The Perfect Storm

by Sebastian Junger

  And now here he is, getting buried at sea. The conditions have degenerated from bad to unspeakable, Beaufort Force 10 or 11. The British Manual of Seamanship describes a Force 10 gale as: “Foam is in great patches and is blown in dense white streaks along the direction of the wind. The rolling of the sea becomes heavy and shock-like.” Force 11 is even worse: “Exceptionally high waves, small or medium-sized ships might be lost from view behind them. The sea is completely covered with long patches of white foam.” Hurricane Grace is still working her way north, and when she collides with the Sable Island storm—probably in a day or so—conditions will get even more severe, maybe as high as Force 12. Very few boats that size can withstand a Force 12 gale.

  Since Billy presumably can’t use his radio, there’s no way to know how things are going aboard the Andrea Gail. A fairly good idea, though, can be had from the Eishin Maru 78, the Japanese longliner two hundred miles to the southwest. The Eishin Maru has a Canadian observer on board, Judith Reeves, who is charged with making sure the vessel abides by Canadian fishing regulations. The storm hits the Eishin Maru around the same time as the Andrea Gail, but not as abruptly; buoy #44137, sixty miles to the south, shows a slow, gradual increase in windspeed starting at five PM on the 28th. By dawn on the 29th, the wind is forty knots gust-ing to fifty, and peak wave heights are only forty-five feet. That’s considerably less than what Billy is experiencing, but it just keeps getting worse. By midnight sustained wind-speeds are fifty knots, gusts are hitting sixty, and peak wave heights are over one hundred feet. At ten past eight at night, October 29th, the first big wave hits the Eishin Maru.

  It blows out a portside window with the sound of a shotgun going off. Water inundates the bridge and barrels down the hallway into Reeves’s room. She hears panicked shouts from the crew and then orders that she doesn’t understand. Men scramble to board up the window and bail out the water, and within an hour the captain has regained control of the bridge. The boat is taking a horrific beating, though. She’s 150 feet long—twice the size of the Andrea Gail—and waves are completely burying her decks. There are no life jackets on hand, no survival suits, and no EPIRB. Just before dawn, the second wave hits.

  It blows out four windows this time, including the one with plywood over it. “All the circuits went, there was smoke and wires crackling,” says Reeves. “We crippled the ship. The VHF, the radar, the internal communication system, the navigation monitors, they were all rendered inoperable. That’s when the radio operator came to me and said—in sign language—that he wanted me to go into the radio room.”

  The radio operator had managed to contact the ship’s agent by satellite phone, and Reeves is put on the line to explain what kind of damage they’ve sustained. While she’s talking, Coast Guard New York breaks in; they’ve been listening in on the conversation and want to know if the Eishin Maru needs help. Reeves says they’ve lost most of their electronics and are in serious trouble. New York patches her through to the Coast Guard in Halifax, and while they’re discussing how to get people off the boat, the radio operator interrupts her. He’s pointing to a sentence in an English phrase book. Reeves leans in close to read it: “We are helpless and drifting. Please render all assistance.” (Unknown to Reeves, the steering linkage has just failed, although the radio operator doesn’t know how to explain that to her.) Its at this moment that Reeves realizes she’s going down at sea.

  “We had no steerage and we were right in the eye of the storm,” she says. “It was a confused sea, all the waves were coming from different directions. The wind was picking up the tops of the waves and slinging them so far that when the search-and-rescue plane arrived, we couldn’t even see it. The whole vessel would get shoved over on its side, so that we were completely upside-down. If you get hit by one wave and then hit by another, you can drive the vessel completely down into the water. And so that second before the vessel starts to come up you’re just holding your breath, waiting.”

  They’re dead in the water, taking the huge waves broadside. According to Reeves, they are doing 360-degree barrel rolls and coming back up. Four boats try to respond to her mayday, but three of them have to stand down because of the weather. They cannot continue without risking their own lives. The ocean-going tug Triumph C leaves Sable Island and claws her way southward, and the Coast Guard cutter Edward Cornwallis is on her way from Halifax. The crew of the Eishin Maru, impassive, are sure they’re going to die. Reeves is too busy to think about it; she has to look for the life jackets, work the radio and satellite phone, flip through the Japanese phrase book. Eventually she has a moment to consider her options.

  “Either I jump ship, or I go down with the ship. As for the first possibility, I thought about it for a while until I realized that they’d hammered all the hatches down. I thought, ‘God, I’ll never get off this friggin’ boat, it will be my tomb.’ So I figured I’d do whatever I had to do at the time, and there was no point in really thinking about it because it was just too frightening. I was just gripped by this feeling that I was going to have to do something very unpleasant. You know, like drowning is not going to be pleasant. And it wasn’t until the moment we lost steerage that I actually thought we were going to die. I mean, I knew there was a real possibility, and I was going to have to face that.”

  Soon after losing steerage, a communications officer in New York asks Reeves how it’s going. Not too well, she says. Is your survival suit out? Yeah, it’s here, she says. Well, how many Japanese can you fit into it? Reeves laughs; even that slight joke is enough to ease the desperateness of the situation. A couple of hours later the satellite phone rings. Improbably, it’s a Canadian radio reporter who wants to interview her. His name is Rick Howe.

  Miss Reeves, is it rough out there? Howe asks, over the static and wind-shriek.

  It’s pretty rough.

  What about the trawler, what’s the problem?

  It’s not a trawler, it’s a longliner. The problem is we took three windows out of the bridge earlier this morning and lost all our instrumentation.

  Are you in any danger or are you confident everything’s going to work out all right?

  Well, we’re in danger, definitely we’re in danger. We’re drifting in twelve meter swells and between fifty and sixty knot winds. If we get any more water coming through the bridge that’s gonna wipe out any communication that we have left. So we’re definitely in danger right now.

  Do you know how dose the nearest ship to you is?

  We’re looking at about a hundred miles. If we have to abandon ship there are helicopters that can be here in three-and-a-half hours. Unfortunately they won’t be able to come in the dark, so if anything happens in the dark, we’re goners.

  You mentioned that you expect the weather to clear up later in the day. What more can you tell us about that?

  The swell size is supposed to go down to five to eight meters and the winds come around to the east, twenty-five to thirty-five knots. So that will take a lot of the edge off the fear I have right now, which is of sustaining a direct hit. If we take a direct hit, and the boat goes over, and we take another hit, the boat goes down. And we’re all shored up here, everything is battened down, hatched and practically nailed shut. If she goes over there’s no way anybody’s gonna get out, over.

  Now is there a point where you may have to abandon ship, and is the crew and yourself prepared for that eventuality?

  Well, to tell you the absolute truth I don’t think the crew is very prepared for an emergency. They have no emergency beacon and don’t seem very up on their emergency procedure, which is a little frightening. I’m the only one who has a survival suit. But, in a swell like we have today, it wouldn’t do me much good.

  Yeah, right. Well, listen, I thank you for talking to us, and the whole of the province is praying for your safe return.

  Thank you.

  With that, Reeves turns back to the business at hand.

  AFTER talking to Tommy Barrie, Billy is probably able to steam northwest
another two or three hours before the seas get too rough to take on his stern. That would place him just north of data buoy #44139 and on the edge of Banquereau, one of the old fishing grounds off Nova Scotia. The 200-fathom line turns a corner at Banquereau, running north up the St. Lawrence Channel and south-southwest to Sable Island. About sixty miles due east is an underwater canyon called “The Gully,” and then the Sable Island shallows start.

  Sable Island is a twenty-mile sandbar that extends another forty or fifty miles east-west below water. From a distance, the surf that breaks on the shoals looks like a white sand cliff. Mariners have headed for it in storms, thinking they might save themselves by driving their boat onto the beach, only to be pounded to pieces by twenty-foot waves on the outer bar. Sable Island historian George Patterson writes, in 1894: “From the east end a bar stretches northeasterly for seventeen miles, of which the first four are dry in fine weather, the next nine covered with heavy breakers and the last four with a heavy cross-sea. The island and its bar present a continuous line of upwards of fifty miles of terrific breakers. The currents around the island are terribly conflicting and uncertain, sometimes passing around the whole circuit of the compass in twenty-four hours. An empty cask will be carried round and round the island, making the circuit several times, and the same is the case with bodies from wrecks.”

  The island prowls restlessly around the Scotian Shelf, losing sand from one end, building it up on the other, endlessly, throughout the centuries. Since 1873 it has melted away beneath the foundations of six lighthouses. Herds of wild horses live on the island, the descendants of tough Breton mountain horses left there by the French. Nothing but mar-ran grass holds the dunes in place, and cranberries, blueberries, and wild roses grow in the inland bogs. The Gulf Stream and the glacial Labrador Current converge at Sable, frequently smothering the island in fog. Five thousand men are said to have drowned in its shallows, earning it the name “The Graveyard of the Atlantic,” and at least that many have been pulled to safety by lifesaving crews that have been maintained there since 1801. “We have had a tolerable winter, and no wrecks, except the hull of the schooner Juno, of Plymouth,” one island-keeper recorded in 1820. “She came ashore without masts, sails or rigging of any description, and no person on board except one dead man in the hold.”

  In bad weather, horsemen circled the island looking for ships in distress. If any were spotted, the horsemen rushed back for the surf boat and rowed out through the breakers to save anyone who was still alive. Sometimes they were able to fire rockets with a line attached and rig up a breeches buoy. After the storm died down they’d salvage the cargo and saw the ship timber up for firewood or construction material. People pulled from sinking ships often spent the entire winter on the island. Sometimes two or three hundred people would be camped out in the dunes, waiting for a relief ship to arrive in the spring.

  Today there are two lighthouses, a Coast Guard station, a meteorological station, and several dozen oil and natural gas wells. There’s a sixty-foot shoal thirty miles to the northwest and a forty-five-foot shoal twenty miles to the east. They mark the western and eastern ends of the sandbar, respectively. Billy isn’t right on top of the bars yet, but he’s getting close. In the old days it was known that most shipwrecks on Sable occurred because of errors in navigation; the westerly current was so strong that it could throw boats off by sixty to a hundred miles. If Billy has lost his electronics—his GPS, radar, and loran—he’s effectively back in the old days. He’d have a chart of the Grand Banks on the chart table and would be estimating his position based on compass heading, forward speed, and wind conditions. This is called dead reckoning. Maybe the currents and the storm winds push Billy farther west than he realizes, and he gets into the shallows around Sable. Maybe he has turned downsea on purpose to keep water out of the wheel-house, or to save fuel. Or maybe their steering’s gone and, like the Eishin Maru, they’re just careening westward on the weather.

  Whatever it is, one thing is known for sure. Around midnight on October 28th—when the storm is at its height off Sable Island—something catastrophic happens aboard the Andrea Gail.

  THE ZERO-MOMENT POINT

  Behold a pale horse, and his name who sat

  on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.

  —REVELATION 6:8

  IN the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. Government decided to detonate a series of nuclear devices in the Pacific Ocean. The thinking was that deep water would absorb the shock wave and minimize the effect on the environment, while still allowing scientists to gauge the strength of the explosions. But an oceanographer named William Van Dorn, associated with the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, California, warned them that a nuclear explosion in the wrong place “could convert the entire continental shelf into a surf zone.”

  Concerned, the Navy ran a series of wave tank tests to see what kind of stresses their fleet could take. (They’d already lost three destroyers to a typhoon in 1944. Before going down the ships had radioed that they were rolling through arcs of 140 degrees. They downflooded through their stacks and sank.) The Navy subjected model destroyers and aircraft carriers to various kinds of waves and found that a single nonbreaking wave—no matter how big it was—was incapable of sinking a ship. A single breaking wave, though, would flip a ship end over end if it was higher than the ship was long. Typically, the ship would climb the wave at an angle of forty-five degrees, fail to gain the top, and then slide back down the face. Her stern would bury itself into the trough, and the crest of the wave would catch her bow and flip her over. This is called pitch-poling; Ernie Hazard was pitch-poled on Georges Bank. It’s one of the few motions that can end ship-to-shore communication instantly.

  Another is a succession of waves that simply drives the boat under—“founders,” as mariners say. The dictionary defines founder as “to cave in, sink, fail utterly, collapse.” On a steel boat the windows implode, the hatches fail, and the boat starts to downflood. The crew is prevented from escaping by the sheer force of the water pouring into the cabin—it’s like walking into the blast of a firehose. In that sense, pitch-poling is better than foundering because an overturned boat traps air in the hold and can stay afloat for an hour or more. That might allow members of the crew to swim out a doorway and climb into a life raft. The rafts are designed to inflate automatically and release from the boat when she goes down. In theory the EPIRB floats free as well, and begins signalling to shore. All the crew has to do is stay alive.

  By the late hours of October 28th the sea state is easily high enough to either pitch-pole the Andrea Gail or drive her under. And if she loses power—a clogged fuel filter, a fouled prop—she could slew to the side and roll. The same rule applies to capsizing as to pitch-poling: the wave must be higher than the boat is wide. The Andrea Gail is twenty feet across her beam. But even if the boat doesn’t get hit by a nonnegotiable wave, the rising sea state allows Billy less and less leeway to maneuver. If he maintains enough speed to steer, he beats the boat to pieces; if he slows down, he loses rudder control. This is the end result of two days of narrowing options; now the only choice left is whether to go upsea or down, and the only outcome is whether they sink or float. There’s not much in between.

  If the conditions don’t subside, the most Billy can realistically hope for is to survive until dawn. Then at least they’ll have a chance of being rescued—now it’s unthinkable. “In violent storms there is so much water in the air, and so much air in the water, that it becomes impossible to tell where the atmosphere stops and the sea begins,” writes Van Dorn. “That may literally make it impossible to distinguish up from down.” In such conditions a helicopter pilot could never pluck six people off the deck of a boat. So, for the next eight hours, the crew of the Andrea Gail must keep the pumps and engine running and just hope they don’t encounter any rogue waves. Seventy-footers are roaming around the sea state like surly giants and there’s not much Billy can do but take them head-on and try to get over the top before they break. If his f
loodlights are out he wouldn’t even have that option—he’d just feel a drop into the trough, a lurch, and the boat starting up a slope way too steep to survive.

  “Seventy foot seas—I’d be puttin’ on my diapers at that point,” says Charlie Reed. “I’d be quite nervous. That’s higher than the highest point on the Andrea Gail. I once came home from the Grand Banks in thirty-five-foot seas. It was a scary fuckin’ thought—straight up, straight down, for six days. My guess is that Billy turned side-to and rolled. You come off one of those seas cocked, the next one comes at a different angle, it pushes the boat around and then you roll. If the boat flips over—even with everything dogged down—water’s gonna get in. The boat’s upside-down, the plywood’s buckling, that’s the end.”

  When Ernie Hazard went over on Georges Bank in 1982, the motion wasn’t a violent one so much as a huge, slow somersault that laid the boat over on her back. Hazard remembers one wave spinning them around and another lifting them end over end. It wasn’t like rolling a car at high speeds, it was more like rolling a house. Hazard was thirty-three at the time; three years earlier he’d answered a newspaper ad and got a job on the Fair Wind, a lobster boat out of Newport, Rhode Island. The storm hit on their last trip of the year, late November. The crew were all good friends; they celebrated the end of their season at a steakhouse and then left for Georges Bank late the next morning. The winds were light and the forecast called for several more days of fair weather. By dawn it was blowing a hundred:

  We were driving the boat well. You point the boat into the sea and try to hold your own until it blows out—stay there, take your pounding. You balance the boat, flood the tanks, try to save what you have on deck. There was the typical howling of wind in the wires and there was a lot of foam because of the wind, yellow foam, spindrift. We’d lose power on the waves because they were more foam than water, the propeller just couldn’t bite.