It’s hard to find a more dangerous job than venturing onto the whaleback during a storm to do a little carpentry. On land a 100-knot wind reduces people to a crawl; at sea it knocks you flat. The decks are awash, the boat is rolling, the spray is raking you like grapeshot. You work in the calm of the wave troughs and flatten yourself at the crests to keep from being blown off the boat. One man holds the plywood against the window while the other lines up a power drill with the holes in the wheelhouse and starts drilling. He drills one hole, hammers a bolt through, and then someone in the wheelhouse threads on the nut while the men on the outside keep drilling and bolting, drilling and bolting until the plywood is screwed down tight. Some captains put a piece of inner tube between the wood and steel to make it waterproof.
Although it’s a suicidal job, crews that lose their windows almost always manage to get some plywood up, even if it means turning downsea to do it. After the plywood is bolted down, the crew starts bucket-bailing the wheelhouse and putting the cabin back in order. Maybe someone tries to wire the loran or radio up to a battery to see if he can get a signal. Billy starts shifting fuel from one tank to another, trying to trim the boat. Someone probably checks the engine room and work deck—are the scuppers clearing their water? Are the birds down? Is the fish hatch secure?
There’s not much they can do at this point but head into the storm and hope they don’t take any more big waves. If waves keep taking out their windows they could turn around and go downsea, but that generates a whole new set of problems. Several large waves could simply bury them, or the lazarette could flood, or sediment could get stirred up in the tanks and clog the fuel filters. If the ship motion is violent enough, the crew has to change the filters nonstop—pull them out, flush the sediment, put them back in again, over and over, as fast as they can. Or the engine stops and the boat goes over.
There’s no question Billy would radio for help now if he had the capability. All he’d have to do is say “mayday,” on channel 16 or 2182 kilohertz, and give his coordinates. Sixteen and 2182 are monitored by the Coast Guard, the military, and all ocean-going vessels; according to maritime law, any vessel that picks up a mayday must respond immediately, unless their own lives would be put in danger. The Coast Guard would send out an Aurora rescue plane to locate the Andrea Gail and circle her. A rescue-swimmer and helicopter crew would be placed on standby at the airbase outside Halifax. The Canadian Coast Guard cutter Edward Cornwallis would start steaming east out of Halifax on what would probably be a 36-hour trip. The Triumph C, an ocean-going tug based at a drilling platform off Sable Island, would put to sea as well. The Contship Holland, the Zarah, and possibly the Mary T, would all try to converge on Billy. Once there, they wouldn’t be able to leave until the Coast Guard signs them off.
Presumably, then, Billy’s radios are out. The Coast Guard never receives a call. Now his only link to the rest of the world is his EPIRB, which sits outside in a plastic holster on the whaleback deck. It’s about the size of a bowling pin and has a ring switch that can be set to “off,” “on,” or “armed.” EPIRBs are kept permanently in the “armed” position, and if the boat goes down, a water-sensitive switch triggers a radio signal that gets relayed by satellite to listening posts on shore. The Coast Guard immediately knows the name of the boat, the location, and that something has gone disastrously wrong. If a boat loses her radios before actually sinking, though, the captain can send a distress signal by just twisting the ring switch to the “on” position. It’s the same as screaming “mayday” into the radio.
Billy doesn’t do it, though; he never trips the switch. This can only mean one thing: that he’s hopeful about their chances right up until the moment when they have no chance at all. He must figure that the kind of sea that took out their windows probably won’t hit again—or that, if it does, they’ll be able to take it. Statistically a forty-knot wind generates thirty-or forty-foot breaking sea every six minutes or so—greenwater over the bow and whitewater over the house. Every hour, perhaps, Billy might get hit by a breaking fifty-footer. That’s probably the kind of wave that blew out the windows. And every 100 hours, Billy can expect to run into a nonnegotiable wave—a breaking seventy-footer that could flip the boat end over end. He’s got to figure the storm’s going to blow out before his hundred hours are up.
Everyone on a sinking boat reacts differently. A man on one Gloucester boat just curled up and started to cry while his shipmates worked untethered on deck. The Andrea Gail crew, all experienced fishermen, are probably trying to shrug it off as just another storm—they’ve been through this before, they’ll go through it again, and at least they’re not puking. Billy’s undoubtedly working too hard at the helm to give drowning much thought. Ernie Hazard claims it was the last thing on his mind. “There was no conversation, just real businesslike,” he says of going down off Georges Bank. “You know, ‘Let’s just get this thing done.’ Never any overwhelming sense of danger. We were just very, very busy.”
Be that as it may, certain realities still must come crashing in. At some point Tyne, Shatford, Sullivan, Moran, Murphy, and Pierre must realize there’s no way off this boat. They could trigger the EPIRB, but a night rescue in these conditions would be virtually impossible. They could deploy the life raft, but they probably wouldn’t survive the huge seas. If the boat goes down, they go down with it, and no one on earth can do anything about it. Their lives are utterly and completely in their own hands.
That fact must settle into Bobby Shatford’s stomach like a bad meal. It was he, after all, who had those terrible misgivings the day they left. That last afternoon on the dock he came within a hair’s breadth of saying no—just telling Chris to start up the car and drive. They could have gone back to her place, or up the coast, or anywhere at all. It wouldn’t have mattered; he wouldn’t be in this storm right now, and neither would the rest of them. It would have taken Billy at least a day to replace him, and right now they’d still be east with the rest of the fleet.
The previous spring Bobby and Chris rented a movie called The Fighting Sullivans, about five brothers who died on a U.S. Navy boat during World War Two. It was Ethel’s favorite movie. Sitting there with Chris, watching the movie, and thinking about his brothers, Bobby started to cry. He was not a man who cried easily and Chris was unsure what to do. Should she say something? Pretend not to notice? Turn off the T.V.? Finally, Bobby said that he was upset by the idea of all his brothers fishing, and that if anything happened to him, he wanted to be buried at sea. Chris said that nothing was going to happen to him, but he insisted. Just bury me at sea, he said. Promise me that.
And now here he is, getting buried at sea. The conditions have degenerated from bad to unspeakable, Beaufort Force 10 or 11. The British Manual of Seamanship describes a Force 10 gale as: “Foam is in great patches and is blown in dense white streaks along the direction of the wind. The rolling of the sea becomes heavy and shock-like.” Force 11 is even worse: “Exceptionally high waves, small or medium-sized ships might be lost from view behind them. The sea is completely covered with long patches of white foam.” Hurricane Grace is still working her way north, and when she collides with the Sable Island storm—probably in a day or so—conditions will get even more severe, maybe as high as Force 12. Very few boats that size can withstand a Force 12 gale.
Since Billy presumably can’t use his radio, there’s no way to know how things are going aboard the Andrea Gail. A fairly good idea, though, can be had from the Eishin Maru 78, the Japanese longliner two hundred miles to the southwest. The Eishin Maru has a Canadian observer on board, Judith Reeves, who is charged with making sure the vessel abides by Canadian fishing regulations. The storm hits the Eishin Maru around the same time as the Andrea Gail, but not as abruptly; buoy 44137, sixty miles to the south, shows a slow, gradual increase in windspeed starting at 5 PM on the 28th. By dawn on the 29th, the wind is forty knots gusting to fifty, and peak wave heights are only 45 feet. That’s considerably less than what Billy is experiencing, b
ut it just keeps getting worse. By midnight sustained windspeeds are fifty knots, gusts are hitting sixty, and peak wave heights are over one hundred feet. At ten past eight at night, October 29th, the first big wave hits the Eishin Maru.
It blows out a portside window with the sound of a shotgun going off. Water inundates the bridge and barrels down the hallway into Reeves’s room. She hears panicked shouts from the crew and then orders that she doesn’t understand. Men scramble to board up the window and bail out the water, and within an hour the captain has regained control of the bridge. The boat is taking a horrific beating, though. She’s 150 feet long—twice the size of the Andrea Gail—and waves are completely burying her decks. There are no life jackets on hand, no survival suits, and no EPIRB. Just before dawn, the second wave hits.
It blows out four windows this time, including the one with plywood over it. “All the circuits went, there was smoke and wires crackling,” says Reeves. “We crippled the ship. The VHF, the radar, the internal communication system, the navigation monitors, they were all rendered inoperable. That’s when the radio operator came to me and said—in sign language—that he wanted me to go into the radio room.”
The radio operator had managed to contact the ship’s agent by satellite phone, and Reeves is put on the line to explain what kind of damage they’ve sustained. While she’s talking, Coast Guard New York breaks in; they’ve been listening in on the conversation and want to know if the Eishin Maru needs help. Reeves says they’ve lost most of their electronics and are in serious trouble. New York patches her through to the Coast Guard in Halifax, and while they’re discussing how to get people off the boat, the radio operator interrupts her. He’s pointing to a sentence in an English phrase book. Reeves leans in close to read it: “We are helpless and drifting. Please render all assistance.” (Unknown to Reeves, the steering linkage has just failed, although the radio operator doesn’t know how to explain that to her.) It’s at this moment that Reeves realizes she’s going down at sea.
“We had no steerage and we were right in the eye of the storm,” she says. “It was a confused sea, all the waves were coming from different directions. The wind was picking up the tops of the waves and slinging them so far that when the search-and-rescue plane arrived, we couldn’t even see it. The whole vessel would get shoved over on its side, so that we were completely upside-down. If you get hit by one wave and then hit by another, you can drive the vessel completely down into the water. And so that second before the vessel starts to come up you’re just holding your breath, waiting.”
They’re dead in the water, taking the huge waves broadside. According to Reeves, they are doing 360-degree barrel rolls and coming back up. Four boats try to respond to her mayday, but three of them have to stand down because of the weather. They cannot continue without risking their own lives. The ocean-going tug Triumph C leaves Sable Island and claws her way southward, and the Coast Guard cutter Edward Cornwallis is on her way from Halifax. The crew of the Eishin Maru, impassive, are sure they’re going to die. Reeves is too busy to think about it; she has to look for the life jackets, work the radio and satellite phone, flip through the Japanese phrase book. Eventually she has a moment to consider her options.
“Either I jump ship, or I go down with the ship. As for the first possibility, I thought about it for a while until I realized that they’d hammered all the hatches down. I thought, ‘God, I’ll never get off this friggin’ boat, it will be my tomb.’ So I figured I’d do whatever I had to do at the time, and there was no point in really thinking about it because it was just too frightening. I was just gripped by this feeling that I was going to have to do something very unpleasant. You know, like drowning is not going to be pleasant. And it wasn’t until the moment we lost steerage that I actually thought we were going to die. I mean, I knew there was a real possibility, and I was going to have to face that.”
Soon after losing steerage, a communications officer in New York asks Reeves how it’s going. Not too well, she says. Is your survival suit out? Yeah, it’s here, she says. Well, how many Japanese can you fit into it? Reeves laughs; even that slight joke is enough to ease the desperateness of the situation. A couple of hours later the satellite phone rings. Improbably, it’s a Canadian radio reporter who wants to interview her. His name is Rick Howe.
Miss Reeves, is it rough out there? Howe asks, over the static and wind-shriek.
It’s pretty rough.
What about the trawler, what’s the problem?
It’s not a trawler, it’s a longliner. The problem is we took three windows out of the bridge earlier this morning and lost all our instrumentation.
Are you in any danger or are you confident everything’s going to work out all right?
Well, we’re in danger, definitely we’re in danger. We’re drifting in 12 meter swells and between 50 and 60 knot winds. If we get any more water coming through the bridge that’s gonna wipe out any communication that we have left. So we’re definitely in danger right now.
Do you know how close the nearest ship to you is?
We’re looking at about a hundred miles. If we have to abandon ship there are helicopters that can be here in three-and-a-half hours. Unfortunately they won’t be able to come in the dark, so if anything happens in the dark, we’re goners.
You mentioned that you expect the weather to clear up later in the day. What more can you tell us about that?
The swell size is supposed to go down to five to eight meters and the winds come around to the east, 25 to 35 knots. So that will take a lot of the edge off the fear I have right now, which is of sustaining a direct hit. If we take a direct hit, and the boat goes over, and we take another hit, the boat goes down. And we’re all shored up here, everything is battened down, hatched and practically nailed shut. If she goes over there’s no way anybody’s gonna get out, over.
Now is there a point where you may have to abandon ship, and is the crew and yourself prepared for that eventuality?
Well, to tell you the absolute truth I don’t think the crew is very prepared for an emergency. They have no emergency beacon and don’t seem very up on their emergency procedure, which is a little frightening. I’m the only one who has a survival suit. But, in a swell like we have today, it wouldn’t do me much good.
Yeah, right. Well, listen, I thank you for talking to us, and the whole of the province is praying for your safe return.
Thank you.
With that, Reeves turns back to the business at hand.
AFTER talking to Tommy Barrie, Billy is probably able to steam northwest another two or three hours before the seas get too rough to take on his stern. That would place him just north of data buoy 44139 and on the edge of Banquereau, one of the old fishing grounds off Nova Scotia. The 200-fathom line turns a corner at Banquereau, running north up the St. Lawrence Channel and south-southwest to Sable Island. About sixty miles due east is an underwater canyon called “The Gully,” and then the Sable Island shallows start.
Sable Island is a twenty-mile sandbar that extends another forty or fifty miles east-west below water. From a distance, the surf that breaks on the shoals looks like a white sand cliff. Mariners have headed for it in storms, thinking they might save themselves by driving their boat onto the beach, only to be pounded to pieces by twenty-foot waves on the outer bar. Sable Island historian George Patterson writes, in 1894: “From the east end a bar stretches northeasterly for seventeen miles, of which the first four are dry in fine weather, the next nine covered with heavy breakers and the last four with a heavy cross-sea. The island and its bar present a continuous line of upwards of fifty miles of terrific breakers. The currents around the island are terribly conflicting and uncertain, sometimes passing around the whole circuit of the compass in 24 hours. An empty cask will be carried round and round the island, making the circuit several times, and the same is the case with bodies from wrecks.”
The island prowls restlessly around the Scotian Shelf, losing sand from one end, building it up on
the other, endlessly, throughout the centuries. Since 1873 it has melted away beneath the foundations of six lighthouses. Herds of wild horses live on the island, the descendants of tough Breton mountain horses left there by the French. Nothing but marran grass holds the dunes in place, and cranberries, blueberries, and wild roses grow in the inland bogs. The Gulf Stream and the glacial Labrador Current converge at Sable, frequently smothering the island in fog. Five thousand men are said to have drowned in its shallows, earning it the name “The Graveyard of the Atlantic,” and at least that many have been pulled to safety by lifesaving crews that have been maintained there since 1801. “We have had a tolerable winter, and no wrecks, except the hull of the schooner Juno, of Plymouth,” one island-keeper recorded in 1820. “She came ashore without masts, sails or rigging of any description, and no person on board except one dead man in the hold.”
In bad weather, horsemen circled the island looking for ships in distress. If any were spotted, the horsemen rushed back for the surf boat and rowed out through the breakers to save anyone who was still alive. Sometimes they were able to fire rockets with a line attached and rig up a breeches buoy. After the storm died down they’d salvage the cargo and saw the ship timber up for firewood or construction material. People pulled from sinking ships often spent the entire winter on the island. Sometimes two or three hundred people would be camped out in the dunes, waiting for a relief ship to arrive in the spring.