Minutes after the evening weather report, Tommy Barrie raises Tyne on the single sideband. Barrie’s 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 24-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 6 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—34 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.
The worst accident occurred on a sticky, windless night off Cape Canaveral. Murph tried sleeping up on deck but it was too hot, so he went below to see if it was any better down there. Th
e air-conditioning was broken, though, so he went back up on deck. He was half asleep when a tremendous shriek of metal brought him to his feet. The boat lurched to one side and water started pouring into the hold. A sleek dark shape loomed in the water off their bow. After the bilge pumps kicked in and the boat stabilized, they turned their searchlights on it: they’d been run down by the conning tower of a British nuclear submarine. It had ripped a hole in the hull and crushed Murph’s bunk like a beer can.
With all this catastrophe in his life Murph had two choices—decide either that he was blessed or that his death was only a matter of time. He decided it was only a matter of time. When he met his wife, Debra, he told her flat out he wasn’t going to live past thirty; she married him anyway. They had a baby, Dale Junior, but the marriage broke up because Dale Senior was always at sea. And a few weeks before signing onto the Andrea Gail, Murph had stopped by his parents’ house in Bradenton for a somewhat unsettling goodbye. His mother reminded him that he needed to keep up on his life insurance policy—which included burial coverage—and he just shrugged.
Mom, I wish you’d quit worryin’ about burying me, he said. I’m going to die at sea.
His mother was taken aback, but they talked a bit longer, and at one point he asked whether she still had his high school trophies. Of course I do, she said.
Well, make sure you keep them for my son, he said, and kissed her goodbye.
“It took my breath away,” says his mother. “And then he was gone—I mean one minute he was there, the next he was out the door. I didn’t even have time to think. He was a rough, tough man. He wasn’t exactly a house person.”
Murph left for Boston in late June by train. (He was scared of flying.) He brought with him The Joy of Cooking, which his mother had given him, because he loved to cook on board the boats. He had taken his sea blanket to Debra’s to wash but forgot to retrieve it, and so Debra folded it and put it up for his return. He’d told her he’d be home by November 2nd to take her out to dinner on her birthday. You’d better be, she said. After the first trip he called her and said he’d made over six thousand dollars and that he was going to send a package down for Dale Junior. He didn’t call his parents because Debra said she’d call for him. He talked to his son for a while and then said goodbye to Debra and hung up the phone.
That was September 23. The Andrea Gail was due to leave within hours.
BY ten o’clock average windspeed is forty knots out of the north-northeast, spiking to twice that and generating a huge sea. The Andrea Gail is a square-transom boat, meaning the stern is not tapered or rounded, and she tends to ride up the face of a following sea rather than slice through it. Every time a large sea rises to her stern, the Andrea Gail slews to one side and Billy must fight the wheel to keep from broaching. Broaching is when the boat turns broadside to the seas and rolls over. Fully loaded steel boats don’t recover from broachings; they downflood and sink.
If Billy’s still running with the weather, he’s taking seas almost continually over his stern and running a real risk of having a hatchcover or watertight door tear loose. And to make matters worse, the waves have an exceptionally short period; instead of coming every fifteen seconds or so, the waves now come every eight or nine. The shorter the period, the steeper the wave faces and the closer they are to breaking; 45-foot breaking waves are much more destructive than rolling swells twice that size. According to buoy 44139, maximum wave heights for October 28th coincide with exceptionally low periods right around ten o’clock. It’s a combination that a boat the size of the Andrea Gail couldn’t take for long. Certainly by ten—if not earlier, but no later than ten—Billy Tyne must have decided to bring his boat around into the seas.
If there’s a maneuver that raises the hairs on the back of a captain’s neck, it’s coming around in large seas. The boat is broadside to the waves—“beam-to”—for half a minute or so, which is easily long enough to get rolled over. Even aircraft carriers are at risk when they’re beam-to in a big sea. If Billy attempts to come around that late in the storm, he’d make sure the decks were cleared and give her full power on the way around. The Andrea Gail would list way over and Billy would peer out of the windows to see what was bearing down on them. With luck, he’d pick a lull between the waves and they’d round up into the weather without any problem.
Billy’s been through a lot of storms, though, and he’s probably brought her around earlier in the evening, maybe even before talking to Barrie. Either way, it’s a significant moment; it means they’ve stopped steaming home and are simply trying to survive. In a sense Billy’s no longer at the helm, the conditions are, and all he can do is react. If danger can be seen in terms of a narrowing range of choices, Billy Tyne’s choices have just ratcheted down a notch. A week ago he could have headed in early. A day ago he could have run north like Johnston. An hour ago he could have radioed to see if there were any other vessels around. Now the electrical noise has made the VHF practically useless, and the single sideband only works for long range. These aren’t mistakes so much as an inability to see into the future. No one, not even the Weather Service, knows for sure what a storm’s going to do.
There are distinct drawbacks to heading into the weather, though. The windows are exposed to breaking seas, the boat uses more fuel, and the bow tends to catch the wind and drag the boat to leeward. The Andrea Gail has a high bow that would force Billy to oversteer simply to stay on course. One can imagine Billy standing at the helm and gripping the wheel with the force and stance one might use to carry a cinder block. It would be a confused sea, mountains of water converging, diverging, piling up on themselves from every direction. A boat’s motion can be thought of as the instantaneous integration of every force acting upon it in a given moment, and the motion of a boat in a storm is so chaotic as to be almost without pattern. Billy would just keep his bow pointed into the worst of it and hope he doesn’t get blind-sided by a freak wave.
The degree of danger Billy’s in can be gauged from the beating endured by the Contship Holland, two hundred or so miles to the east. The Holland is a big ship—542 feet and 10,000 tons—and capable of carrying almost seven hundred land/sea containers on her decks. She could easily take the Andrea Gail as cargo. From her daily log, October 29–30:
0400—Ship labors hard in very high following seas.
1200—Ship labors in very high stormy seas (hurricane gusts), water over deck and deck cargo. Ship strains heavily, travel reduced.
0200—Steering weather-dependent course. Ship no longer obeys rudder. Ship strains hard and lurches heavily.
0400—Containers are missing from Bay 6.
In other words, Billy’s riding out a storm that has forced a 10,000-ton containership to abandon course and simply steer to survive. The next High Seas report comes in at 11 PM, and Tommy Barrie mulls it over while waiting for Billy to call. The storm is supposed to hit just west of the Tail, around the 42 and the 55, but the Weather Service doesn’t always know everything. The 42 and the 55 are only about a hundred miles southeast of Billy, so he’s a much more reliable source for local conditions than the weather radio. It’s possible, Barrie thinks, that the Allison could get away with fishing a little gear that night. Two sections, maybe eight miles of line. Barrie’s the westernmost boat of the main fleet, so whatever is on the way is going to hit him first; but first of all it’s going to hit Billy Tyne. Barrie waits twenty, thirty minutes, but Billy never calls. That’s not as bad as it sounds—we’re all big boys out there, as Barrie says, and can take care of ourselves. Maybe Billy’s got his hands full, or maybe he went below to take a nap, or maybe he simply forgot.
Finally, around midnight, Barrie tries to raise Billy himself. He can’t get through, though, which is more serious. It means the Andrea Gail has sunk, has lost her antennas, or there’s such pandemonium on board that no one can get to the radio. Barrie guesses it’s the antennas—they’re bolted to a steel mast behind the wheelhouse, and although they’re high up, they’re fragile. Most s
word boats have lost them at one point or another, and there’s not much that can be done about it until the weather calms down. You can’t even survive a walk across the deck during Force 12 conditions, much less a trip up the mast.
Losing the antennas would seriously affect the Andrea Gail: it would mean they’d lost their GPS, radio, weatherfax, and loran. And a wave that had taken out their antennas may well have also stripped them of their radar, running lights, and floodlight. Not only would Billy not know where he was, he wouldn’t be able to communicate with anyone or detect other boats in the area; he’d basically be back in the nineteenth century. There’s not much he could do at this point but keep the Andrea Gail pointed into the seas and hope the windows don’t get blown out. They’re half-inch Lexan, but there’s a limit to what they can take; the Contship Holland took waves over her decks that peeled land/sea containers open like sardine cans, forty feet above the surface. The Andrea Gail’s pilothouse is half that high.
Around midnight a curious thing happens: The Sable Island storm eases up a bit. The winds drop a few knots and maximum wave heights fall about ten feet. Their periods lengthen as well, meaning there are fewer breaking waves; instead of crashing through walls of water, the Andrea Gail rises up the face of each wave and plunges down its backside. Forty-five foot waves have an angled face of sixty or seventy feet, which is nearly the length of the boat. On exceptionally big waves, the Andrea Gail has her stern in the trough and her bow still climbing toward the crest.
The lull, such as it is, lasts until one AM. At that point the center of the low is directly over the Andrea Gail. It’s possible that the low, with its ferocious winds and extremely tight pressure gradient, has developed an eye similar to that of a hurricane. Two days later, satellite photographs will show clouds swirling into its center like water down a drain. Dry arctic air wraps one-and-a-half times around the low before finally making it into the center—an indication of how fast the system is spinning. On October 28th the center isn’t that well defined, but it may serve to take the edge off the conditions just a bit. The reprieve doesn’t last long, though; within a couple of hours the waves are back up to seventy feet. A seventy-foot wave has an angled face of well over a hundred feet. The sea state has reached levels that no one on the boat, and few people on earth, have ever seen.