The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea (5 page)

Thea says come by any time, and Chris hangs up and goes back to the bar. Bobby's hangover has alchemized into a huge empty hunger, and they finish off their beers and leave a buck on the bartop and head back outside. They drive across town to a lunch place called Sammy J's and order two more beers and fishcakes and beans. Fishcakes are Bobbys favorite food and he probably won't see them again until he's back on shore. The last thing fishermen want to eat at sea is more fish. They eat fast and pick up Bugsy and then drive over to Ethels. Chris has had a falling out with Ethel's boyfriend, and Chris is going to move out everything she has stored there. It's still raining a little, everything seems dark and oppressive, and they carry boxes of her belongings down one flight of stairs and pack them into the Volvo. They fill the car with lamps and clothes and house plants and then squeeze themselves in and drive across town to the projects on Arthur Street.

Thea doesn't go for Bugsy; as it turns out, she's already got a boyfriend. The four of them sit around talking and drinking beer for a while, and then the men have a terrible realization: They've forgotten the hotdogs. Murph, who is charged with buying food for the trip, won't get hotdogs on his own, so if they want any they'll have to get them on their own. They drive to Cape Ann Market and Bobby and Bugsy run into the store and come back a few minutes later with fifty dollars' worth of hotdogs. It's midafternoon now; it's getting close. Chris drives them back down Rogers Street, past Walgreen's and Americold and Gorton's, and turns down into the gravel lot behind Rose's Marine. Bobby and Bugsy get out with their hotdogs and jump from the pier to the deck of the
Andrea Gail.

Watching the men move around the boat Chris thinks: this winter Bobby'11 be down in Bradenton, next summer he'll be back up here but gone a month at a time, and that's just how it is; Bobby's a swordfisherman and owes a lot of money. At least they have a plan, though. Bobby signed a statement directing Bob Brown to give his settlement check from the last trip to Chris, and she's going to use the money—almost $3,000—to pay off some of his debts and get an apartment in Lanesville, on the north shore of Cape Ann. Maybe living out there, they'll spend a little less time at the Nest. And she's got two jobs lined up, one at the Old Farm Inn in Rockport, and another taking care of the retarded son of a friend. They'll get by. Bobby might be away a lot, but they'll get by.

Suddenly there are shouts coming from the boat: Bugsy and Bobby are standing toe to toe on the wharf in the rain, wrenching a jug of bleach back and forth. Fists are coming up and the bleach is going first one way, then another, and at any moment it looks like one of them's going to roundhouse the other. It doesn't happen; Bobby finally turns away, spitting, swears, and goes back to work. Out of the corner of her eye Chris sees another fisherman named Sully angling across the gravel lot toward her car. He walks up and leans in the window.

I just got a site on the boat, he says, I'm replacin' some guy who backed out. He looks over at Bobby and Bugsy. Can you believe this shit? Thirty days together and it's startin' already?

THE Andrea Gail,
in the language, is a raked-stem, hard-chined western-rig swordfisherman. That means her bow has a lot of angle to it, she has a nearly square cross section, and her pilothouse is up front rather than in the stern, atop an elevated deck called the whaleback. She's seventy-two feet long, has a hull of continuously welded steel plate, and was built in Panama City, Florida, in 1978. She has a 365-horsepower, turbo-charged diesel engine, which is capable of speeds up to twelve knots. There are seven type-one life preservers on board, six Imperial survival suits, a 406-megahertz Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB), a 121.5-megahertz EPIRB, and a Givens auto-inflating life raft. There are forty miles of 700-pound test monofilament line on her, thousands of hooks, and room for five tons of baitfish. An ice machine that can make three tons of ice a day sits on her whaleback deck, and state-of-the-art electronics fill her pilothouse: radar, loran, single sideband, VHF, weather track satellite receiver. There's a washer/dryer on board, and the galley has fake wood veneer and a four-burner stove.

The
Andrea Gail
is one of the biggest moneymakers in Gloucester harbor, and Billy Tyne and Bugsy Moran have driven all the way from Florida to grab sites onboard. The only other sword boat in the harbor that might be able to outfish her is the
Hannah Boden,
skippered by a Colby College graduate named Linda Greenlaw. Not only is Greenlaw one of the only women in the business, she's one of the best captains, period, on the entire East Coast. Year after year, trip after trip, she makes more money than almost anyone else. Both the
Andrea Gail
and the
Hannah Boden
are owned by Bob Brown, and they can take so much fish from the ocean that Ethel's son Ricky has been known to call in from Hawaii to find out if either one is in port. When the
Hannah Boden
unloads her catch in Gloucester, swordfish prices plummet halfway across the world.

So far, though, Billy's second trip on the
Andrea Gail
is off to a bad start. The boys have been drinking hard all week and everyone's in a foul mood. No one wants to go back out. For the past several days almost every attempt to work on the boat has degenerated either into a fight or an occasion to walk across the street to the bar. Now it's September 20th, late in the season to be heading out, and Tyne can barely round up a full crew. Alfred Pierre—an immense, kind Jamaican from New York City—is holed up with his girlfriend in one of the upstairs rooms at the Nest. One minute he says he's going, the next minute he's not—it's been like that all day long. Bobby's somewhere across town with a black eye and a hangover. Bugsy's in an ugly mood because he hasn't met a woman. Murph is complaining about money and misses his kid, and— the last straw—a new crew member walked off this morning without any explanation at all.

The guy's name was Adam Randall, and he was supposed to replace Doug Kosco, who'd crewed on the previous trip. Randall had driven up from East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, with his father-in-law that morning to take the job; he pulled into the dirt parking lot behind Rose's and got out to look the boat over. Randall was a lithe, intensely handsome thirty-year-old man with a shag of blond rock-star hair and cold blue eyes. He was a welder, an engineer, a scuba diver, and had fished his whole life. He knew an unsafe boat when he saw one—he called them "slabs"—and the
Andrea Gail
was anything but. She looked like she could take an aircraft carrier broadside. Moreover, he knew most of her crew, and his girlfriend had practically told him not to bother coming home if he didn't take the job. He hadn't worked in three months. He walked back across the lot, told his father-in-law that he had a funny feeling, and the two of them drove off together to a bar.

People often get premonitions when they do jobs that could get them killed, and in commercial fishing—still one of the most dangerous pursuits in the country—people get premonitions all the time. The trick is knowing when to listen to them. In 1871, a cook named James Nelson shipped aboard the schooner
Sachem
for a fishing trip to Georges Bank. One night he was awakened by a recurring dream and ran aft to tell the captain. For God's sake get clear of the Banks, he begged, I've had my dream again. I've been shipwrecked twice after this dream.

The captain was an old salt named Wenzell. He asked what the dream was. I see women, dressed in white, standing in the rain, Nelson replied.

There was hardly a breath of wind and Wenzell was not impressed. He told Nelson to go back to bed. A while later a little breeze sprang up. Within an hour it was blowing hard and the
Sachem
was hove-to under close-reefed foresail. The hull started to open up and the crew manned the pumps.

They couldn't keep up with the leak, and Wenzell desperately signalled to a nearby Gloucester schooner, the
Pescador.
The
Pescador
put dories over the side and managed to save the
Sachem's
crew. Within half an hour the
Sachem
rolled over, settled bow-down into the sea, and sank.

Even today, instincts are heeded and fears are listened to. Randall walked off and suddenly Tyne had another site to fill. He called around and finally got twenty-eight-year-old David Sullivan. Sully, as he's known, was mildly famous in town for having saved his entire crew one frigid January night. His boat, the
Harmony,
was tied to another boat when she began to take on water out at sea. Her crew started screaming for help but couldn't wake up the men on the other boat, so Sully jumped overboard and pulled himself across on a rope, legs dragging through the icy North Atlantic. Sullivan, in other words, was a good man to have on board.

Tyne said he'd be over to pick him up in half an hour. Sully packed a bag and made a few phone calls to tell people he'd be away for a while. Suddenly his plans for that evening were off; his life was on hold for the next month. Billy showed up around two o'clock and they drove back to Rose's just in time to see Bobby and Bugsy going at it. Wonderful, Sully thought. He stopped to say hello to Chris and then Billy sent him off to the Cape Ann Market to get the food for the trip. Murph went with him. Bulging in Sully's pocket was $4,000 cash.

One of the things about commercial fishing is that everything seems to be extreme. Fishermen don't work in any normal sense of the word, they're at sea for a month and then home celebrating for a week straight. They don't earn the same kind of money most other people do, they come home either busted or with a quarter-million dollars' worth of fish in their hold. And when they buy food for the month, it's not something any normal person would recognize as shopping; it's a retail catastrophe of Biblical proportions.

Murph and Sully drive to the Cape Ann Market out on Route 127 and begin stalking up and down the aisles throwing food into their carts by the armful. They grab fifty loaves of bread, enough to fill two carts. They take a hundred pounds of potatoes, thirty pounds of onions, twenty-five gallons of milk, eighty-dollar racks of steak. Every time they fill a cart they push it to the back of the store and get another one. The herd of carts starts to grow—ten, fifteen, twenty carts—and people stare nervously and get out of the way. Murph and Sully grab anything they want and lots of it: ice cream sandwiches, Hostess cupcakes, bacon and eggs, creamy peanut butter, porterhouse steaks, chocolate-coated cereal, spaghetti, lasagna, frozen pizza. They get top-of-the-line food and the only thing they don't get is fish. Finally they get thirty cartons of cigarettes—enough to fill a whole cart—and round their carts up like so many stainless steel cattle. The store opens two cash registers especially for them, and it takes half an hour to ring them through. The total nearly cleans Sully out; he pays while Murph backs the truck up to a loading dock, and they heave the food on and then drive it down to Rose's wharf. Bag by bag, they carry $4,000 worth of groceries down into the fish hold of the
Andrea Gail.

The
Andrea Gail
has a small refrigerator in the galley and twenty tons of ice in the hold. The ice keeps the baitfish and groceries from spoiling on the way out and the swordfish from spoiling on the way home. (In a pinch it can even be used to keep a dead crew member fresh: once a desperately alcoholic old fisherman died on the
Hannah Boden,
and Linda Greenlaw had to put him down the hole because the Coast Guard refused to fly him out.) Commercial fishing simply wouldn't be possible without ice. Without diesel engines, maybe; without loran, weather faxes, or hydraulic winches; but not without ice. There is simply no other way to get fresh fish to market. In the old days, Grand Banks fishermen used to run to Newfoundland to salt-dry their catch before heading home, but the coming of the railroads in the 1840s changed all that. Suddenly food could be moved faster than it would spoil, and ice companies sprang up practically overnight to accommodate the new market. They cut ice from ponds in the winter, packed it in sawdust and then sold it to schooners in the summer months. Properly packed ice lasted so long—and was so valuable—that traders could ship it to India and still make a profit.

The market for fresh fish changed fishing forever. No longer could schooner captains return home at their leisure with a hold full of salt cod; now it was all one big race. Several full schooners pulling into port at once could saturate the market and ruin the efforts of anyone following. In the 1890s, one schooner had to dump 200 tons of halibut into Gloucester harbor because she'd been beaten into port by six other vessels. Overloaded schooners built like racing sloops dashed home through fall gales with every inch of canvas showing and their decks practically awash. Bad weather sank these elegant craft by the dozen, but a lot of people made a lot of money. And in cities like Boston and New York, people were suddenly eating fresh Atlantic cod.

Little has changed. Fishing boats still make the same mad dashes for shore they were making 150 years ago, and the smaller boats—the ones that don't have ice machines—are still buying it in bulk from Cape Pond Ice, located in a low brick building between Felicia Oil and Parisi Seafoods. In the old days, Cape Pond used to hire men to carve up a local pond with huge ice saws, but now the ice is made in row upon row of 35O-pound blocks, called "cans." The cans look like huge versions of the trays in people's refrigerators. They're extracted from freezers in the floor, skidded onto elevators, hoisted to the third floor, and dragged down a runway by men wielding huge steel hooks; the men work in a building-sized refrigerator and wear shirts that say, "Cape Pond Ice—The Coolest Guys Around." The ice blocks are shoved down a chute into a steel cutting drum, where they jump and rattle in terrible spasms until all 350 pounds have been eaten down to little chips and sprayed through a hose into the hold of a commercial boat outside.