The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea (23 page)

Moore starts stripping off his gear, and he's got his wetsuit halfway off when he realizes the helicopter isn't going anywhere. It's hovering off the
Tamaroa's
port quarter. He puts his flight helmet on and hears the
Tamaroa
talking to Hessel, telling him to stand by because their Avon crew still needs to be recovered. Oh, Jesus, he thinks. Moore pulls his gear back on

* Ray Leonard was unavailable for interviews with the media after the storm, and he was unavailable to this author two years later. However, since the publication of the hardcover edition, he has denied the acuracy of this account of the
Satori's
voyage. Primarily, he maintains that he and his crew were never in 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, battering 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.

and takes up his position at the jump door. Hessel has decided on another in-the-water rescue, and Moore watches the three Coast Guardsmen grab hands and reluctantly abandon ship. Even from a distance they look nervous. Hessel comes in low and puts them at his six o'clock again, barely able to find such a small target in his rearview mirror. Moore gets the nod and jumps for the third time; he's got the drill down now and the entire rescue takes ten minutes. Each Coast Guardsman that makes it into the aircraft gives Stimpson a thumbs-up. Moore comes up last—"via bare hook," as the report reads—and Vriesman pulls him in through the door. The H-3 banks, drops her nose, and starts for home.

"When I got up into the helicopter I remember everyone looking in my and Sue's faces to make sure we were okay," says Stimpson. "I remember the intensity, it really struck me. These guys were
so
pumped up, but they were also human— real humanity. They'd take us by the shoulders and look us in the eyes and say, 'I'm so glad you're alive, we were with you last night, we prayed for you. We were worried about you.' When you're on the rescuing side you're very aware of life and death, and when you're on the rescued side, you just have a sort of numb awareness. At some point I stopped seeing the risk clearly, and it just became an amalgam of experience and observation."

Stimpson has been awake for forty-eight hours now, much of it above deck. She's starting to get delirious. She slumps into a web seat in the back of the helicopter and looks out at the ocean that almost swallowed her up. "I saw the most amazing things; I saw Egypt and I knew it was Egypt," she says. "And I saw these clay animals, they were over green pastures like the Garden of Eden. I could see these clay animals and also gorgeous live animals munching on grass. And I kept seeing cities that I recognized as being from the Middle East."

While Stimpson drifts in and out of hallucinations, the H-3 pounds home through a seventy-knot headwind. It takes an hour and forty minutes to get back to base. Three miles off Martha's Vineyard the crew look down and see another Coast Guard helicopter settling onto a desolate scrap of land called Noman's Island. A Florida longliner named the
Michelle Lane
had run aground with a load of swordfish, and her crew had spent the night under an overturned life raft on the beach. An H-3 was dispatched from Air Station Cape Cod to take them off, and Hessel happens to fly by as they're landing.

Hessel touches down at 4:40 at Air Station Cape Cod, and the other H-3 comes in a few minutes later. (While landing at Noman's, as it turned out, the rotor wash flipped the raft over and knocked one of the fishermen unconscious. He was taken off in a Stokes litter.) It's almost dark; rain flashes down diagonally through the airfield floodlights and scrub pine stretches away darkly for miles in every direction. The six survivors are ushered past the television cameras and led into changing rooms upstairs. Stimpson and Bylander pull off their survival suits, and Bylander curls up on a couch while Stimpson goes back downstairs. The simple fact of being alive has her so wired she can hardly sit still. The Coast Guardsmen are gathered with the reporters in a small television room, and Stimpson wanders in and finds Leonard sitting miserably on the floor, back to the wall. He's not saying a word.

He didn't want to leave the boat, Stimpson explains to a local reporter. It was his home, and everything he owned was on it.

Dave Coolidge, the Falcon pilot that flew the previous night, walks up to Stimpson and shakes her hand. Camera bulbs flash. Boy, are we glad to see you two, he says. It was a long night, I was afraid you weren't going to make it. Stimpson says graciously, When we heard you on the radio we said, Yes, we're going to make it. We're not just going to perish out here without anyone knowing.

The reporters gradually drift off, and Leonard retires to an upstairs room. Stimpson stays and answers questions for the rescue crew, who are very interested in the relationship between Leonard and the two women. His reactions weren't quite what we expected, one of the Guardsmen admits. Stimpson explains that she and Bylander don't know Leonard very well, they met him through their boss.

Sue and I had been working several months without a break, she says. This trip was going to be our vacation.

While they're talking, the phone rings. One of the Falcon pilots goes to answer it. What time was that? the pilot says, and everyone in the room stops talking. How many were they? What location?

Without a word the Coast Guardsmen get up and leave, and a minute later Stimpson hears toilets flushing. When they come back, one of them asks the Falcon pilot where they went down.

South of Montauk, he says.

The Guardsmen zip up their flight suits and file out the door. A rescue helicopter has just ditched fifty miles offshore and now five National Guardsmen are in the water, swimming.

INTO THE ABYSS

The Lord bowed the heavens and came down, thick darkness under his feet. The channels of the sea were seen, and the foundations of the world were laid bare.

—
SAMUEL 22

"I DIDN'T
know there was a problem, I just knew the
Andrea Gail
was supposed to be in any day," says Chris Cotter, Bobby's Shatford's girlfriend. "I went to bed and just before dawn I had this dream. I'm on the boat and it's real grey and ugly out and it's rollin' and rockin' and I'm screaming, BOBBY! BOBBY! There's no answer so I walk around the boat and go down into the fishhole and start digging. There's all this slime and weeds and slimy shit and I'm hysterical and crazy and screaming for Bobby and finally I get down and there's one of his arms. I find that and grab him and I know he's gone. And then the wake-up comes."

It's the morning of October 30th; there's been no word from the
Andrea Gail
in over thirty-six hours. The storm is so tightly packed that few people in Gloucester—only a few hundred miles from the storm's center—have any idea what's out there. Chris lies in bed for a while, trying to shake off the dream, and finally gets up and shuffles into the kitchen. Her apartment looks out across Ipswich Bay, and Christine can see the water, itself cold and grey as granite, piling up against the granite shores of Cape Ann. The air is warm but an ill wind is backing around the compass, and Chris sits down at her kitchen table to watch it come. No one has said anything about a storm, there was nothing about it on the news. Chris smokes one cigarette after another, watching the weather come in off the sea, and she's still there when Susan Brown knocks on the door.

Susan is Bob Brown's wife. She issues the paychecks for the Seagale Corporation, as Brown's company is called, and the week before she'd given Christine the wrong check by mistake. She'd given her Murph's check, which was larger than Bobby Shatford's, and now she's come back to rectify the mistake. Chris invites her in and immediately senses that something is wrong. Susan seems uncomfortable, glancing around and refusing to look Chris in the eye.

Listen, Chris, Susan says finally, I've got some bad news. I'm not sure how to say this. We don't seem to be able to raise the
Andrea Gail.

Chris sits there, stunned. She's still in the dream—still in the dark slimy stink of the fishhole—and the news just confirms what she already knows: He's dead. Bobby Shatford is dead.

Susan tells her they're still trying to get through and that the boat probably just lost her antennas, but Chris knows better; in her gut she knows it's wrong. As soon as Susan leaves, Chris calls Mary Anne Shatford, Bobby's sister. Mary Anne tells her it's true, they can't raise Bobbys boat, and Chris drives down to the Nest and rushes in through the big heavy door. It's only ten in the morning but already people are standing around with beers in their hands, red-eyed and shocked. Ethel is there, and Bobby's other sister, Susan, and his brother, Brian, and Preston, and dozens of fishermen. Nothing's sure yet—the boat could still be afloat, or the crew could be in a life raft or drunk in some Newfoundland bar— but people are quietly assuming the worst.

Chris starts drinking immediately. "People didn't want to give me the details because I was totally out of my mind," she says. "Everybody was drunk 'cause that's what we do, but the crisis made it even worse, just drinkin' and drinkin' and cryin' and drinkin', we just couldn't conceive that they were gone. It was in the paper and on the television and this is my
love,
my
friend,
my
man,
my
drinking partner,
and it just couldn't be. I had pictures of what happened, images: Bobby and Sully and Murph just bug-eyed, knowing this is the final moment, looking at each other and this jug of booze goin' around real fast because they're tryin' to numb themselves out, and then Bobby goes flyin' and Sully goes under. But what was the final moment? What was the final, final thing?"

The only person not at the Crow's Nest is Bob Brown. As owner of the boat he may well not feel welcome there, but he's also got work to do—he's got a boat to find. There's a single sideband in his upstairs bedroom, and he's been calling on 2182 since early yesterday for both his boats. Neither Billy Tyne nor Linda Greenlaw will come in. Oh boy, he thinks. At nine-thirty, after trying a few more times, Brown drives twenty miles south along Route 128 through the grey rocky uplands of the North Shore. He parks at the Bang's Grant Inn in Danvers and walks into the conference room for the beginning of a two-day New England Fisheries Management Council meeting. The wind is moving heavily through the treetops now, piling dead leaves up against a chainlink fence and spitting rain down from a steel sky. It's not a storm yet, but it's getting there.

Brown takes a seat at the back of the room, notebook in hand, and endures a long and uninteresting meeting. Someone brings up the fact that the Soviet Union has disintegrated into different countries, and U.S. fishing laws need to be changed accordingly. Another person cites a
Boston Globe
article that says that cod, haddock, and flounder populations are so low that regulations are useless—the species are beyond saving. The National Marine Fisheries Service is not the sole institution with scientific knowledge on pelagic issues, a third person counters. The meeting finally adjourns after an hour of this, and Bob Brown gets up to talk with Gail Johnson, whose husband, Charlie, is out on the Banks at that moment. Charlie owns the
Seneca,
which had put into Bay Bulls, Newfoundland, a few weeks earlier with a broken crankshaft.

Did you hear anything from your husband? Brown asks.

Yeah, but I could hardly get him. He's east of the Banks, and they've got bad weather out there.

I know they do, Brown says. I know they do.

Brown asks her to call him if Charlie hears anything about either of his boats. Then he hurries home. As soon as he arrives he goes up to his bedroom and tries the single sideband again, and this time—thank God—Linda comes through. He can hear her only faintly though the static.

/
haven't been able to reach Billy in a couple of days,
Linda shouts.
I'm worried about them.

Yeah, I'm worried too,
says Brown.
Keep trying him. I'll check back.

At six o'clock that night, the time he generally checks in with his boats, Brown tries one last time to raise the
Andrea Gail.
Not a sign. Linda Greenlaw hasn't been able to raise her, either, nor has anyone else in the fleet. At 6:15 on October 30th, two days to the hour after Billy Tyne was last heard from, Brown calls the Coast Guard in Boston and reports the vessel missing. I'm afraid my boat's in trouble and I fear the worst, he says. He adds that there have been no distress calls from her and no signals from her EPIRB. She has disappeared without a trace. In some senses that's good news because it may just mean she's lost her antennas; a distress call or EPIRB signal would be a different matter entirely. It would mean absolutely that something has gone wrong.

Meanwhile, the news media have picked up on the story. Rumors are flying around Gloucester that the
Allison
has gone down along with the
Andrea Gail,
and that even the
Hannah Boden
may be in trouble. A reporter from News Channel Five calls Tommy Barries wife, Kimberly, and asks her about the
Allison.
Kimberly answers that she talked to her husband the night before by single sideband and that, although she could barely hear him, he seemed to be fine. Channel Five broadcasts that tidbit on the evening news, and suddenly every fisherman's wife on the East Coast is calling Kimberly Barrie to ask if she has any news about the fleet. She just repeats that she talked to her husband on the 29th, and that she could barely hear him. "As soon as the storms move offshore the weather service stops tracking them," she says. "The fishermen's wives are left hanging, and they panic. The wives always panic."