Bond Conveyor has a regular run between Halifax and Tampa carrying gypsum ore, and on March 14th, about a hundred miles southeast of where Billy Tyne went down, she runs into the Mother of All Storms. She’s the only vessel of any kind to encounter both storms at their height, and they happen to be two of the most powerful nor’easters of the century. One could say the vessel was marked. That evening the captain radios Halifax that waves are breaking over their upper decks, and shortly after midnight he calls again to say that they’re abandoning ship. The seas are a hundred feet and the snow is driving down sideways in the dark. Thirty-three men go over the side and are never seen again.

  But it’s still not over; the Halloween Gale has one last shoulder to tap. Adam Randall has been working steadily on the Mary T, but in February, Albert Johnston hauls her out for repairs and Randall has to find another job. He finds one on the Terri Lei, a tuna longliner out of Georgetown, South Carolina. The Terri Lei is a big, heavily built boat with a highly experienced crew, and she’s due to go out at the end of March. Chris Hansen, Randall’s girlfriend, drives him to Logan Airport for the flight south, but all the planes are grounded because of the blizzard—the Mother of All Storms. He gets a flight out the next day, but when he talks with Chris Hansen on the phone from South Carolina, she tells him she’s worried about him. Are you okay? There’s a funny sound in your voice, she says.

  Yeah, I’m fine, he says. I don’t really want to go on this trip. It’ll be good, though—maybe I’ll make some money.

  The night before leaving, the crew of the Terri Lei go to a local bar and get into a fight with the crew of another boat. Several men wind up in the hospital, but the next day, bruised and sore, the crew of the Terri Lei cut their lines and head out to sea. They’re going to work the deep waters just off the continental shelf, due east of Charleston. It’s spring, the fish are working their way up the Gulf Stream, and with a little luck they’ll make their trip in ten or twelve sets. On the night of April sixth they finish setting their gear and then Randall calls Chris Hansen on the ship-to-shore radio. They talk for over half an hour—ship to shore isn’t cheap, Randall’s phone bill is regularly five hundred dollars—and he tells Chris that they’d had some bad weather but it’s passed and all their gear is in the water. He says he’ll call her soon.

  Randall’s a tough one to categorize. He’s an expert fisherman and marine welder but has also, at various times, considered hairdressing or nursing as careers. He has a tattoo of a clipper ship on one arm, an anchor on the other, and a scar on his hand where he once stitched himself up with a needle and thread. He has the sort of long blond hair that one associates with English rock stars, but he also has the muscled build of a man who works hard. (“You can hit him with a hammer and he won’t bruise,” Chris Hansen says.) Randall says that at times he can feel ghosts swirling around the boat, the ghosts of men who died at sea. They’re not at peace. They want back in.

  The next morning the crew of the Terri Lei start hauling their gear in choppy seas and gusty winds. They’re 135 miles offshore and there are a lot of boats in the area, including a freighter en route from South America to Delaware. At 8:45 AM the Charleston Coast Guard pick up an EPIRB distress signal, and they immediately send out two aircraft and a cutter to investigate. It might be a false alarm—the weather is moderate and no ships have reported trouble—but they have to respond anyway. They home in on the radio signal and immediately spot the EPIRB amidst a scattering of deck gear. A short distance away floats a life raft with the canopy up and Terri Lei stencilled on one side.

  The boat herself has vanished and no one signals from the raft, so a swimmer drops into the water to investigate. He strokes over and hauls himself up on one of the grab lines. The raft is empty. No one got off the Terri Lei alive.

  AFTERWORD

  AFTER The Perfect Storm was published, Gloucester residents experienced a brief turn in the spotlight that culminated in Warner Bros. Entertainment filming a movie version of the book on the streets of their town. Harbor Loop was blocked to traffic, and actors were elbow-to-elbow with locals at the Crow’s Nest. Fishermen seemed to walk around with a bit more of a swagger, the dangers and importance of their trade having finally been noticed by the country at large.

  The first scenes were scheduled to be shot in town in mid-September 1999, but Hurricane Floyd began rolling up the coast a few days before filming, and I drove up to Gloucester to see what would happen. The first place I went was the waterfront, and I was chilled to see a boat named the Andrea Gail tied up at the town wharf. The vessel was just part of the movie set, but it was a sight no one in town had seen since late September 1991. Floyd missed Gloucester but generated a huge groundswell, and the next morning the mock Andrea Gail was sent out to get some storm footage. I went with the chase boat and watched an impressive variety of people—technical guys, producers, even Gloucester fishermen—turn pale and get sick over the gunwale. If you felt sick, you were supposed to raise your hand so that the rescue swimmer could stand next to you and make sure you didn’t fall overboard.

  One of the last scenes to be filmed in Gloucester was at St. Peter’s Church, where 700 locals were hired to shoot a memorial service for the dead fishermen. I wasn’t there, but I heard about it from a lot of people, including Wolfgang Petersen, the movie’s director. It was a strange blurring of fiction and reality, he said, one of the most intense experiences he’d ever had on set. During a eulogy given by the actress Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, whole sections of the audience started to cry, including family and friends of the original boat crew. They’d sat in the same church eight years earlier, listening to virtually the same words. Later, reviewing the takes, Mr. Petersen heard a faint thumping sound that he could not identify. Finally he realized it was the beating of Ms. Mastrantonio’s heart, picked up by a highly sensitive mic.

  Eventually the film crew moved on, and the locals took back their streets and their waterfront bars. The movie and the book brought some recognition to the fishing industry—people now understood that it was dangerous, brutal, and possibly even romantic—but little changed on the decks of the boats. Fishing continues to be one of the easiest ways in America to die while earning a paycheck. The yearly fatality rate for commercial fishermen is thirty to forty times the national workplace average. Not all fisheries have the same level of danger, however. Fishermen in California, Oregon, and Washington die at roughly twice the national rate for the industry, and those in the shellfish fleet die at three times the national rate. The deadliest fishery there, the Northwest Dungeness crab fleet, averaged 463 deaths per 100,000 between the years 2000 and 2006. The men of the Dungeness crab fleet would have been safer serving consecutive combat tours in Afghanistan than hauling crab pots in the Pacific for those six years.

  The New England
fisheries aren’t quite as dangerous as their West Coast counterparts, but boats still go down with shocking frequency. Since the Andrea Gail sank in 1991, at least 31 commercial fishermen have died off the New England coast. A year almost to the day after the Andrea Gail was lost, five men disappeared on the 72-foot trawler Atlantis out of New Bedford, Massachusetts. A 112-foot quahogger named Cape Fear sank with a crew of five during the winter of 1999; two died. Two years later the Starbound was run down by a Russian oil tanker 130 miles east of the Massachussetts coast, resulting in the death of three men—two of whom were from Gloucester. In December 2004 a New Bedford scalloper named the Northern Edge sank 45 miles southeast of Nantucket, taking five men with her. Four men died in January 2007 when a 75-foot dragger named the Lady of Grace capsized only 12 miles south of Hyannis. And in 2007 a stern trawler named the Lady Luck out of Newburyport, Massachussetts, rolled over for no apparent reason and sank in 500 feet of water about 30 miles southeast of Portland, Maine. The two young men on board didn’t even have time to send out a mayday.

  Many of the men who died were known in Gloucester because they drank in the waterfront bars when their boats put in to fill up with fuel or bait or ice. But no Gloucester boats were lost until 2009, when a 54-foot steel-hulled trawler named the Patriot left port for an overnight trip on the night of January 2nd. The boat was owned by a Gloucester native named Matteo Russo and his wife, Josephine, who was pregnant with their second child. Josephine’s father, John Orlando, crewed the ship with his son-in-law. Both men were from longtime Gloucester families and had spent most of their lives fishing. The Patriot was one of the best-equipped boats in the Gloucester groundfish fleet. She had a fire alarm that automatically signaled to a control station on shore, an emergency locating beacon, and a “vessel monitoring system,” or VMS, that pinged the National Marine Fisheries Service computers every hour. Fishermen refer to the VMS as an electronic bracelet because its primary use is to enforce fishing regulations, but it can also be used to locate vessels in an emergency.

  The Patriot was headed for China Beach, an area of sandy shallows in the middle of the well-known fishing grounds of Stellwagen Bank. At 12:30 AM, six and a half hours after leaving port, the Patriot’s VMS pinged from the northwest corner of Stellwagen. Forty-five minutes later, the boat’s automatic fire alarm was triggered, and the alarm company called both Josephine Russo and the Gloucester Fire Department. (The Coast Guard later determined that there was no fire on board—what set off the alarm remains a mystery.) The emergency beacon was not transmitting, which supposedly meant that the boat was still afloat—beacons signal automatically when they hit water—but Josephine told the Coast Guard that her husband’s cell phone was defaulting to voice mail. That was not a good sign. The Gloucester Fire Department sent a truck down to the harbor to check for the Patriot and then notified the Coast Guard that she was not in port and might be in trouble offshore.

  The Coast Guard delayed initiating a search-and-rescue for more than two hours while they tried to reach the Patriot by radio, phone, and e-mail. It was a delay that would prove controversial in the days and weeks that followed. Around 4 AM, a rescue helicopter was launched out of Air Station Cape Cod, a 47-foot motor lifeboat left Gloucester harbor, and an 87-foot coastal patrol boat left Boston, all bound for Stellwagen. About an hour later, deck gear and debris were spotted floating near the location of the Patriot’s last VMS ping. Soon thereafter, two bodies were recovered from the water.

  Part of the controversy surrounding the Coast Guard’s slow response stemmed from the fact that they fumbled around for more than an hour trying to access the VMS data. Positional information that streams in from hundreds of commercial fishing boats is handled by the National Marine Fisheries Service, which uses it to ensure that boats don’t intrude on protected areas or spend more than their allotted time on the fishing grounds. Confronted with collapsing fish stocks in the 1990s, the NMFS developed an elaborate set of rules that parceled out allowable fishing days to boats in the New England groundfish fleet. More recently, unused days could be leased from one boat to another, but unlicensed time on the fishing grounds resulted in heavy penalties. Boats were first restricted to 176 days of fishing per year, then to 88 days, and have continually been restricted from there. Needless to say, boat captains found themselves idling on shore for weeks at a time and then barely able to make a living from the few days they were actually allowed to work.

  Some countries, like Iceland, have tied their VMS in to rescue services so that if a boat needs help, the authorities will know her location to within the previous half hour (five or ten miles). In the United States there have been occasions when the Coast Guard’s system has been able to utilize VMS data, but the two systems have not been set up to allow this access with ease. Whatever happened aboard the Patriot, it happened so fast that Orlando and Russo did not even have time to radio for help or grab their survival gear. They found themselves in 36-degree water at night, and they probably lost consciousness within minutes. Had the Patriot gone down in summer or fall, they might have survived long enough for the Coast Guard to come to their rescue. In that case, access to VMS data could mean the difference between life and death.

  What has not been determined is why the Patriot went down in the first place. She was a well-kept, stable boat on a calm sea and had come to rest on her starboard side in 104 feet of water. Cameras sent down to inspect the wreck revealed that there was no damage to the hull, the cabin, or the fishing gear; it was as if some great force had just pushed her under. The only clue as to what may have happened were abrasions that showed up as white scrapes against the black paint of her hull. An oceangoing tug called the Gulf Service had passed in the vicinity of the Patriot that night, pulling a barge with a 2,000-foot-long steel cable. It’s possible that the crew of the Patriot thought they were passing between two unconnected vessels when in fact they were heading straight for the cable, and it simply rolled them over into the sea.

  If so, it would not be the first time. In 1996 the steel cable between a similar tug-and-barge flipped over a Newburyport boat called the Heather Lynne II ten miles east of Gloucester. The three men on board found themselves trapped inside the overturned boat in a small pocket of air. They frantically started tapping the fiberglass hull to let people know that they were alive, but when the Coast Guard finally showed up, they didn’t have a rescue diver who could save the men. By the time they got one out there it was too late, and the dead men were taken out of the flooded hull with their knuckles bloody from their desperate banging.

  Orlando and Russo probably died much faster, but their last moments couldn’t have been pleasant. Among other things, it must have just been so inexplicable: One moment they’re in a bright, well-heated wheelhouse drinking coffee, the next moment they’re in the North Atlantic. People lose consciousness in as little as fifteen minutes in water that cold. The shock of it slams their respiratory rate into overdrive and triggers an overwhelming panic, which causes them to thrash and flounder, further dissipating their body heat. It was an iron-cold night in January with little swell and the lights of a new liquefied natural gas terminal visible just a few miles away. One finds oneself hoping that, in their pain and confusion, Orlando and Russo were able to make some sense of what was happening to them. One finds oneself hoping that, in their pain and confusion, they didn’t simply think they’d been shoved under by the hand of God.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ONE of the most difficult tasks in writing this book was to get to know—to whatever extent this is possible—the men who died at sea in the Halloween Gale. That required contacting their friends and family and reopening wounds that had only begun to heal. With that in mind, I would like to thank the Shatford family, Chris Cotter, Tammy Cabral, Debra Murphy, Mildred Murphy, Jodi Tyne, Chris Hansen, and Marianne Smith for their willingness to talk about such a painful episode in their lives.

  The survivors of the storm also had difficult stories to tell, and I am indebted to Judit
h Reeves, Karen Stimpson, John Spillane, and Dave Ruvola for talking about their experiences so openly. I would also like to thank all the people who answered my questions about fishing, bought me beers at the Crow’s Nest, got me onto fishing boats, and generally taught me about the sea. They are—in no particular order—Linda Greenlaw, Albert Johnston, Charlie Reed, Tommy Barrie, Alex Bueno, John Davis, Chris Rooney, “Hard” Millard, Mike Seccareccia, Sasquatch, Tony Jackett, and Charlie Johnson. In addition, Bob Brown was kind enough to talk to me despite the obviously delicate issues surrounding the loss of his boat.

  This material first appeared as an article in Outside magazine, and I must thank the editors there for their help. Also, Howie Sanders and Richard Green in Los Angeles.

  Finally, I must thank my friends and family for reading draft after draft of this manuscript, as well as my editor, Starling Lawrence, his assistant, Patricia Chui, and my agent, Stuart Krichevsky.

  * Ray Leonard was unavailable for interviews with the media after the storm, and he was unavailable to the author until after this book’s first publication. However, he has since denied the accuracy of this account of the Satori’s voyage. Primarily, he maintains that he and his crew were never in any danger during the storm, and that they should not have been forced off the boat by the Coast Guard. In support of this, he cites his own long experience as a sailor, the extremely heavy construction of the boat, and the fact that the boat survived the storm intact and was eventually salvaged off the New Jersey coast. He says that “lying ahull”—that is, battening down the hatches and staying safely in the bunks—wasn’t evidence of passivity on his part, but was rather an accepted heavy-weather strategy. In contradiction to crew member Karen Stimpson’s recollection, Leonard insists that he took an active role in the handling of the boat, and that he did not take a drink of alcohol until after the Coast Guard arrived. He was ordered off the boat, he maintains, because his two crew members were inexperienced and terrified.