The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea (29 page)

It's full dark when the first helicopter, zeroed-in by the marker buoy, arrives on-scene. There's no sign of Smith. The Coast Guard pilot who spotted him, debriefed back on-base, says the dye was fresh and he was "awful sure" there was a man in the middle of it. The seas were too rough to tell whether he swam to the life raft that was dropped to him, though. Three hours later one of the helicopter pilots radios that they've spotted Smith near the radio marker buoy. Another H-60 and tanker plane prepare to launch from Suffolk, but no sooner are those orders given than the pilot on-scene corrects himself: He didn't spot a
person,
he spotted a
life raft.
It was probably dropped by the Coast Guard earlier that day. The Suffolk aircraft stand down.

Throughout that night the storm slides south along the coast and then doubles back on itself, heading toward Nova Scotia and dissipating by the hour. The convective engine of the storm that sucks warm moist air off the ocean is finally starting to break down in cold northern water. By the morning of November 1st the conditions are stable enough to evacuate John Spillane, and he's strapped into a rescue litter and carried out of his room and onto the aft deck of the
Tamaroa.
He's hoisted up into the belly of an H-3 and flown to Atlantic City, where he's rushed into intensive care and given two units of blood. A few hours later a Coast Guardsman tracks down a search pilot who says that he dropped green dye into the water to mark a line he'd seen. That explains the dye but not the person spotted at the center of it. A Coast Guard survival specialist named Mike Hyde says that Smith could stay warm virtually forever in a quarter-inch wetsuit, but that he might drown by inhaling water into his lungs. There aren't any charts or graphs for survival time in the conditions he was in, Hyde says.

If Smith made it through the storm, though, Hyde's personal guess is that he could survive another four days. Eventually, he'll die of dehydration. The sea is much calmer now, but the search has been going full-bore for seventy-two hours without turning up anything; chances are almost nonexistent that Smith is alive. On the morning of November 2nd—the storm now over Prince Edward Island and failing fast—the cutter
Tamaroa
makes port at Shinnecock Inlet, Long Island, and Ruvola, Buschor, and Mioli are taken off by motor launch. Rick Smith's wife, Marianne, is at Suffolk Airbase for the event, and several people express concern over her watching the airmen reunited with their families.

What do they think, that I want those women to lose
their
husbands, too? she wonders. She takes John Brehm, the PJ supervisor, aside and says, Look, John, if they haven't found Rick by now, they're not going to. As far as I'm concerned, I'm a widow and I need to know what's going to happen.

Brehm expresses the hope that they might still find him, but Marianne just shakes her head. If he were alive, he'd signal, she says. He's not alive.

Marianne Smith, who's nursing a three-week-old baby, practically hasn't slept since the ditching. She found out about it late the first night, when someone from the airbase called and woke her up out of an exhausted sleep. It took her a minute to even understand what the person was saying, and when she did, he reassured her that it was a controlled ditching and everything would be fine. Things were not fine, though. First they wouldn't tell her which four crew members had been picked up by the
Tamaroa
(she understandably assumed one of them was her husband), and then they said they'd spotted him at the center of some green dye, and then they lost him again. Now she's between worlds, treated as a widow by everyone on base but still reassured that her husband will be found alive. No one, it seems, can openly face the fact that Rick Smith is dead. The planes keep going out, the grids keep getting flown.

Finally, after nine days of round-the-clock flights, the Coast Guard suspends its search for Rick Smith. The consensus is that he must have hit the water so hard that he was knocked unconscious and drowned. Another possibility is that Spillane hit him when he landed, or that the life raft hit him, or that he jumped with his gunner's strap on. The gunner's strap is used to keep crewmen from falling out of helicopters, and if Smith jumped with it on, he'd have just dangled below the helicopter until Ruvola set it down.

John Spillane prefers to believe that Smith was knocked out on impact. He was weighed down by a lot of gear, and he must have lost position during his fall and hit the water flat. Spillane's only memory of the fall is exactly that: starting to flail and thinking, "My God, what a long way down." Those words, or something very like them, are probably the last thoughts that went through Rick Smith's mind.

WHILE
aircraft are crisscrossing the waters off the coast of Maryland, an even larger search continues for the
Andrea Gail.
Fifteen aircraft, including a Navy P-3 transferred from the Smith search, are flying grids southwest of Sable Island, where a life raft would most likely have drifted. A rumor ripples through Gloucester that Billy Tyne called someone on a satellite phone the night of the 29th, but Bob Brown chases the rumor down and tells the Coast Guard it's bogus. Half the boats in the sword fleet—the
Laurie Dawn 8, Mr. Simon, Mary T,
and
Eishin Maru
—sustain considerable damage and cut their trips short. The eastern half of the fleet misses the full fury of the storm ("Oh, we only had about seventy-knot winds," Linda Greenlaw recalls), but such extreme weather generally ruins the fishing for days, and most of the eastern boats head in as well.

Nothing is seen or heard of the
Andrea Gail
until November 1st when Albert Johnston, steaming for home, plows straight through a cluster of blue fuel barrels. They're a hundred miles southwest of Sable, and they all have
AG
stencilled on the side. "The barrels went down either side of the hull, I didn't even have to change course," says Johnston. "It was spooky. You know, just a few fuel barrels, that's all that was left."

An hour later Johnston passes another cluster, then a third, and calls their position in to the Coast Guard. The barrels don't, by themselves, mean the
Andrea Gail
went down—they could have just washed off the deck—but they're not a good sign. The Canadian and American Coast Guards keep widening the search area without finding anything; finally, on November 4th, things start to turn up. A Coast Guardsman on a routine beach patrol around Sable Island finds a propane tank and radio beacon with
Andrea Gail
painted on them. The beacon is for locating fishing gear and has been switched on, which may have been a desperate attempt to surround the stricken boat with as many electronically active objects as possible. Normally they're stowed in the "off" position.

And then, on the afternoon of November 5th, an EPIRB washes up on Sable Island. It's an orange 406-megahertz model, built by an American company named Koden, and the ring switch has been turned off. That means that it can't signal even if it hits the water. The serial number is 986. It's from the
Andrea Gail.

Like the bottled note thrown overboard from the schooner
Falcon
a century ago, the odds of something as small as an EPIRB winding up in human hands are absurdly small. And the odds of Billy Tyne disarming his EPIRB—there's no reason to, it wouldn't even save batteries—are even smaller. Bob Brown, Linda Greenlaw, Charlie Reed, no one who knows Billy can explain it. The fourteen-page incident log kept by the Canadian Coast Guard records the discovery of the propane tank and the radio beacon, but not of the EPIRB. The entire day, in fact, that the EPIRB is found—November 5th, 1991—is missing from the log. Rumors start creeping around Gloucester that the Coast Guard
did
pick up an EPIRB signal when the
Andrea Gail
was in trouble, but conditions were too severe to go out. And when, against all odds, the EPIRB washes up on Sable Island, the Coast Guard switches it off to cover themselves.

Whether the rumors are fair or not, they're in some ways beside the point. Conditions severe enough to frighten the Coast Guard are severe enough to prevent a rescue, and by the time the EPIRB started signalling—if it ever did—the crew of the
Andrea Gail
were probably doomed anyway. Judging by the rescue attempts off Long Island, even a helicopter hovering directly over the
Andrea Gail
crew would have been powerless to help them. Regardless, the EPIRB is duly transported back to the United States for inspection by the Federal Communications Commission.

On November 6th, a Canadian pilot spots an uninflated life raft just off the Nova Scotia coast, but there's no one inside it, and he loses sight of it before it can be recovered. Two days later the
Hannah Boden,
steaming home after three weeks at sea, spots another cluster of fuel barrels marked
AG
on the side, but there's still no sign of the boat. Finally, a half hour before midnight on November 8th, the search for the
Andrea Gail
is permanently suspended. She's been missing for almost two weeks, and planes have searched 116,000 square miles of ocean without finding any survivors. All they turned up was a little deck gear.

"I WENT
down to the fish pier a lot after the search ended," says Chris Cotter. "I went there a lot, I went there alone and I'd go through these things—you know, picturing what happened to their bodies, that kind of horror. I'd reject it from my mind and my soul as soon as it blew in, and then I'd remember the good things, he'd come back to me and it would be okay. I miss him immensely, though, I fight it all the time. Later, I tell myself. I'll see him later on."

The memorial service is held several days later at St. Ann's Church, just up the hill from the Crow's Nest. It's the first service in thirteen years for Gloucestermen lost at sea, and it brings people out who don't even know the men who died. The sea was their domain, they knew it well, Reverend Casey says quietly to the thousand people packed into his church for the service. I urge you to mourn not just for these three men, but for all the other brave people who gave their lives for Gloucester and its fishing industry.

Mary Anne and Rusty Shatford read a poem about fishing, and Sully's brother speaks, and some of the Tyne family speak. Bob and Susan Brown are at the service, but they say very little and leave as soon as it's over. This is the third time men have died on one of Bob Brown's boats and, regardless of fault, people in town are not inclined to forget it. After the service the mourners drive and walk down the steep hill to Rogers Street and pile into the Crow's Nest and the Irish Mariner, where a wake is held for the next couple of days. Food is brought and people go to Sully's brother's apartment, then back to the Crow's Nest, then over to the Tynes', and back to the Nest again, endlessly, all weekend long.

If the men on the
Andrea Gail
had simply died, and their bodies were lying in state somewhere, their loved ones could make their goodbyes and get on with their lives. But they didn't die, they disappeared off the face of the earth and, strictly speaking, it's just a matter of faith that these men will never return. Such faith takes work, it takes effort. The people of Gloucester must willfully extract these men from their lives and banish them to another world.

"The night before I found out about the boat, I had this dream," says Debra Murphy, Murph's ex-wife. "Murph was supposed to be home for my birthday, and in my dream—I don't know if he's standing there or if he's calling me—he says, 'I'm sorry, I'm not going to make it this time.' Then I wake up, and the phone call comes. It's from Billy's new girlfriend, who says there was a big storm out there and the
Andrea Gail
hasn't been heard from in a couple of days."

The first thing Debra does is drive over to Murph's parents' house to give them the bad news. They've never liked his fishing much—his father's in real estate, they live a quiet suburban life—and they sit there in shock while Debra tells them the boat is missing. She doesn't know much more than that one fact, and when she calls Bob Brown, all he can tell her is that the boat was last heard from on the 28th and that a search has been launched. Brown refuses to return her calls after that, so she starts talking to the Coast Guard every day asking how many flights went out, whether they see anything, what they plan to do next. Finally, after ten days of hell, Debra sits her three-year-old son, Dale Jr., down and explains that his father's not coming back. Her son doesn't understand, and wants to know where he is.

He's fishing, honey, she answers. He's fishing in heaven.

Dale knows his father fishes lots of places—Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Massachusetts. Heaven must be just another place where his father fishes. Well, when's he coming back from fishing in heaven? he asks.

A couple of months later, as far as young Dale is concerned, his father
does
come back from fishing in heaven. Dale wakes up screaming in the middle of the night, and Debra rushes into his room, panicked. What's wrong, honey, what's wrong? she says.

Daddy's in the room, Dale answers. Daddy was just here.

What do you mean, Daddy was just here? Debra asks.

Daddy was here and told me what happened on the boat.

Three-year-old Dale, stumbling over the language, goes on to repeat what his father told him. The boat rolled over and caught his father on a "hook" (one of the gaff hooks for grabbing fish). The hook snagged his shirt and Murph wasn't able to free himself in time. He got dragged under, and that was it.

"My son has a lot of anger in him from losing his father," says Debra. "There'll be days where he'll just be really depressed and I'll say, 'What's the matter, Dale?' And he'll say, 'Nothin', Mom, I'm just thinking about my dad.' Oh, God, he'll look at me with these big brown eyes, the tears running down his cheeks and it kills me because there's nothing I can do. Not one thing."

Others, too, are visited. Murph's mother looks out the bedroom window one day and sees Murph ambling down their street in huge deck boots. Someone else spots him in traffic in downtown Bradenton. From time to time Debra dreams that she sees him and runs up and says, "Dale, where've you been?" And he won't answer, and she'll wake up in a cold sweat, remembering.