The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea (15 page)

A lesser version of that is heading toward the Grand Banks: Hurricane Grace, a late-season fluke that still contains enough energy to crank another storm system off the chart. Ordinarily, Grace would come ashore somewhere in the Carolinas, but the same cold front that spawned the short-wave trough aloft also blocks her path on shore. (Cold air is very dense, and warm weather systems tend to bounce off them like beach balls off a brick wall.) According to atmospheric models generated by the Cray computers in Maryland, Grace will collide with the cold front and be forced northward, straight into the path of the short-wave trough. Wind is simply air rushing from an area of high pressure to an area of low; the greater the pressure difference, the faster it blows. An Arctic cold front bordering a hurricane-fortified low will create a pressure gradient that meteorologists may not see in their lifetime.

Ultimately, the engine behind all of this activity is the jet stream, a river of cold upper-level air that screams around the globe at thirty or forty thousand feet. Storms, cold fronts, short-wave troughs—they're all dragged eastward sooner or later by upper-level winds. The jet stream is not steady; it convulses like a loose firehose, careening off mountains, veering across plains. These irregularities create continent-sized eddies that come ballooning out of the Arctic as deep cold fronts. They are called anticyclones because the cold air in them flows outwards and clockwise, the opposite of a low. It is along the leading edge of these anticyclones that low-pressure waves sometimes develop; occasionally, one of these waves will intensify into a major storm. Why, and when, is still beyond the powers of science to predict. It typically happens over areas where a leg of the jet stream collides with subtropical air—the Great Lakes, the Gulf Stream off Hatteras, the southern Appalachians. Since air flows counterclockwise around these storms, the winds come out of the northeast as they move offshore. For that reason they're known as "nor'easters." Meteorologists have another name for them. They call them "bombs."

The first sign of the storm comes late on October 26th, when satellite images reveal a slight bend in the leading edge of the cold front over western Indiana. The bend is a pocket of low barometric pressure—a short-wave trough—imbedded in the wall of the cold front at around 20,000 feet. It's the embryo of a storm. The trough moves east at forty miles an hour, strengthening as it goes. It follows the Canadian border to Montreal, cuts east across northern Maine, crosses the Bay of Fundy, and traverses Nova Scotia throughout the early hours of October 28th. By dawn an all-out gale is raging north of Sable Island. The upper-level trough has disintegrated, to be replaced by a sea-level low, and warm air is rising out the top of the system faster than it can be sucked in at the bottom. That is the definition of a strengthening storm. The barometric pressure is dropping more than a millibar an hour, and the Sable Island storm is sliding away fast to the southeast with sixty-five-knot winds and thirty-foot seas. It's a tightly packed low that Billy Tyne, two hundred miles away, can't even feel yet.

The Canadian Government maintains a data buoy seventy miles east of Sable Island, at 43.8 north and 57.4 west, just short of Billy's position. It is simply known as buoy #44139; there are eight others like it between Boston and the Grand Banks. They relay oceanographic information back to shore on an hourly basis. Throughout the day of October 28th, buoy #44139 records almost no activity whatsoever—dinghy-sailing weather on the high seas. At two o'clock the needle jumps, though: suddenly the seas are twelve feet and the winds are gusting to fifteen knots. That in itself is nothing, but Billy must know he has just seen the first stirrings of the storm. The wind calms down again and the seas gradually subside, but a few hours later another weather report creaks out of the radiofax:

WARNINGS. HURRICANE GRACE MOVING E 5 KTS MXIMUM WINDS 65 KTS GUSTING TO 80 NEAR CENTER. FORECAST DANGEROUS STORM WINDS 50 TO 75 KTS AND SEAS 25 TO 35 FT.

Billy's at 44 north, 56 west and heading straight into the mouth of meteorological hell. For the next hour the sea is calm, horribly so. The only sign of what's coming is the wind direction; it shirts restlessly from quadrant to quadrant all afternoon. At four o'clock it's out of the southeast. An hour later it's out of the south-southwest. An hour after that it's backed around to due north. It stays that way for the next hour, and then right around seven o'clock it starts creeping into the northeast. And then it hits.

It's a sheer change; the
Andrea Gail enters
the Sable Island storm the way one might step into a room. The wind is instantly forty knots and parting through the rigging with an unnerving scream. Fishermen say they can gauge how fast the wind is—and how worried they should be—by the sound it makes against the wire stays and outrigger cables. A scream means the wind is around Force 9 on the Beaufort Scale, forty or fifty knots. Force 10 is a shriek. Force 11 is a moan. Over Force 11 is something fishermen don't want to hear. Linda Greenlaw, captain of the
Hannah Boden,
was in a storm where the wind registered a hundred miles an hour before it tore the anemometer off the boat. The wind, she says, made a sound she'd never heard before, a deep tonal vibration like a church organ. There was no melody, though; it was a church organ played by a child.

By eight o'clock the barometric pressure has dropped to 996 millibars and shows no sign of levelling off. That means the storm is continuing to strengthen and create an even greater vacuum at its center. Nature, as everyone knows, abhors a vacuum, and will try to fill it as fast as possible. The waves catch up with the wind speed around eight PM and begin increasing exponentially; they double in size every hour. After nine o'clock every graph line from data buoy #44139 starts climbing almost vertically. Maximum wave heights peak at forty-five feet, drop briefly, and then nearly double to seventy. The wind climbs to fifty knots by nine PM and gradually keeps increasing until it peaks at 58 knots. The waves are so large that they block the anemometer, and gusts are probably reaching ninety knots. That's 104 miles an hour—Gale Force 12 on the Beaufort Scale. The cables are moaning.

Minutes after the evening weather report, Tommy Barrie raises Tyne on the single sideband. Barries from Florida, a solid, square-shouldered guy with slicked-back hair and a voice like a box of rocks. He wants to know, of all things, how much gear to fish that night. He's six hundred miles to the east and figures he might as well squeeze in as much fishing as he can. The conversation, as Barrie remembers it, is brief and to-the-point:

We're over here around the forty-six, Billy. What's it look like?

It's blowin' fifty to eighty and the seas are thirty feet. It was calm for a while, but now it's startin' to come on pretty good. I'm 130 miles east of Sable.

Okay, we're gonna keep the gear in the boat but let's talk at eleven. Maybe we'll throw a little bit of gear in late.

All right, I'll give you a check after the weather. I'll tell you what's goin' on out here.

We'll be standin' by.

After talking to Barrie, Billy picks up the microphone on his single sideband and issues one last message to the fleet:
She's comin' on boys, and she's comin' on strong.
The position he'd given Linda Greenlaw on the
Hannah Boden
—44 north, 56.4 west— is a departure from his original heading. It appears to be more the heading of a man bound for Halifax, Nova Scotia, or maybe even Louisbourg, Cape Breton Island, than Gloucester, Massachusetts. Louisbourg is only 250 miles to the northeast, a twenty-four-hour drive with the seas at their stern. Maybe Billy, having looked down the barrel of the gun, has decided to dodge north like Johnston. Or maybe he's worried about fuel, or needs to pick up ice, or decides that the cold countercurrent inside Sable is starting to look pretty good.

Whatever the reason, Billy changes course sometime before six PM and neglects to tell the rest of the fleet. They all assume he's headed straight for Gloucester. Albert Johnston on the
Mary T,
Tommy Barrie on the
Allison,
and Linda Greenlaw on the
Hannah Boden
all hear Billy Tyne's six o'clock bulletin on the weather. Only Linda is worried— "Those boys sounded scared and we were scared for them," she says. The rest of the fleet is more nonchalant. "We live in this stuff for years and years," says Barrie. "You have to look at the charts, listen to the weather, talk to the other boats, and make a decision on your own. You can't just go out there and wait for nice weather."

*     *     *

THE
storm is centered around Sable Island, but its far western edges are already brushing the New England coast. The
Satori
—now too far offshore to abort the trip—starts to feel the storm as early as Sunday morning. Another wall of fog moves in from Georges Bank and the barometer starts a slow downward slide that can only mean something very big is on the way. The
Satori
is at the top of the Great South Channel, off Cape Cod, and working her way through an increasingly restless and uneasy sea. Stimpson mentions the weather forecasts again, but Leonard insists there's no reason to worry. By Sunday morning the swells start to mound up in ominous, chaotic ways, and that afternoon, when Stimpson tunes in to the NOAA weather broadcast, she feels the first stabs of fear: NORTHEAST WIND 30 TO 40 KNOTS, AVERAGE SEAS EIGHT TO FIFTEEN FEET, VISIBILITY UNDER TWO MILES IN RAIN.

By nightfall the wind swings out of the northeast, as predicted, and starts to climb steadily up the Beaufort scale. It's clear that both the
Satori
and the boat she left Portsmouth with are in for a bad night. The two crews talk every hour or so over the VHF, but by midnight on Sunday, the air is so highly charged that the radios are useless. Around eleven o'clock Stimpson takes one last call from the other boat—
We're having a rough time and have lost gear on deck
—and they're not heard from again. The
Satori
heads alone into the night, straining crazily up the swells and struggling to maintain steerageway.

Monday dawns a full gale, the seas building to twenty feet and the wind shearing ominously through the rigging. The sea takes on a grey, marbled look, like bad meat. Stimpson tells Leonard that she really thinks it's going to be a bad one, but he insists it'll blow itself out in twenty-four hours. I don't think so, Ray, Stimpson tells him, I've got a bad feeling. She and Leonard and Bylander eat chili cooked by Stimpson's mother and spend as much time as possible below deck, out of the weather. The navigation table is across from the galley on the starboard side, and Bylander sets herself up as the communications person, monitoring the radar and weather forecasts and tracking their position by GPS. A dash into shore would be risky now, across shipping lanes and dangerous shoal waters, so they reef down the sails and keep to open sea.

Monday night the storm crosses offshore and the "first stage wind surge" passes over the
Satori.
NOAA weather radio reports that conditions will ease off briefly and then deteriorate again as the storm swings back toward the coast. By then, though, the
Satori
might be far enough south to escape its full wrath. They wallow on through Monday night, the barometer rising slightly and the wind easing off to the northeast; but then late that night, like a bad fever, it comes on again. The wind climbs to fifty knots and the seas rise up in huge dark mountains behind the boat. The crew take turns at the helm, clipped into a safety line, and occasionally take a breaking sea over the cockpit. The barometer crawls downward all night, and by dawn the conditions are worse than anything Stimpson has ever seen in her life. For the first time, she starts thinking seriously about dying at sea.

Meanwhile, five hundred miles to the east, the sword fleet is getting slammed. On Albert Johnston's boat, the crew is so terrified that they just watch videos. Johnston stays at the helm and drinks a lot of coffee; like most captains, he's loath to relinquish the helm unless the weather calms down a bit. On the
Andrea Gail,
Billy probably takes the helm while the rest of the crew go below and try to forget about it. Some guys get stoned, which keeps them calm, and some sleep, or try to. Others just lie on their bunks and think about their families, or their girlfriends, or how much they wish this wasn't happening.

"I picture it like this," says Charlie Reed, trying to imagine the last evening aboard the
Andrea Gail.
"The guys are down below readin' books, and every now and then the boat takes a big sea on the side. They run up to the wheelhouse and ask, 'Hey, what's goin' on, Cap?' and Billy says something like, 'Well, we're gettin' there, boys, we're gettin' there.' If Billy's goin' downsea it has to be an awful frightening ride. Sometimes you come off the top of one of those waves and it just kinda leaves out from under you. The boat just drops. It's better to take the seas head-on—at least that way you can see what's comin' at you. That's about all you can do."

Of the men on the boat, Bugsy, Murph, and Billy have the most time at sea—thirty-four years, all told, much of it together. At home Billy has a photo of the three of them at sea with a gigantic swordfish. He has hip boots on, rolled down to his shins, and he's sitting on a hatchcover pulling open the fish's mouth with a steel hook. He's staring straight into the camera. Bugsy's just behind Billy, head cocked to one side, looking as gaunt and ethereal as Christ on the Shroud of Turin. Murph's in back, squinting into the sea glare and noticeably huge even beneath a bulky pair of Farmer John waders.

All these men have seen their share of close calls at sea, but Murph's record is the worst. He's six-foot-two, 250 pounds, covered in tattoos and, apparently, extremely hard to kill. Once a mako shark clamped its jaws around his arm on deck and his friends had to beat it to death. The Coast Guard helicoptered him out. Another time he was laying out the longline when an errant hook went into his palm, out the other side and into a finger. No one saw it happen, and he was dragged off the back of the boat and down into the sea. All he could do was watch the hull of his boat get smaller and smaller above him and hope someone noticed he was gone. Luckily another crew member turned around a few seconds later, understood what was happening, and hauled him in like a swordfish. I thought I was gone, Mom, he told his mother later. I thought I was dead.