The Perfect Storm

by Sebastian Junger

  When Bylander finished stowing the supplies, the crew squeezed around a small dinette table in the cabin and ate lasagna baked by Stimpson’s mother. Stimpson has straw-blonde hair and a sort of level, grey-eyed look that seems to assess a situation, run the odds, and make a decision all in the same moment. She’s no romantic—“if you’re looking for enlightenment it’s not going to happen on a oil tanker”—but she’s deeply in love with the ocean. She’s not married and has no children. She’s the perfect crew for a late-season run south.

  So, Ray, have you listened to a weather forecast lately? she asked at one point during dinner.

  Leonard nodded his head.

  Did you hear there’s a front coming through?

  It shouldn’t be a problem, he says. We can always cut into Buzzard’s Bay.

  Buzzard’s Bay is at the western end of the Cape Cod Canal. One could, if the weather were bad enough, go nearly all the way from Boston to New York City by protected waterways. It’s not particularly beautiful, but it’s safe. “Ray was used to sailing solo, so having me on board may have made him feel more invulnerable,” Stimpson says. “And there’s a point at which you’re so far out that you don’t want to turn back, you just run offshore. In the future I will listen to the weather forecast, I will decide, as crew, whether I’m willing to keep sailing. It will be immaterial to me the level of experience of the owner-captain.”

  The date was October 26th. The lives of Stimpson, Bylander, and Leonard were about to converge with several dozen others off the New England coast.

  BILLY, like Leonard, has undoubtedly heard the forecast, but he’s even less inclined to do anything about it than Leonard is. The lead time for an accurate forecast is only two or three days, and it takes twice that long for a sword boat to make port. Weather reports are vitally important to the fishing, but not so much for heading home; when the end of the trip comes, captains generally just haul their gear and go. Because errors compound, the longer the trip, the more careful the captain has to be when he sets his initial heading for home. An error of just one degree puts a boat thirty miles off-course by the time she gets back to Gloucester; a captain could add a day to each trip with a month of such errors. When Billy Tyne starts for home, a bearing of 260 degrees would run him straight into Cape Ann, but it would also shave too close to Sable Island, which presents a ghastly hazard to shipping. (“I try to avoid it by at least forty or fifty miles,” says Charlie Reed.) The channel between Sable and Nova Scotia is blessed with a good, cold countercurrent that starts in Labrador and hugs the coast all the way down to Hatteras, but for some reason Billy decides not to take it. He decides to cross the Tail around 44 degrees north—his “way-point”—and then, once clear of Sable, shoot a course almost due west for Gloucester.

  Fishing boats use a global positioning system for bluewater navigation. GPS, as it’s called, fixes a position relative to military satellites circling the earth and then converts it to longitude and latitude. It’s accurate to within fifteen feet. The Department of Defense intentionally distorts the signals because they’re worried about the misuse of such precise information, but the standards of accuracy on a sword boat are loose enough so that it doesn’t matter. Fishermen generally use GPS to back up a loran system, which works by measuring the time it takes for two separate low-frequency radio signals to reach the vessel from broadcasting stations on shore. Charts are printed with numbered lines radiating out from the signal sources, and a loran reading identifies which lines correspond to the vessel’s position.

  Even with two electronic systems, though, mistakes happen—iron-bearing landmass, electrical interference, all kinds of things skew the output. Furthermore, the plotter gives you a pure direction, as if you could slice right through the curvature of the earth, but boats must follow an arc from point to point—the “Great Circle” route. The Great Circle route requires a correction of about eleven degrees north between Gloucester and the Flemish Cap. On the night of October 24th, Billy Tyne punches in the loran coordinates for his waypoint on the Tail of the Banks and reads a bearing of 250 degrees on his video plotter. On a Great Circle route, the compass heading and the actual heading are identical at the start of a trip, gradually diverge until the halfway point, and then converge again as the boat nears its destination.

  Having determined his Great Circle route and plugged the heading into the autopilot, Tyne then goes over to the chart drawer and pulls out a ten-dollar nautical chart called INT 109. He lines up a course of 250 degrees to his waypoint on the Tail and then walks his way down the map with a set of hinged parallel rules. He rechecks the bearing at the compass rose at the bottom and then adjusts by twenty degrees for the local magnetic variation. (The earth’s magnetic field doesn’t line up exactly with the axis of the earth; in fact it doesn’t even come close.) That should bring him to his way-point on the Tail in about three days. From there he’ll come up fourteen degrees and take another Great Circle route into Gloucester.

  INT 109 is one of the few charts that shows the full width and breadth of the summer swordfishing grounds, and is carried by every sword boat in the Banks. It has a scale of one to three-and-a-half-million; on a diagonal it stretches from New Jersey almost to Greenland. Land on 109 is depicted the way mariners must see it, a blank, featureless expanse with a scattering of towns along a minutely rendered coast. The lighthouses are marked by fat exclamation points and jut from every godforsaken headland between New York City and South Wolf Island, Labrador. Water depth is given in meters and shallow areas are shaded in blue. Georges Bank is clearly visible off Cape Cod, an irregular shape about the size of Long Island and rising to a depth of nine feet. To the west of Georges is the Great South Channel; beyond are the Nan-tucket Shoals and an area peppered with old ordnance: Submerged torpedo, Unexploded depth charges, Unexploded bombs.

  The Two Hundred Fathom line is the chart’s most prominent feature, echoing the coastline in broad strokes like a low-angle shadow. It swings north around Georges, skirts Nova Scotia a hundred miles offshore, and then runs deep up the St. Lawrence Seaway. East of the Seaway are the old fishing grounds of Burgeo and St. Pierre Banks, and then the line makes an enormous seaward loop to the southeast. The Grand Banks.

  The Banks are a broad flat plateau that extend hundreds of miles southeast from Newfoundland before plunging off the continental shelf. A clump of terrors known as the Virgin Rocks lurk seventy miles east of St. Johns, but otherwise there are no true shoals to speak of. A sheet of cold water called the Labrador Current flows over the northern edge of the Banks, injecting the local food chain with plankton; and a sluggish warm-water flow called the North Atlantic Current creeps toward Europe east of the Flemish Cap. Bending around the Tail of the Banks is something called Slope Water, a cold half-knot current that feeds into the generally eastward movement of the area. Below Slope Water is the Gulf Stream, trundling across the Atlantic at speeds of up to three or four knots. Eddies sometimes detach themselves from the Gulf Stream and spin off into the North Atlantic, dragging entire ecosystems with them. These eddies are called warm core rings. When the cores fall apart, the ecosystems die.

  Billy wants to run a slot between the Gulf Stream to the south and Sable Island to the north. It’s a relatively straight shot that doesn’t buck the warm headcurrent or come too close in to Sable. Steaming around the clock, he’s looking at a one-week trip; maybe he even takes one bird out of the water to speed things up. The diesel engine has been throbbing relentlessly for a month now and, without the distraction of work, it suddenly seems hellishly loud. There’s no way to escape the noise—it gets inside your skull, shakes your stomach lining, makes your ears ring. If the crew weren’t so sleep-deprived it might even bother them; as it is they just wallow in their bunks and stand watch at the helm twice a day. After two-and-a-half days the Andrea Gail has covered about 450 miles, right to the edge of the continental shelf. The weather is fair and there’s a good rolling swell from the northeast. At 3:15 on the afternoon of October 27th, B
illy Tyne raises the Canadian Coast Guard on his single sideband to tell them he’s entering Canadian waters. This is the American fishing vessel Andrea Gail, WYC 6681, he says. We’re at 44.25 north, 49.05 west, bound for New England. All our fishing gear is stowed.

  The Canadian Coast Guard at St. Johns gives him the go-ahead to proceed. Most of the sword fleet is a couple of hundred miles to the east, and Albert Johnston is the same distance to the south. Sable Island is no longer in the way, so Billy comes up fourteen degrees and puts Gloucester right in his gunsights. They’re heading almost due west and running a Great Circle route on autopilot. Around nightfall a Canadian weather map creaks out of the satellite fax. There’s a hurricane off Bermuda, a cold front coming down off the Canadian Shield, and a storm brewing over the Great Lakes. They’re all heading for the Grand Banks. A few minutes after the fax, Linda Greenlaw calls.

  Billy, you seen the chart? she asks.

  Yeah I saw it, he says.

  What do you think?

  Looks like it’s gonna be wicked.

  They agree to talk the next day so Billy can give her a list of supplies he’s going to need. He has no desire at all to talk to Bob Brown. They sign off, and then Billy hands the helm off to Murph and goes below for dinner. They’re in a big steel boat with 40,000 pounds of fish in the hold, plus ice. It takes a lot to sink a boat like that. Around nine o’clock, a half-moon emerges off their port quarter. The air is calm, the sky is full of stars. Two thousand miles away, weather systems are starting to collide.

  THE BARREL OF THE GUN

  The men could only look at each other through the falling snow, from land to sea, from sea to land, and realize how unimportant they all were.

  —SHIP ON THE ROCKS, NEWBURYPORT, MASSACHUSETTS, 1839, NO SURVIVORS.

  (SIDNEY PERLEY, Historic Storms of New England, 1891)

  THERE’S a certain amount of denial in swordfishing. The boats claw through a lot of bad weather, and the crews generally just batten down the hatches, turn on the VCR, and put their faith in the tensile strength of steel. Still, every man on a sword boat knows there are waves out there that can crack them open like a coconut. Oceanographers have calculated that the maximum theoretical height for wind-driven waves is 198 feet; a wave that size could put down a lot of oil tankers, not to mention a seventy-two-foot sword boat.

  Once you’re in the denial business, though, it’s hard to know when to stop. Captains routinely overload their boats, ignore storm warnings, stow their life rafts in the wheelhouse, and disarm their emergency radio beacons. Coast Guard inspectors say that going down at sea is so unthinkable to many owner-captains that they don’t even take basic precautions. “We don’t need an EPIRB because we don’t plan on sinking,” is a sentence that Coast Guard inspectors hear a lot. One of the videos on file with the Portland Coast Guard—shown as often as possible to local fishermen—was shot from the wheelhouse of a commercial boat during a really bad blow. It shows the bow rising and falling, rising and falling over mammoth, white-streaked seas. At one point the captain says, a little smugly, “Yep, this is where you wanna be, right in your wheelhouse, your own little domain—”

  At that moment a wall of water the size of a house fills the screen. It’s no bigger than the rest of the waves but it’s solid and foaming and absolutely vertical. It engulfs the bow, the foredeck, the wheelhouse, and then blows all the windows out. The last thing the camera sees is whitewater coming at it like a big wet fist.

  The farther you work from shore, the less smug you can afford to be. Any weekend boater knows the Coast Guard will pluck him out of whatever idiocy he gets himself into, but sword boats don’t have that option. They’re working four or five hundred miles from shore, way beyond helicopter range. So Billy—any bluewater fisherman—has a tremendous respect for the big wet fist. When Billy receives the weather chart off the fax machine, he undoubtedly tells the crew that there’s something very heavy on the way. There are specific things you can do to survive a storm at sea and whether the crew does them, and how well they do them, depends on how jaded they all are. Billy has fished his whole life. Maybe he thinks nothing can sink him; or maybe the sea is every nightmare he’s ever had.

  A good, worried crew starts by dogging down every hatch, porthole, and watertight door on the boat. That keeps breaking waves from busting things open and flooding the hold. They check the hatches on the lazarette, where the steering mechanism is housed, and make sure they’re secure. A lot of boats founder when the lazarette floods. They check the bilge pump filters and fish out any debris floating in the bilgewater. They clear everything off the deck—fishing gear, gaff pikes, oil slickers, boots—and put them down the fishhole. They remove the scupper plates so the boat can clear her decks. They tighten the anchor fastenings. They double-lash the fuel and water barrels on the whaleback. They shut off the gas cocks on the propane stove. They lash down anything in the engine room that might break loose and cause damage. They press down the fuel tanks so that some are empty and others are as full as possible. That reduces something called free surface effect—liquid sloshing around in tanks, changing the center of gravity.

  Some boats pay one crew member a bit extra to oversee the engine, but the Andrea Gail doesn’t have such a position; Billy takes care of it himself. He climbs down the engine room companionway and runs through the checklist: engine oil, hydraulics, batteries, fuel lines, air intakes, injectors. He makes sure the fire and high-water alarms are on and the bilge pumps are working. He tests the backup generator. He hands out seasick pills. If one of the steel birds is out of the water, he puts it back in. He fixes his position on the chart and calculates how the weather will affect his drift. He reckons their course in his head in case a wave takes out their electronics. He checks the emergency lighting. He checks the survival suits. He checks the photos of his daughters. And then he settles down to wait.

  So far the weather has been overcast but calm, light winds out of the northwest and a little bit of sea. Before the Portland Gale of 1898, one captain reported that it was “the greasiest evening you ever saw,” and a few hours later 450 people were dead. It’s not quite that calm, but almost. The wind hovers around ten knots and a six-foot swell rolls lazily under the boat. The Andrea Gail passes just north of Albert Johnston during the night, and by dawn they’ve almost made the western edge of the Banks, around 52 degrees west. They’re halfway home. Dawn creeps in with a few shreds of salmon-pink sky, and the wind starts to inch into the southeast. That’s called a backing wind; it goes counterclockwise around the compass and usually means bad weather is coming. A backing wind is an ill wind; it’s the first distant touch of a low-pressure system going into its cyclonic spin.

  Then another weather fax comes in:

  HURRICANE GRACE MOVING WILL TURN NE AND ACCELERATE. DEVELOPING DANGEROUS STORM MOVING E 35 KTS WILL TURN SE AND SLOW BY 12 HOURS. FORECAST WINDS 50 TO 65 KTS AND SEAS 22 TO 32 FEET WITHIN 400 NM SEMICIRCLE.

  It reads like an inventory of things fishermen don’t want to hear. An accompanying chart shows Hurricane Grace as a huge swirl around Bermuda, and the developing storm as a tightly jammed set of barometric lines just north of Sable Island. Every boat in the swordfish fleet receives this information. Albert Johnston, south of the Tail, decides to head northwest into the cold water of the Labrador Current. Cold water is heavier, he says, and seems to lay better in the wind; it doesn’t produce such volatile seas. The rest of the sword fleet stays far to the east, waiting to see what the storm does. They couldn’t make it into port in time anyway. The Contship Holland, a hundred miles south of Billy, heads straight into the teeth of the thing. Two hundred miles east, another containership, the Liberian-registered Zarah, also heads for New York. Ray Leonard on the sloop Satori has decided not to head for port; he holds to a southerly course for Bermuda. The Laurie Dawn 8 keeps plowing out to the fishing grounds and the Eishin Maru 78, 150 miles due south of Sable Island, makes for Halifax harbor to the northeast. Billy can either waste several days trying to
get out of the way, or he can stay on-course for home. The fact that he has a hold full of fish, and not enough ice, must figure into his decision.

  “He did what ninety percent of us would’ve done—he battened down the hatches and hung on,” says Tommy Barrie, captain of the Allison. “He’d been gone well over a month. He probably just said, ‘Screw it, we’ve had enough of this shit,’ and kept heading home.”

  THE Boston office of the National Weather Service occupies the ground floor of a low brick building along a gritty access road in back of Logan Airport. Heavy glass windows allow a tinted view of the USAir shuttle terminal and a wasteland of gravel piles and rebar. Weather Service meteorologists can look up from their radar screens and watch USAir jets taxi back and forth behind a grey jet-blast barrier. Only their stabilizers stick up above it; they cruise like silver sharks across a concrete sea.

  Weather generally moves west-to-east across the country with the jet stream. In a very crude sense, forecasting simply means calling up someone to the west of you and asking them to look out their window. In the early days—just after the Civil War—the National Weather Service was under the auspices of the War Department, because that was the only agency that had the discipline and technology to relay information eastward faster than the weather moved. After the novelty of telegraph wore off, the Weather Service was shifted over to the Department of Agriculture, and it ultimately wound up in the Department of Commerce, which oversees aviation and interstate trucking. Regional Weather Service offices tend to be in very grim places, like industrial parks bordering metropolitan airfields. They have sealed windows and central air-conditioning. Very little of the air being studied actually gets inside.