The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea (16 page)

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. The 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 23rd. 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; forty-five-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 29th-30th:

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 eleven 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. Barries 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 sword 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 28 th 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.

When the
Contship Holland
finally limped into port several days later, one of her officers stepped off and swore he'd never set foot on another ship again. She'd lost thirty-six land/sea containers over the side, and the ship's owners promptly hired an American meteorological consultant to help defend them against lawsuits. "The storm resulted in large-scale destruction of offshore shipping and coastal installations from Nova Scotia to Florida," wrote Bob Raguso of
Weathernews New York.
"It was called an extreme nor'easter by U.S. scientists and ranked as one of the five most intense storms from 1899-1991. It had the highest significant wave heights either arrived at by measurement or calculation. Some scientists termed it the hundred year storm."

The
Andrea Gail
is at the epicenter of this storm and almost on top of the Sable Island shoals. It's very likely she has lost her antennas, or Billy would have radioed Tommy Barrie that things looked bad—and definitely don't fish any gear that night. On the other hand, it's debatable whether the sea state could have overwhelmed Billy's boat that early in the evening; the fifty-five-foot
Fair Wind
didn't flip until winds hit a hundred knots and the waves were running seventy feet. A more likely scenario is that Billy manages to get through the ten o'clock spike in weather conditions but takes a real beating—the windows are out, the electronics are dead, and the crew is terrified.

For the first time they are completely, irrevocably on their own.

GRAVEYARD OF THE ATLANTIC

In a few days the El Dorado expedition went into the patient wilderness, that closed upon it like the sea closes over a diver. Long afterwards the news came back that all the donkeys were dead.

—
JOSEPH CONRAD,
Heart of Darkness

ALBERT JOHNSTON:

I was the first one to know how bad it was really gonna be. Halifax called for twenty meter seas and when we heard that we thought, Oh boy. You don't really have time to run to land so we tried to get into the coldest water we could find. The colder the water, the denser it is and the waves don't get as big. Also, I knew we'd get a northeast-northwest wind. I wanted to make as much headway as possible 'cause the Gulf Stream was down south and that's where the warm water and fast current are.

There was an awful lot of electrical noise along the leading edge of this thing, there was so much noise you couldn't hear anything on the radio. I was up in the wheelhouse, when it's bad like that I usually stay up there. If it looks like it's settlin' down a bit and I can grab a little sleep, then I will. The crew just racks out and watches videos. Everybody acknowledged this was the worst storm they'd ever been in—you can tell by the size of the waves, the motion of the boat, the noise, the crashing. There's always a point when you realize that you're in the middle of the ocean and if anything goes wrong, that's it. You see so much bad weather that you kind of get used to it. But then you see
really
bad weather. And that, you never get used to.