The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

Cod was a blessing but could not, alone, have accounted for such riches. In 1816, a Cape Ann fisherman named Abraham Lurvey invented the mackerel jig by attaching a steel hook to a drop-shaped piece of cast lead. Not only did the lead act as a sinker, but, jiggled up and down, it became irresistible to mackerel. After two centuries of watching these elusive fish swim past in schools so dense they discolored the sea, New England fishermen suddenly had a way to catch them. Gloucester captains ignored a federal bounty on cod and sailed for Sable Island with men in the cross-trees looking for the tell-tale darkening of mackerel in the water. “School-O!” they would shout, the ship would come around into the wind, and ground-up baitfish—“chum”—would be thrown out into the water. The riper the chum was, the better it attracted the fish; rotting chum on the breeze meant a mackerel schooner was somewhere upwind.

Jigging for mackerel worked well, but it was inevitable that the Yankee mind would come up with something more efficient. In 1855 the purse seine was invented, a 1,300-foot net of tarred twine with lead weights at the bottom and cork floats at the top. It was stowed in a dory that was towed behind the schooner, and when the fish were sighted, the dory quickly encircled them and cinched the net up tight. It was hauled aboard and the fish were split, gutted, beheaded, and thrown into barrels with salt. Sometimes the school escaped before the net was tightened and the crew drew up what was called a “water haul”; other times the net was so full that they could hardly winch it aboard.

Purse-seining passed for a glamorous occupation at the time, and it wasn’t long before codfishermen came up with their own version of it. It was called tub trawling and if it was more efficient at killing fish, it was also more efficient at killing men. No longer did groundfishermen work from the relative safety of a schooner; now they were setting out from the mother ship in sixteen-foot wooden dories. Each dory carried half a dozen 300-foot trawl lines that were coiled in tubs and hung with baited hooks. The crews rowed out in the morning, paid out their trawls, and then hauled them back every few hours. There were 1,800 hooks to a dory, ten dories to a schooner, and several hundred ships in the fleet. Groundfish had several million chances a day to die.

Pulling a third of a mile’s worth of trawl off the ocean floor was back-breaking work, though, and unspeakably dangerous in bad weather. In November of 1880, two fishermen named Lee and Devine rowed out from the schooner Deep Water in their dory. November was a hell of a time to be on the Grand Banks in any kind of vessel, and in a dory it was sheer insanity. They took a wave broadside while hauling their trawl and both men were thrown into the water. Devine managed to clamber back into the boat, but Lee, weighed down by boots and winter clothing, started to sink. He was several fathoms under when his hand touched the trawl line that led back up to the surface. He started to pull.

Almost immediately his right hand sunk into a hook. He jerked it away, leaving part of his finger on the barbed steel like a piece of herringbait, and kept pulling upwards towards the light. He finally broke the surface and heaved himself back into the dory. It was almost awash and Devine, who was bailing like mad, could do nothing to help him. Lee passed out from the pain and when he came to, he grabbed a bucket and started bailing as well. They had to empty the boat before they were hit by another freak wave. Twenty minutes later they were out of danger and Devine asked Lee if he needed to go back to the schooner. Lee shook his head and said that they should finish hauling the trawls. For the next hour he pulled gear out of the water with his mangled hand. That was dory-fishing in its heyday.

There are worse deaths than the one Lee almost suffered, though. Warm Gulf Stream water meets the Labrador Current over the Grand Banks, and the result is a wall of fog that can sweep in with no warning at all. Dory crews hauling their gear have been caught by the fog and simply never seen again. In 1883, a fisherman named Howard Blackburn—still a hero in town, Gloucester’s answer to Paul Bunyan—was separated from his ship and endured three days at sea during a January gale. His dory-mate died of exposure, and Blackburn had to freeze his own hands around the oar handles to continue rowing for Newfoundland. In the end he lost all his fingers to frostbite. He made land on a deserted part of the coast and staggered around for several days before finally being rescued.

Every year brought a story of survival nearly as horrific as Blackburn’s. A year earlier, two men had been picked up by a South American trader after eight days adrift. They wound up in Pernambuco, Brazil, and it took them two months to get back to Gloucester. From time to time dory crews were even blown across the Atlantic, drifting helplessly with the trade winds and surviving on raw fish and dew. These men had no way to notify their families when they finally made shore; they simply shipped home and came walking back up Rogers Street several months later like men returning from the dead.

For the families back home, dory-fishing gave rise to a new kind of hell. No longer was there just the grief of losing men at sea; now there was the agony of not knowing, as well. Missing dory crews could turn up at any time, and so there was never a point at which the families knew for sure they could grieve and get on with their lives. “We saw a father go morning and evening to the hill-top which overlooked the ocean,” recorded the Provincetown Advocate after a terrible gale in 1841. “And there seating himself, would watch for hours, scanning the distant horizon … for some speck on which to build a hope.”

And they prayed. They walked up Prospect Street to the top of a steep rise called Portagee Hill and stood beneath the twin bell towers of Our Lady of Good Voyage church. The bell towers are one of the highest points in Gloucester and can be seen for miles by incoming ships. Between the towers is a sculpture of the Virgin Mary, who gazes down with love and concern at a bundle in her arms. This is the Virgin who has been charged with the safety of the local fishermen. The bundle in her arms is not the infant Jesus; it’s a Gloucester schooner.

AFTER Mary Anne leaves the Green Tavern, Chris and Bobby finish up their drinks and then tell Bugsy that they’re going out for a while. They step out of the barroom darkness into the soft grey light of Gloucester in the rain and walk across the street to Bill’s. Bobby orders a couple of Budweisers while Chris fishes a dime out of her pocket and calls her friend Thea from a pay-phone. She and Thea used to be neighbors in a housing project, and Chris thinks she might be able to borrow Theas apartment for a while to give Bobby a proper goodbye. She wants to be alone with him for a while, and she wants to help Bugsy out if she can. It’s possible Thea might be interested in him—he’s leaving in a few hours for the Grand Banks, but you never know.

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 Bobby’s 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 Ethel’s. 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 it 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’ll 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 72 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 out fish her is the Hannah Boden, skippered by a Colby College graduate named Linda Green law. Not only is Green law 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 girl-friend 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 30-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 28-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 four thousand dollars 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 dollar’s 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 four thousand dollars’ 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 Sea foods. 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 350-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.

Cape Pond is one of hundreds of businesses jammed into the Gloucester waterfront. Boats come into port, offload their catch, and then spend the next week making repairs and gearing up for the next trip. A good-sized wave can bury a sword boat underwater for a few seconds—“It just gets real dark in here,” is how Linda Green law describes the experience—and undoing the effects of a drubbing like that can take days, even weeks. (One boat came into port twist ed’) Most boats are repaired at Gloucester Marine Railways, a haul-out place that’s been in business since 1856. It consists of a massive wooden frame that rides steel rollers along two lengths of railroad track up out of the water. Six-hundred-ton boats are blocked up, lashed down, and hauled ashore by a double-shot of one-inch chain worked off a series of huge steel reduction gears. The gears were machined a hundred years ago and haven’t been touched since. There are three railways in all, one in the Inner Harbor and two out on Rocky Neck. The harbor railway is the least robust of the three and terminates in a greasy little basement, which sports a pair of strangely Moorish-looking brick arches. The other two railways are surrounded by the famous galleries and piano bars of Rocky Neck. Tourists blithely wander past machinery that could rip their summer homes right off their foundations.

The Andrea Gail had been touched up at the Railways, but most of her major work was done in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1987. Almost three feet were added to her stern to accommodate two 1,900-gallon fuel tanks; the whaleback deck was extended aft nine feet; and a steel bulwark on the port side was raised and extended eighteen feet. In addition, 28 fuel-oil drums, seven water drums, and the ice machine were stored on the whaleback.

In all, perhaps about ten tons of steel, fuel, and machinery were added to the whaleback. The weight had been added high up, eight feet or so above the deck and perhaps twice that high above the waterline. The boat’s center of gravity had been changed just a little. The Andrea Gail would now sit more deeply in the water, recover from rolls a bit more slowly.

On the other hand, she could now put to sea for six weeks at a time. That, after all, was the point; and no man on the boat would have disagreed.

GOD’S COUNTRY

Going to sea is going to prison, with a chance at drowning besides.

—SAMUEL JOHNSON

BY mid afternoon the Andrea Gail is ready: The food and bait have been stowed away, the fuel and water tanks have been topped off, spare drums of both have been lashed onto the whaleback, the gear’s in good order, and the engine’s running well. All there remains to do is leave. Bobby climbs off the boat without saying anything to Bugsy—they’re still morose after their fight—and walks across the parking lot to Chris’s Volvo. They drive back across town to Thea’s and trot up her front steps in a soft warm rain. Thea hears their feet on the stoop and invites them in and takes her cue from a quick glance from Chris. I‘ve got some errands to do, I’ll be back in a few hours, she says. Make yourselves at home.