The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

Okay you guys, Billy says. One last drink. Everyone downs one last drink. Okay, one more, someone says. Everyone has one more. Bobby’s drinking tequila. He’s standing by Chris looking down at the floor and she’s holding his hand and neither of them are saying much. Sully comes over and asks if they’re going to be okay. Chris says, Sure, we’ll be fine and then she says: Actually, I’m not sure. Actually, no, I don’t think so.

Six men are leaving for a month and it feels as if things are shearing off into a new and empty direction from which they may never return. Ethel, trying to maintain her composure, goes around the room hugging all the men. The only person she doesn’t hug is Alfred because she doesn’t know him well enough. Bobby asks his mother if they can take the color T.V. above the bar. If it’s okay with Billy, she says.

Billy looks up. Ethel, he says, they can take the T.V., but if they watch it instead of doing’ their work it’s going’ straight overboard.

That’s fine, Billy, that’s fine, Ethel says.

Billy’s girlfriend sees Bobby’s shiner under the brim of his Budweiser cap and glances over at Chris. She’s of the old school where ladies don’t slug their men.

You northern gals, she says.

I didn’t mean it, says Chris. It was a mistake.

It’s now way too late for anyone to back out. Not in the literal sense—any one of them could still take off running out the door—but people don’t work like that. More or less, they do what others expect them to. If one of the crew backed out now he’d sit around for a month and then either go to a welcome-home party or a memorial service. Either would be horrible in its own way. Half the crews have misgivings about this trip, but they’re going anyhow; they’ve crossed some invisible line, and now even the most desperate premonitions won’t save them. Tyne, Pierre, Sullivan, Moran, Murphy, and Shat ford are going to the Grand Banks on the Andrea Gail.

Okay, Billy says. Let’s go.

Everyone files out the big wooden door. The rain has stopped and there are even a few scraps of clear sky off to the west. Pale, late-summer blue. Chris and Bobby get into her Volvo and Alfred and his girlfriend get into their car and everyone else walks. They cross Rogers Street through the impatient stream of Friday afternoon traffic and then angle down through the gate in the chain-link fence. There are fuel tanks on iron scaffolds behind Rose’s, and small boats up with tarps over them, and a battered sign that says “Carter’s Boat Yard.” One of the fuel tanks has a pair of humpback whales painted on it. Chris drives past the little group, tires crunching on the gravel, and comes to a stop in front of the Andrea Gail. The boat is tied up to a small piece of wharf behind Old Port Sea foods, next to the fire boat and a dockside fuel pump. Bobby looks over at her.

I don’t want to do this, he says. I really don’t.

Chris is holding onto him in the front seat of her Volvo, with everything she owns in the back. Well don’t go then, she says. Well fuck it. Don’t go.

I got to go. The money; I got to.

Billy Tyne walks over and leans in the window. You gonna be all right? He asks. Chris nods her head. Bobby is really starting to fight the tears and he looks away so that Billy doesn’t see. Okay, Billy says to Chris. We’ll see you when we get back. He walks across the dock and jumps down onto the deck of the boat. Then Sully comes over. He’s known Bobby most of his life—without Bobby he probably wouldn’t even have taken the trip—and he’s worried about him now. Worried that somehow Bobby isn’t going to make it, that the trip’s a huge mistake. Are you two okay? he says. Are you sure?

Yeah, we’re okay, says Chris. We just need a minute.

Sully smiles and slaps the car roof and walks away. Bugsy and Murph don’t have anyone to linger over and so they waste no time getting on the boat; now it’s just the two couples in their cars. Alfred detaches himself from his girlfriend in the front seat and gets out and walks across the dock. His girlfriend looks around, crying, and spots Chris in the Volvo. She draws two fingers down her cheeks—“Yes, I’m sad, too”—and then just sits there, tears running down her cheeks. There’s nothing more to wait for now, nothing more to say. Bobby’s trying to keep it together because of the other five guys on the boat, but Chris is not trying to keep it together.

Well, I got ta go now, he says.

Yep.

And Christina, you know, I’ll always love you.

She smiles at him through her tears. Yeah, I know, she says.

Bobby kisses her and gets out of the car, still holding hands. He closes the door and gives her a final smile and then starts walking across the gravel. As Chris remembers it he doesn’t look back, not once, and he keeps his face hidden the entire way.

ALMOST as soon as the New World was discovered, Europeans were fishing it. Twelve years after Columbus, a Frenchman named Jean Denys crossed the Atlantic, worked the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, and returned home with a hold full of cod. Within a few years there were so many Portuguese boats on the Banks that their king felt compelled to impose an import tax in order to protect the fishermen at home. Codfish ran so thick off Newfoundland, it was said, that they slowed ships down in the water.

Codfish weren’t quite that plentiful, but they were certainly worth crossing the Atlantic for. And they were easily transported: Crews salted them aboard ship, dried them when they got home, and then sold them by the hundreds of thousands. The alternative was to go over with two crews, one to fish and another to preserve the catch on shore. The fish were split down the middle and then laid on racks, called flakes, to cure all summer in the Newfoundland air. Either way, the result was a rugged slab of protein that could be treated as indelicately as shoe leather and then soaked back to a palatable form. Soon European ships were shuttling back and forth across the North Atlantic in a hugely lucrative—if perilous—trade.

For the first fifty years the European powers were content to fish off Newfoundland and leave the coastlines alone. They were jagged, gloomy places that seemed to offer little more than a chance to impale one’s ship. Then, in 1598, a French marquis named Troïlus de Mesgouez pulled sixty convicts from French prisons and deposited them on a barren strip of sand called Sable Island, south of Nova Scotia. Left to shift for themselves, the men hunted wild cattle, constructed huts from shipwrecked vessels, rendered fish oil, and gradually killed one another off. By 1603, there were only eleven left alive, and these unfortunates were dragged back to France and presented to King Henri IV. They were clothed in animal skins and had beards halfway down their chests. Not only did the king pardon them their crimes, he gave them a bounty to make up for their suffering.

It was around this time that Cape Ann was first sighted by Europeans. In 1605, the great French explorer Samuel de Champlain was working his way south from Casco Bay, Maine, when he rounded the rock ledges of Thatcher’s, Milk, and Salt islands and cast anchor off a sandy beach. The natives drew for him a map of the coastline to the south, and Champlain went on to explore the rest of New England before returning to Cape Ann the following year. This time he was clawing his way up the coast in some ugly fall weather when he sought shelter in a natural harbor he’d missed on his previous trip. He was greeted by a party of Wampanoag Indians, some of whom wore the scraps of Portuguese clothing they had traded for a hundred years before, and they made a great show of hospitality before launching a surprise attack from the woods of Rocky Neck. The Frenchmen easily fended them off and on the last day of September, 1606,with the Indians waving goodbye from the shore and the oaks and maples rusting into their fall colors, Champlain set sail again. Because of the sheltered coves and thick shellfish beds he called the place “Beauport”—The Good Harbor. Seventeen years later a group of Englishmen sailed into Beauport, eyed the local abundance of cod and cast their anchor. The year was 1623.

The ship was financed by the Dorchester Company, a group of London investors that wanted to start tapping the riches of the New World. Their idea was to establish a settlement on Cape Ann and use it to support a fleet of boats that would fish all spring and summer and return to Europe in the fall. The shore crew was charged with building a habitable colony and drying the catch as it came in. Unfortunately, luck was against the Dorchester men from the start. The first summer they caught a tremendous amount of fish, but the bottom dropped out of the cod market, and they didn’t even make expenses. The next year prices returned to normal, but they caught almost no fish at all; and the third year violent gales damaged the boats and drove them back to England. The company was forced to liquidate their assets and bring their men home.

A few of the Settlers refused to leave, though. They combined forces with a band of outcasts from the tyrannical Plymouth colony and formed the nucleus of a new colony at Gloucester. New England was an unforgiving land in those days, where only the desperate and the devout seemed to survive, and Gloucester wound up with more than its share of the former. Its most notorious citizen was the Reverend John Lyford, whose deeds were so un-Christian—he criticized the Church and groped a local servant girl—as to be deemed unprintable by a local historian; another was a “shipwrecked adventurer” named Fells who fled Plymouth to escape public whipping. His crime was that he’d had “unsanctioned relations” with a young woman.

Gloucester was a perfect place for loose cannons like Lyford and Fells. It was poor, remote, and the Puritan fathers didn’t particularly care what went on up there. After a brief period of desertion, the town was re-settled in 1631, and almost immediately the inhabitants took to fishing. They had little choice, Cape Ann being one big rock, but in some ways that was a blessing. Farmers are easy to control because they’re tied to their land, but fishermen are not so easy to control. A twenty-year-old off a three-month trip to the Banks has precious little reason to heed the bourgeois mores of the town. Gloucester developed a reputation for tolerance, if not outright debauchery, that drew people from all over the Bay Colony. The town began to thrive.

Other communities also had a healthy streak of godless-ness in them, but it was generaly relegated to the outskirts of town. (Wellfleet, for example, reserved an island across the harbor for its young men. In due time a brothel, a tavern, and a whale lookout were built there—just about everything a young fisherman needed.) Gloucester had no such buffer, though; everything happened right on the waterfront. Young women avoided certain streets, town constables were on the lookout for errant fishermen, and orchard-owners rigged guns up to trip-wires to protect their apple trees. Some Gloucester fishermen, apparently, didn’t even respect the Sabbath: “Cape Cod captains went wild-eyed in an agony of inner conflict,” recorded a Cape Cod historian named Josef Berger, “as they read the Scriptures to their crews while some godless Gloucester craft lay in plain sight … hauling up a full share of mackerel or cod.”

If the fishermen lived hard, it was no doubt because they died hard as well. In the industry’s heyday, Gloucester was losing a couple of hundred men every year to the sea, four percent of the town’s population. Since 1650, an estimated ten thousand Gloucestermen have died at sea, far more Gloucestermen than died in all the country’s wars. Sometimes a storm would hit the Grand Banks and half a dozen ships would go down, a hundred men lost overnight. On more than one occasion, Newfound-landers woke up to find their beaches strewn with bodies.

The Grand Banks are so dangerous because they happen to sit on one of the worst storm tracks in the world. Low pressure systems form over the Great Lakes or Cape Hatteras and follow the jet stream out to sea, crossing right over the fishing grounds in the process. In the old days, there wasn’t much the boats could do but put out extra anchor cable and try to ride it out. As dangerous as the Grand Banks were, though, Georges Bank—only 180 miles east of Cape Cod —was even worse. There was something so ominous about Georges that fishing captains refused to go near it for three hundred years. Currents ran in strange vortexes on Georges, and the tide was said to run off so fast that ocean bottom was left exposed for gulls to feed on. Men talked of strange dreams and visions they had there, and the uneasy feeling that dire forces were assembling themselves.

Unfortunately, Georges was also home to one of the greatest concentrations of marine life in the world, and it was only a matter of time before someone tried to fish it. In 1827, a Gloucester skipper named John Fletcher Wonson hove-to off Georges, threw out a fishing line, and pulled up a halibut. The ease with which the fish had been caught stuck in his mind, and three years later he went back to Georges expressly to fish. Nothing particularly awful happened, and soon ships were going back and forth to Georges without a second thought. It was only a one-day trip from Gloucester, and the superstitions about the place started to fade. That was when Georges turned deadly.

Because the fishing grounds were so small and close to shore, dozens of schooners might be anchored within sight of each other on a fair day. If a storm came on gradually, the fleet had time to weigh anchor and disperse into deeper water; but a sudden storm could pile ship upon ship until they all went down in a mass of tangled spars and rigging. Men would be stationed at the bow of each boat to cut their anchor cables if another boat were bearing down on them,but that was usually a death sentence in itself. The chances of sailing clear of the shoal water were horribly small.

One of the worst of these catastrophes happened in 1862, when a winter gale bore down on seventy schooners that were working a closely-packed school of cod. Without warning the sky turned black and the snow began to drive down almost horizontally. One fisherman described what ensued:

My shipmates showed no sign of fear; they were now all on deck and the skipper was keeping a sharp lookout. Somewhere about nine o’clock, the skipper sang out, ‘There’s a vessel adrift right ahead of us! Stand by with your hatchet, but don’t cut until you hear the word!’ All eyes were bent now on the drifting craft. On she came, directly at us. A moment more and the signal to cut must be given. With the swiftness of a gull, she passed by, so near that I could have leaped aboard. The hopeless, terror-stricken faces of the crew we saw but a moment, as the doomed craft sped on her course. She struck one of the fleet a short distance astern, and we saw the waters close over both vessels almost instantly.

A FEW modern swordfishing boats still fish Georges Bank, but most make the long trip to the Grand. They’re out for longer but come back with more fish—the old trade-off. It takes a week to reach the Grand Banks on a modern sword boat. You drive east-northeast around the clock until you’re twelve hundred miles out of Gloucester and four hundred miles out of Newfoundland. From there it’s easier to get to the Azores than back to the Crow’s Nest Inn. Like Georges, the Grand Banks are shallow enough to allow sunlight to penetrate all the way to the bottom. An infusion of cold water called the Labrador Current crosses the shoals and creates the perfect environment for plankton; small fish collect to feed on the plankton, and big fish collect to feed on the small fish. Soon the whole food chain’s there, right up to the seventy-foot sword boats.

The trips in and out are basically the parts of the month that swordfishermen sleep. In port they’re too busy cramming as much life as they can into five or six days, and on the fishing grounds they’re too busy working. They work twenty hours a day for two or three weeks straight and then fall into their bunks for the long steam back. The trips entail more than just eating and sleeping, though. Fishing gear, like deck gear, takes a terrific amount of abuse and must be repaired constantly. The crew doesn’t want to waste a day’s fishing because their gear’s messed up, so they tend to it on the way out: they sharpen hooks, tie gangions, tie ball drops, set up the leader cart, check the radio buoys. At the Hague Line —where they enter Canadian waters—they must stow the gear in accordance with international law, and are briefly without anything to do. They sleep, talk, watch T.V., and read; there are high school dropouts who go through half a dozen books on the Grand Banks.

Around eight or nine at night the crew squeeze into the galley and shovel down whatever the cook has put together. (Murph is the cook on the Andrea Gail, he’s paid extra and stands watch while the other men eat) At dinner the crew talk about what men everywhere talk about—women, lack of women, kids, sports, horseracing, money, lack of money, work. They talk a lot about work; they talk about it the way men in prison talk about time. Work is what’s keeping them from going home, and they all want to go home. The more fish they catch, the sooner the trip’s over, which is a simple equation that turns them all into amateur marine biologists. After dinner someone takes his turn at the dishes, and Billy goes back up to the wheelhouse so Murph can eat. No one likes washing dishes, so guys sometimes trade the duty for a pack of cigarettes. The longer the trip, the cheaper labor gets, until a $50,000-a-year fisherman is washing dishes for a single smoke. Dinner, at the end of such a trip, might be a bowl of croutons with salad dressing.

Everyone on the crew stands watch twice a day. The shifts are two hours long and involve little more than watching the radar and occasionally punching numbers into the autopilot. If the gear is out, the night watches might have to jog back onto the mainline to keep from drifting too far away. The Andrea Gail has a padded chair in her wheelhouse, but it’s set back from the helm so that no one can fall asleep on watch. The radar and loran are bolted to the ceiling, along with the VHF and single sideband, and the video plotter and autopilot are on the control panel to the left. There are nine Lexan windows and a pistol-grip spotlight that protrudes from the ceiling. The wheel is the size of a bicycle tire and positioned at the very center of the helm, about waist high. There’s no reason to touch the wheel unless the boat has been taken off autopilot, and there’s almost no reason to take the boat off autopilot. From time to time the helmsman checks the engine room, but otherwise he just stares out at sea. Strangely, the sea doesn’t get tedious to look at—wave trains converge and crisscross in patterns that have never happened before and will never happen again. It can take hours to tear one’s eyes away.

Billy Tyne’s been out to the Grand Banks dozens of times before, and he’s also fished off the Carolinas, Florida, and deep into the Caribbean. He grew up on Gloucester Avenue, near where Route 128 crosses the Annisquam River, and married a teenaged girl who lived a few blocks away. Billy was exceptional for downtown Gloucester in that he didn’t fish and his family was relatively well-off. He ran a Mexican import business for a while, worked for a vault manufacturer, sold waterbeds. His older brother was killed at age twenty-one by a landmine in Vietnam, and perhaps Billy drew the conclusion that life was not something to be pissed away in a bar. He enrolled in school, set his sights on being a psychologist, and started counselling drug-addicted teenagers. He was searching for something, trying out different lives, but nothing seemed to fit. He dropped out of school and started working again, but by then he had a wife and two daughters to support. His wife, Jodi, had been urging him to give fishing a try because she had a cousin whose husband made a lot of money at it. You never know, she told him, you just might like it.

“It was all over after that,” says Jodi. “The men don’t know anything else once they do it; they love it and it takes over and that’s the bottom line. People get possessed with church or God and fishing’s just another thing they’re possessed with. It’s something inside of them that nobody can take away and if they’re not doin’ it they’re not gonna be happy.”

It helped, of course, that Billy was good at it. He had an uncanny ability to find fish, a deep sense of where they were. “It was weird—it was like he had radar,” says Jodi. “He was one of the few guys who could go out and catch fish all the time. Everyone always wanted to fish with him ‘cause he always made money.” Tyne’s very first trip was on the Andrea Gail, and after that he switched over to the Linnea C., owned by a man named Warren Cannon. Tyne and Cannon became close friends and, for eight years, Cannon taught him everything he knew. After his long apprenticeship Tyne decided to go out on his own, and he began to take out the Haddit — “that fuckin’ Clorox bottle,” as Charlie Reed called it. (It was a fiberglass boat) By this time Tyne was fully hooked; the strains of being at sea had split up his marriage, but he still wouldn’t give it up. He moved to Florida to be closer to his ex-wife and daughters, and fished harder than ever.

Every summer Tyne’s two daughters, Erica and Billie Jo, went up to Gloucester to visit their grandparents, and Tyne would stop over between trips to see them. He also kept in touch with Charlie Reed, and when Reed stepped down from the Andrea Gail, Billy’s name came up. Brown offered him a site as skipper of the boat and one-third of the crew share. It was a good deal; a man like Tyne could clear a hundred thousand a year that way. He accepted. In the mean time, Reed got a job on a ninety-foot steel dragger called the Corey Pride. He’d make less money, but he’d spend more time at home. “I just couldn’t get into the gypsy life anymore,” Reed says. “Movin around, not comin’ home three months at a time —I got by, but it was hell on my wife. And I thought I’d made enough to keep all my kids in school. I hadn’t, but I thought I had.”

THE Andrea Gail rides out to the fishing grounds on the back of a high pressure system that comes bulging out of Canada. The winds are out of the northwest and the skies are a deep sharp blue. These are the prevailing winds for the area; they are the reason people say “Down East” when they refer to northeast Maine. Schooners that hauled eastward downwind could be in St. John’s or Halifax within twenty-four hours. A 365-horsepower diesel engine makes the effect less pronounced, but heading out is still a shorter trip than heading in. By September 26 or 27, Billy Tyne’s around 42 north and 49 west, about 300 miles off the tip of Newfoundland, in a part of the Grand Banks known as the “Tail.” Canadian National Waters, which extend two hundred miles offshore, exclude foreign boats from most of the Banks, but two small sections protrude to the northeast and southeast: the Nose and the Tail. Sword boats patrol an arc hinging on a spot around 50 degrees west and 44 degrees north. Inside that arc are the broad, fertile submarine plains of the Grand Banks, off-limits to all but Canadian boats and licensed foreign boats. Outside that arc are thousands of legal swordfish that might conceivably be fooled by a mackerel hung on a big steel hook.

Swordfish are not gentle animals. They swim through schools of fish slashing wildly with their swords, trying to eviscerate as many as possible; then they feast. Swordfish have attacked boats, pulled fishermen to their deaths, slashed fishermen on deck. The scientific name for swordfish is Xiphias gladius; the first word means “sword” in Greek and the second word means “sword” in Latin. “The scientist who named it was evidently impressed by the fact that it had a sword,” as one guidebook says.

The sword, which is a bony extension of the upper jaw, is deadly sharp on the sides and can grow to a length of four or five feet. Backed up by five hundred pounds of sleek, muscular fish, the weapon can do quite a bit of damage. Swordfish have been known to drive their swords right through the hulls of boats. Usually this doesn’t happen unless the fish has been hooked or harpooned, but in the nineteenth century a swordfish attacked a clipper ship for no apparent reason. The ship was so badly damaged that the owner applied to his insurer for compensation, and the whole affair wound up in court.

Grand Banks swordfish spawn in the Caribbean and then edge northward during the summer months, heading for the cold, protein-rich waters off Newfoundland. During the daylight hours the fish work their way down the water column to depths of 3,000 feet, chasing squid, hake, cod, butterfish, bluefish, mackerel, menhaden, and bonito, and at night they follow their prey back up to the surface. Their young hatch with scales and teeth, but no sword, and have been described as “wistful-looking.” Although all manner of fish feed on larval swordfish, only mako, sperm whale, and killer whale attack them when they’re fully grown. Mature swordfish are considered to be one of the most dangerous game fish in the world and have been known to fight non-stop for three or four hours. They have sunk small boats in their struggles. Sport fishermen need live bait on heavy steel hooks that are secured to 500-pound test steel wire or chain to catch sword-fish; they also need a “numbing club” on board to beat the fish senseless. Commercial fishermen, who are in the business of avoiding the thrill of fishing, use different methods entirely. They hang a thousand baited hooks on forty miles of monofilament and then crawl into bed to get some sleep.

Bob Brown doesn’t know when Billy makes his first set because Billy hates talking to him on the radio. He’s been known to leave messages with Linda Greenlaw in order not to talk to Bob Brown; he’s been known to fake static on the single sideband. But it’s reasonable to assume that on the night of September 27th, Tyne’s making his first set of the trip. The boat’s outriggers are boomed out and two steel plates, known as “birds,” hang by chain down into the water to provide stability. The ocean has already settled into the galloping darkness of mid-autumn, and the wind has swung around to the southeast. The surface of the ocean is cross-hatched with changing weather.

Baiting has all the glamour of a factory shift and considerably more of the danger. The line is spooled on a big Lindegren drum that sits under the shelter of the whaleback on the port side of the boat. It crosses diagonally over the deck, passes through an overhead block, and then bends straight back toward the stern. A steel ring guides it over the rail and into the water. That’s where the baiters stand. There’s a bait table on top of the stern rail—basically a wooden well with squid and mackerel in it—and a leader cart on either side. The leader carts are small drums spooled with hundreds of lengths of seven-fathom line, called gangions. Each gan gion has a #10 hook at one end and a stainless steel snap on the other.

The baiter reaches behind him and takes a gangion from his back-up man, who’s peeling them off the leader cart one at a time. The baiter impales a squid or mackerel onto the hook, snaps the gangion onto the mainline, and throws the whole thing over the side. The hook is easily big enough to pass through a man’s hand, and if it catches some part of the baiter’s body or clothing, he goes over the side with it. For this reason, baiters have complete control over the hook; no one handles the gangion while they’re on it. There’s also a knife holstered to the baiting table. A baiter might, conceivably, grab it fast enough to sever the line before going over.