The Perfect Storm

by Sebastian Junger

  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,ooo-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 seventy-nine 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 whale-back 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 Browns 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 fifty-five-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 fifty-five-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 thirty-three-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” searchlight 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.

  Brown’s reputation is no concern of Billy’s, though. Brown’s not on the boat, he’s twelve hundred miles away in Gloucester, and if Billy doesn’t want him in his life, he just doesn’t pick up the radio mike. Furthermore, Billy’s making money hand over fist on his boat, and that makes Brown’s scruples—or his judgment—or his lack of empathy—all but irrelevant. All Billy needs is five men, a well-maintained boat, and enough fuel to get to and from the Flemish Cap.

  The first five sets of Johnston’s trip are on what’s called the “frontside” of the moon, the quarters leading up to full. Boats that fish the frontside tend to get small males on the line; boats that fish the backside get large females. Johnston’s record is twenty-seven consecutive hooks with a fish on each, mostly small males. On the day of the full moon the catch abruptly switches over to huge females and stays that way for a couple of weeks. “You might go from an average weight of seventy pounds, all males, to four or five 800-pounders, all females,” Johnston says. “They lose their heads on the full moon, they feed with reckless abandon.”

  The full moon is on October 23rd, and Johnston has timed his trip to straddle that date. There are captains who will cut a good trip short just to stay on the lunar cycle. The first four or five sets of Johnston’s trip are spare, but then he starts to get into the fish. By the 21st, he’s landing six or seven thousand pounds of bigeye a day, enough to make his trip in a week. The weather has been exceptionally good for the season, and Johnston gets on the VHF every night to give the rest of the fleet a quick update. As the westernmost boat, the fleet relies on him to decide how much gear to fish. They don’t want forty miles of line hanging out there with a storm coming on. On October 22nd, the Laurie Dawn 8, a converted oil boat captained by a quiet Texan named Larry Davis, leaves New Bedford for the Grand Banks. She’s the last boat of the season to head out to the fishing grounds. The same day a containership named the Contship Holland leaves the port of Le Havre, France, for New York City. Her voyage is a classic rhumbline course from the English Channel straight through the fishing grounds. Scattered south of the Flemish Cap are the Hannah Boden, the Allison, the Miss Millie, and the Seneca. The Mary T and the Mr. Simon are southwest of the Tail, right on the edge of the Gulf Stream, and Billy Tyne is nearly 600 miles to the east.

  Billy’s been out through the dark of the moon, which may explain his bad luck, but things start to change around the 18th. The whole fleet, in fact, starts to get into a little more fish with the approach of the full moon. Tyne doesn’t tell anyone how much he’s catching, but he’s rapidly making up for three weeks of thin fishing. He’s probably pulling in swordfish at the same rate Johnston’s pulling in bigeye, five or six thousand pounds a day. By the end of the month he has 40,000 pounds of fish in his hold, worth around $160,000. “I talked with Billy on the 24th and he said he’d hatched his boat,” Johnston says. “He was headed in while the rest of us were just starting our trips. You could just tell he was happy.”

  Billy finishes up his last haul around noon on the 25th and—the crew still stowing their gear—turns his boat for home. They’ll be one of the only boats in port with a load of fish, which means a short market and a high price. Captains dream of bringing 40,000 pounds into a short market. The weather is clear, the blue sky brushed with cirrus and a solid northwest wind spackling the waves with white. A long heavy swell rolls under the boat from a storm that passed far off to the south. Billy has a failing ice machine and a 1,200-mile drive ahead of him. He’ll be heading in while the rest of the fleet is still in mid-trip, and he’ll make port just as they’re finishing up. He’s two weeks out of synch. Ultimately, one could blame some invisible contortion of the Gulf Stream for this: The contortion disrupts the swordfish, which adds another week or two to the trip, which places the Andrea Gail on the Flemish Cap when she should already be heading in. The circumstances that place a boat at a certain place at a certain time are so random that they can’t even be catalogued, much less predicted, and a total of fifty or sixty more people—swordfishermen, mariners, sailors—are also converging on the storm grounds of the North Atlantic. Some of these people have been heading there, unavoidably, for months; others made a bad choice just a few days ago.

  IN EARLY September, a retired sailor named Ray Leonard started ask
ing around Portland, Maine, for a crew to help him sail his thirty-two-foot Westsail sloop to Bermuda. Portland is a big sailing town—people race J-boats in the summer, crew on in the Caribbean in the winter, squeeze in a little skiing between seasons—and Leonard was quickly introduced to Karen Stimpson, one of the most experienced sailors in the harbor. Stimpson, forty-two, started crewing on boats as a teenager, graduated from maritime academy in her thirties, and has crossed the ocean several times on oil tankers. Between sailing trips she and another woman, Sue Bylander, thirty-eight years old, worked as graphic designers for a friend of Leonard’s. Leonard offered them both a place on his boat if they would fly themselves home from Bermuda, and their boss said that they were free to take the time off if they wanted. They accepted, and a departure date was set for the last weekend in October. One month later the sloop Satori cast off from the Great Bay Marina in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and motored slowly down the Piscataqua River toward open ocean.

  The weather was so warm that the crew were in t-shirts on deck and the sky was the watery blue of Indian summer. A light wind came in from the west, a backing wind. The Satori ran down the Piscataqua under power, rendezvoused with another boat, cleared Kittery Point, and then bore away to the east. The two boats were headed for the Great South Channel between Georges Bank and Cape Cod, and from there they would sail due south for Bermuda. Bylander stayed below to sort out the mountain of food and gear in the cabin while Stimpson and Leonard sat above deck and talked. Fog rolled in before they’d even cleared Isle of Shoals, and by dark the Satori was alone on a strangely quiet sea.