The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea (9 page)

The F/V
Tiffany Vance
arrived in Shelburne, Nova Scotia at first light on August 21. We left that afternoon at 5:30 P.M. with fuel and supplies and were escorted out of the harbor by dolphins riding the bow wake. Two Spanish fishing vessels (a crewman on the
Tiffany Vance
was from Spain) were sighted heading west. Numerous container vessels were seen heading towards Canada. We arrived on the Tail of the Banks on August 25. The water temperature was constantly monitored for "edges" where cold and warm water meet. On August 26, the captain found good water as well as an open area among the other swordfish longliners, and we were to set that evening. The set-out took an hour and a half and five hundred hooks were used.

Haulback began at 5:10 A.M. with the pulling on board of the highflyer and radio beacon. Yankee hooks and traps were coiled and boxed as they came on board and monofilament hooks were wound on reels. The captain steering and throttling the boat fishes the longline for "weight." The first fish was a swordfish. With its bill breaking the water surface and then rolling on its back, dead, it was hauled to the vessel on the longline. Gaffed, it is pulled aboard, its sword sawed off and the fish is cleaned. The crew checks the stomach contents and feels the internal body temperature for clues as to what type of water the fish has been in. Most of the swordfish were feeding on squid.

The next two days of fishing took place in the same general area south of the Tail of the Banks. On the second day we caught eleven swordfish, four blue sharks, one mako shark, one sea turtle (released alive) and one skate. We kept the mako in addition to the swordfish. The third day during set-out we had a gear conflict. Despite efforts by captains to establish berths and to contact all area boats on gear positions, we crossed a longline. Our vessel's stabilizers, which hang from outriggers about 18 feet below the surface, caught on a longline. The port stabilizer held fast but the starboard stabilizer, which is composed of lead and steel, left rhe water and slammed into the bait box just inches from a seaman.

To escape gear conflicts and the increased traffic, we moved northeast over the Newfoundland seamounts. The next fishing day, August 30—31, was fairly routine. The captain set out a lesser number of hooks (300) because the water wasn't quite right (flat water). Despite this we caught nine swordfish. During haulback we lost the gear for an hour due to the mainline parting. After haulback the captain, in order to find better waters, steamed all night and into the northeast approximately 170 miles towards the Flemish Cap. Whales were seen in the distance. On September 4 we set out 400 hooks and the catch consisted of twelve swordfish, one mako shark, three lancetfish, three skates, one blue shark and a leatherback turtle, which was released alive.

On the night of September 5, the captain rendezvoused with the swordfish vessel
Andrea Gail
so I could get home. The vessels tied stern-to-stern and transferred my gear on a second line. Then the vessels untied and the
Andrea Gail
aligned her starboard side to the stern of the
Tiffany Vance,
and I swam the 30 yards to the
Andrea Gail.
They pulled me on board, and two days later we landed at the port of Burin, Newfoundland. The owner of the
Andrea Gail,
Robert Brown, who flew to Newfoundland to replace malfunctioning generators, flew us home to Beverly Airport on September 9, 1982. The
Tiffany Vance
arrived in New Bedford on October 18—sixty-three days at sea with 25,000 pounds of swordfish.

Swordfish fishermen, in particular the Grand Banks fishermen, are at sea for extended periods of time without communication with the mainland. An opportunity to study short-term culture shock is available among these fishermen, and should be undertaken.

Through the end of September and the first week in October the crew of the
Andrea Gail
set out their gear, steam back, haul it up, and set it out again. The days are hot and the men are in t-shirts on deck, their skin curing to a salt-streaked brown in the afternoon sun. In the evening they put on jackets and sweatshirts and work the bait table with their hoods pulled up. The light angles and reddens and finally sinks into darkness with the decklights ruining the stars and the sharp cold air digging at memories of the New England fall. Around ten o'clock the men finish up and pitch into their bunks for a few hours' sleep.

To a fisherman, the Grand Banks are as distinct and recognizable as, say, the Arizona deserts or the swamps of Georgia. They have their own particular water, light, wildlife, "feel." No bluewater fisherman could ever wake up on the Grand Banks and think he was off Georges, say, or Long Island. Cliffs of fog move in and smother the boats for weeks at a time. Winter cold fronts come howling down off the Canadian Shield and make the water smoke. The sea is so rich with plankton that it turns a dull green-grey and swallows light rather than reflects it. Petrels and shearwaters circle the boats hundreds of miles from land. Great skuas swoop over the waters, rasping
hah-hah-hah
at their empty world. Prehistoric-looking creatures called beaked whales spook the crews of fogbound boats. Killer whales range up and down the longlines eating—strangely enough—only the pectoral fins of blue sharks.

Billy's fishing about 200 miles east of the Tail, near a set of shallows known as the Newfoundland Seamounts. On the horizon he can occasionally make out the white pilothouse of a boat called the
Mary T,
captained by a Florida man named Albert Johnston. Johnston and Billy fish end for end for about a week, setting their gear southwestward in two great parallel lines. The lines stitch back and forth across slight temperature breaks to anchor the gear in the slower-moving cold water. From time to time they see each other during the haulback, but mostly they're just snowy images on each other's radar screens. Sword boats on the high seas don't socialize much. One would think they would—my God, all that emptiness—but generally they'd rather socialize in a barroom or in bed with their wives. (A waterfront joke: What's the second thing a fisherman does when he gets home? Puts down his bags.) Captains have been known to pull one steel bird out of the water on the trip home just because it slows them down by half a knot. Over the course of a week that means twelve more hours until they get home. Four or five days into October, Johnston hauls his last set and tells the rest of the fleet he's heading in. He says he'll radio the weather conditions back as he goes. The boat rolls along atop an old decayed swell, and the crew catch up on their sleep and take turns at the helm. A new moon rises behind them on October 7th, and they follow its pale suggestion all through the day until late that afternoon. The sunset is a bloody rust-red on a sharp autumn horizon, and the night comes in fast with a northwest wind and a sky rivetted with stars. There's no sound but the smack of water on steel and the heavy gargle of the diesel engine. The
Mary T
makes port in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, on October nth, after more than a month at sea.

Fairhaven is a smaller version of New Bedford, which sits half a mile away across the Acushnet River. Both cities are tough, bankrupt little places that never managed to diversify during the century-long decline of the New England fishing industry. If Gloucester is the delinquent kid who's had a few scrapes with the law, New Bedford is the truly mean older brother who's going to kill someone one day. One New Bedford bar was the scene of an infamous gang rape; another was known to employ a Doberman pinscher as a bouncer, A lot of heroin passes through New Bedford, and a lot of sword-fishermen get in trouble there. One of Johnston's crew drew a $13,000 check in New Bedford and returned a week later without any shoes.

Johnston ties up at Union Wharf alongside McLean's Seafood and North Atlantic Diesel. McLean's is a battered two-story building with cement floors for draining fishblood and a rabbit warren of offices upstairs where deals are cut. Dark, wild-haired young men stomp around in rubber boots and shout to each other in Portuguese as they heave fish around the room. With long knives they "loin" the fish— carve the meat off the bones—and then seal it in vacuum bags and load it onto trucks. A good worker can loin a full-sized fish in two minutes. McLean's moves two million pounds of swordfish a year, and a million pounds of tuna. They fly it overseas, ship it around the country, and sell it to the corner store.

Johnston's boat takes most of a day to unload, the next day he settles the accounts and starts fitting the boat out again. Food, diesel, water, ice, repairs, the usual. The faster the turnaround, the better—not only will his crew be more likely to survive New Bedford's charms, but it's getting late in the season to head out to the Grand Banks. The longer you wait, the worse the storms are. "You get in that kind of weather and if anything goes wrong—if a hatch busts off or one of the outriggers gets tangled up—you can really be in trouble," says Johnston. "Some of the guys get to where they feel invincible, but they don't realize that there's a real fine line between what they've seen and what it can get to. I know a guy who lost a 900-foot boat out there. It broke in half and sank with thirty men.

Sure enough, Johnston's still fitting-out when the first ugly weather blows through. It's a double-low that grinds off the coast and cranks the wind around to the southwest. The storm intensifies as it plows out to sea and catches Billy one morning while he's hauling back. The wind is thirty knots and the waves are washing over the deck, but they can't stop working until the gear is in. Late in the morning, they get slammed.

It's a rogue wave: steep, cresting, and maybe thirty feet high. It avalanches over the decks and buries the
Andrea Gail
under tons of water. One moment they're at the hauling station tending the line, the next they're way over on their side. Heavily, endlessly, the
Andrea Gail
rights herself, and Billy brings her around into the weather and checks for damages. The batteries have come out of their boxes down in the engine room, but that's about it. That evening Billy radios Charlie Johnson of the
Seneca
to tell him what happened. Charlie's in Bay Bulls, Newfoundland, getting a crankshaft fixed, and Billy calls him every evening to keep him updated on the fleet.
Jesus, we took a hell of a wave,
Billy says.
We went way over on our side. I didn't think we'd make it back up.

They discuss the weather and the fishing for a few minutes and then sign off. The story of the wave doesn't sound good to Charlie Johnson—the
Andrea Gail's
known as a tough little boat and shouldn't go over that easily. Not with a bird in the water and twenty thousand pounds of fish in the hold. "I didn't want to say anything, but it didn't seem right," Johnson says. "You're in God's country out there. You can't make any mistakes."

The
Andrea Gail
fishes east of the Tail for another week and does very poorly, the trip's shaping up to be a total bust. A boat can't stay indefinitely out at sea—supplies run low, the crew gets crazy, the fish get old. They've got to find some fish fast. Around mid-month they pull their gear and steam northeast all night to a set of shallows known as the Flemish Cap. The rest of the fleet is way off to the south and west: Tommy Barrie on the
Allison,
Charlie Johnson on the
Seneca,
Larry Horn on the
Miss Millie,
Mike Hebert on the
Mr. Simon,
and Linda Greenlaw on the
Hannah Boden.

There's also a 150-foot Japanese longliner named the
Eishin Maru #78.
The
Eishin Maru
is carrying a Canadian Fisheries observer, Judith Reeves, who is the only person on board who has a survival suit or knows how to speak English. The
Mary T
is on her way out, and another boat named the
Laurie Dawn 8
has just arrived in New Bedford to gear up.

Billy's at 41 degrees west, way out on the edge. He's almost off the fishing charts. The weather has turned raw and blustery and the men work in layers of sweatshirts and overalls and rubber slickers. It's the end of the season, their last chance for a decent trip. They just want to get this thing done.

THE FLEMISH CAP

And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled with fire . . .

—
REVELATION 15

NEW ENGLANDERS
started catching swordfish in the early 1800s by harpooning them from small sailboats and hauling them on board. Since swordfish don't school, the boats would go out with a man up the mast looking for single fins lolling about in the glassy inland waters. If the wind sprang up, the fins were undetectable, and the boats went in. When the lookout spotted a fish, he guided the captain over to it, and the harpooner made his throw. The throw had to take into account the roll of the boat, the darting of the fish, and the refraction of light through water. Giant bluefin tuna are still hunted this way, but fishermen use spotter planes to find their prey and electric harpoons to kill them. Giant bluefin are a delicacy in Japan; they are airfreighted over and get up to eighty dollars a pound. A single bluefin might go for thirty or forty thousand dollars.

Spotter planes were introduced to New England fishermen in 1962, but it was the longline that really changed the fishery. For years the Norwegians had caught mako on long-lines, along with a few swordfish, but they had never gone after swordfish exclusively. Then, in 1961, Canadian fishermen made some alterations to the gear and nearly tripled the total northeastern sword catch. The boom didn't last long, though; ten years later the U.S. Food and Drug Administration determined that swordfish carried a dangerous amount of mercury in them, and both the American and Canadian governments banned sale of the fish. Some longliners went out after swordfish anyway, but they risked having their catch seized and tested by the F.D.A.

Finally, in 1978, the U.S. government relaxed the standards for acceptable mercury contamination in fish, and the gold rush was on. In the interim fishing had changed, though; boats were using satellite navigation, electronic fish finders, temperature-depth gauges. Radar reflectors were used to track gear, and new monofilament made it possible to set thirty or forty miles of line at a time. By the mid-eighties, the U.S. swordfish fleet alone was up to 700 boats fishing around fifty million hooks a year. "The technological change appears to be bumping up against the limits of the resource," as one government study put it at the time.