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

THE Andrea Gail rides out to the fishing grounds on the back of a high pressure system that comes bulging out of Canada. The winds are out of the northwest and the skies are a deep sharp blue. These are the prevailing winds for the area; they are the reason people say “Down East” when they refer to northeast Maine. Schooners that hauled eastward downwind could be in St. John’s or Halifax within twenty-four hours. A 365-horsepower diesel engine makes the effect less pronounced, but heading out is still a shorter trip than heading in. By September 26 or 27, Billy Tyne’s around 42 north and 49 west, about 300 miles off the tip of Newfoundland, in a part of the Grand Banks known as the “Tail.” Canadian National Waters, which extend two hundred miles offshore, exclude foreign boats from most of the Banks, but two small sections protrude to the northeast and southeast: the Nose and the Tail. Sword boats patrol an arc hinging on a spot around 50 degrees west and 44 degrees north. Inside that arc are the broad, fertile submarine plains of the Grand Banks, off-limits to all but Canadian boats and licensed foreign boats. Outside that arc are thousands of legal swordfish that might conceivably be fooled by a mackerel hung on a big steel hook.

Swordfish are not gentle animals. They swim through schools of fish slashing wildly with their swords, trying to eviscerate as many as possible; then they feast. Swordfish have attacked boats, pulled fishermen to their deaths, slashed fishermen on deck. The scientific name for swordfish is Xiphias gladius; the first word means “sword” in Greek and the second word means “sword” in Latin. “The scientist who named it was evidently impressed by the fact that it had a sword,” as one guidebook says.

The sword, which is a bony extension of the upper jaw, is deadly sharp on the sides and can grow to a length of four or five feet. Backed up by five hundred pounds of sleek, muscular fish, the weapon can do quite a bit of damage. Swordfish have been known to drive their swords right through the hulls of boats. Usually this doesn’t happen unless the fish has been hooked or harpooned, but in the nineteenth century a swordfish attacked a clipper ship for no apparent reason. The ship was so badly damaged that the owner applied to his insurer for compensation, and the whole affair wound up in court.

Grand Banks swordfish spawn in the Caribbean and then edge northward during the summer months, heading for the cold, protein-rich waters off Newfoundland. During the daylight hours the fish work their way down the water column to depths of 3,000 feet, chasing squid, hake, cod, butterfish, bluefish, mackerel, menhaden, and bonito, and at night they follow their prey back up to the surface. Their young hatch with scales and teeth, but no sword, and have been described as “wistful-looking.” Although all manner of fish feed on larval swordfish, only mako, sperm whale, and killer whale attack them when they’re fully grown. Mature swordfish are considered to be one of the most dangerous game fish in the world and have been known to fight non-stop for three or four hours. They have sunk small boats in their struggles. Sport fishermen need live bait on heavy steel hooks that are secured to 500-pound test steel wire or chain to catch sword-fish; they also need a “numbing club” on board to beat the fish senseless. Commercial fishermen, who are in the business of avoiding the thrill of fishing, use different methods entirely. They hang a thousand baited hooks on forty miles of monofilament and then crawl into bed to get some sleep.

Bob Brown doesn’t know when Billy makes his first set because Billy hates talking to him on the radio. He’s been known to leave messages with Linda Greenlaw in order not to talk to Bob Brown; he’s been known to fake static on the single sideband. But it’s reasonable to assume that on the night of September 27th, Tyne’s making his first set of the trip. The boat’s outriggers are boomed out and two steel plates, known as “birds,” hang by chain down into the water to provide stability. The ocean has already settled into the galloping darkness of mid-autumn, and the wind has swung around to the southeast. The surface of the ocean is cross-hatched with changing weather.

Baiting has all the glamour of a factory shift and considerably more of the danger. The line is spooled on a big Lindegren drum that sits under the shelter of the whaleback on the port side of the boat. It crosses diagonally over the deck, passes through an overhead block, and then bends straight back toward the stern. A steel ring guides it over the rail and into the water. That’s where the baiters stand. There’s a bait table on top of the stern rail—basically a wooden well with squid and mackerel in it—and a leader cart on either side. The leader carts are small drums spooled with hundreds of lengths of seven-fathom line, called gangions. Each gan gion has a #10 hook at one end and a stainless steel snap on the other.

The baiter reaches behind him and takes a gangion from his back-up man, who’s peeling them off the leader cart one at a time. The baiter impales a squid or mackerel onto the hook, snaps the gangion onto the mainline, and throws the whole thing over the side. The hook is easily big enough to pass through a man’s hand, and if it catches some part of the baiter’s body or clothing, he goes over the side with it. For this reason, baiters have complete control over the hook; no one handles the gangion while they’re on it. There’s also a knife holstered to the baiting table. A baiter might, conceivably, grab it fast enough to sever the line before going over.

Since swordfish feed at night, each hook is also fixed with a Cylume lightstick that illuminates the bait. Cylumes are cigar-sized plastic tubes with phosphorescent chemicals inside them that activate when the tube is snapped in half. They cost a dollar apiece, and a sword boat might go through five thousand in a trip. The hooks and lightsticks are spaced about thirty feet apart, but the exact interval is determined by the speed of the boat. If the captain wants to fish the hooks closer together, he slows down; if he wants to spread them apart, he speeds up. The typical speed for setting-out on the Grand Banks is six or seven knots. At that speed it takes about four hours to set out thirty miles of line.

Every three hooks the baiter snaps on a ball drop, which floats on the surface and keeps the longline from sinking to the bottom. A typical arrangement is to hang your line at five fathoms and dangle your hooks to twelve—that’s about 70 feet down. Depending on currents and the temperature breaks, that’s where swordfish like to feed. Every four miles, instead of a ball drop, the baiter clips on a highflyer. The highflyer is a float and aluminum pole with a radar-reflecting square on top. It bobs along on the surface of the ocean and shows up very clearly on the radar screen. Finally, every eight miles, a radio transmitter is attached. It has a big whip antenna that broadcasts a low-frequency signal back to the boat. This allows the captain to track the gear down if it parts off mid-string.

A fully-baited longline represents a significant amount of money, and captains have been known to risk the lives of their crew to get them back. Forty miles of monofilament line goes for $1,800. Each of the radio beacon buoys costs $1,800, and there are six of them on a longline. The polyballs cost six dollars apiece and are set every three hooks for one thousand hooks. The hooks are a dollar, the lightsticks are a dollar, the squid is a dollar, and the gangions are two dollars. Every night, in other words, a sword boat drops $20,000 worth of gear into the North Atlantic. One of the biggest disputes on a sword boat is whether to set out or not. Crews have hauled in a full gale because their captain misjudged the weather.

The baiting usually gets finished up late in the evening,and the Andrea Gail crew hangs their rain gear in the tool room and tramps into the kitchen. They eat dinner quickly, and when they’re done, Billy climbs up the companionway to take over the helm from Murph. He checks his loran bearings, which fix him on the chart, and the video plotter, which fixes him in relation to the mainline. The radar is always on and has a range of fifteen miles or so; the highflyers on the mainline register as small squares on the screen. The VHF is tuned to channel 16, and the single sideband is tuned to 2182 megahertz. They are both emergency channels, and if two boats need to communicate, they contact each other and switch to a separate working channel.

At 11PM the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) broadcasts a weather forecast, and the captains generally check in with each other afterward to discuss its finer points. By then most of the crew has already turned in—they’re into a stretch of twenty 20-hour work days, and sleep becomes as coveted as cigarettes. The bunks are bolted against the tapered sides of the bow, and the men fall asleep listening to the diesel engine and the smack of waves against the hull. Underwater, the prop whine and the cavitation of hundreds of thousands of air bubbles radiate outward into the ocean. The sound wraps around the foreshores of Newfoundland, refracts off the temperature discontinuity of the Gulf Stream, and dissipates into the crushing black depths beyond the continental shelf. Low frequency vibrations propagate almost forever underwater, and the throb of the Andrea Gail’s machinery must reach just about every life form on the Banks.

DaWN at sea, a grey void emerging out of a vaster black one. “The earth was without form and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” Whoever wrote that knew the sea—knew the pale emergence of the world every morning, a world that contained absolutely nothing, not one thing.

A long blast on the airhorn.

The men stagger out of their bunks and pour themselves coffee under the fluorescent lights of the galley, squinting through swollen lids and bad moods. They can just start to make out shapes on deck when they go out. It’s cold and raw, and under their slickers they have sweat shirts and flannel shirts and thermal tops. Dawn’s not for another hour, but they start work as soon as they can see anything. At 43 degrees north, a week after the equinox, that’s 5:30 in the morning.

The boat is at the start of the mainline, about one hundred miles outside Canada’s territorial limit. You generally set into the Gulf Stream and haul into the Gulf Stream, so the previous afternoon they’d set the gear while steaming west into the warm four-knot current. Then they’d turned around and headed east again, back to the start of the mainline. That gives the entire string the same amount of time in the water, and also keeps the boat from losing too much ground to the eastward currents. Billy has hunted down the beginning of the mainline with the radio beacon signals and now sits, bow toward America, ready to haul.

Haulback is less dangerous than setting-out because the hooks are coming in-board rather than going out-board, but the mainline still gets pulled at considerable velocity out of the water. The hooks can whiplash over the rail and snag people in all kinds of horrible ways; one crewman took a hook in the face that entered under his cheekbone and came out his eye socket. To make matters worse, the boat is rarely a stable platform, and rarely dry. Keeping one’s feet while eighteen inches of deck slop pour out the scuppers can require the balance of an ironworker in a sleet storm.

Nevertheless, you’re hauling up your lottery ticket, and even the most jaded deckhand wants to know what he’s hit. The line has been unhooked from the stern guide-ring and now comes onboard through a cut-out in the starboard rail and into the overhead block. The captain steers the boat from an auxiliary helm on deck and runs up to the wheelhouse from time to time to check the radar for other boats in their path. The man at the line is called the hauler, and it’s his job to unclip the gangions and hand them back to the coder, who pulls the bait off and wraps them around the leader cart. Being a hauler is a high-stress job; one hauler described having to pry his fingers off the hydraulic lever at the end of the day because he was so tense. Haulers are paid extra for the trip and are chosen because they can unclip a gangion every few seconds for four hours straight.

A hooked swordfish puts a tell-tale heaviness in the line, and when the hauler feels that, he eases off on the hydraulic lever to keep the hook from tearing out. As soon as the fish is within reach, two men swing gaff hooks into his side and drag him on board. If the fish is alive, one of the gaffers might harpoon him and haul him up on a stouter line to make sure he doesn’t get away. Then the fish just lays there eyes bulging, mouth working open and shut. If it’s a good haul there are sometimes three or four half-dead swordfish sloshing back and forth in the deck wash, bumping into the men as they work. A puncture wound by a swordfish bill means a severe and nearly instantaneous infection. As the fish are brought on board their heads and tails are sawn off, and they’re gutted and put on ice in the hold.

Mako shark eat pretty much what swordfish do, so occasionally longliners haul mako up as well. They’re dangerous, though: A mako once bit Murph so badly that he had to be helicoptered back to shore. (Touching even a severed mako head can trigger it to bite.) The rule for mako is that they’re not considered safe until they’re on ice in the hold. For that reason some boats don’t allow live mako on board; if one is caught, the gaffer pins him against the hull while another crew member blows his head open with a shotgun. Then he’s hauled on board and gutted. “We fish too far out to take any chances,” says a former crew member of the Hannah Boden. “You’re out of helicopter range, and help is two days’ drive to the west’ard. If you’re still alive when we get there, we’ll take you to a Newfoundland hospital. And then your troubles have just begun.”

A longliner might pull up ten or twenty swordfish on a good day, one ton of meat. The most Bob Brown has ever heard of anyone catching was five tons a day for seven days —70,000 pounds of fish. That was on the Hannah Boden in the mid-eighties. The lowest crew member made ten thousand dollars. That’s why people fish; that’s why they spend ten months a year inside seventy feet of steel plate.

For every trip like that, though, there’s a dozen busts. Fish are not distributed equally throughout the water column; they congregate in certain areas. You have to know where those areas are. You generally set westward into the current. With a thermocline scope you get temperature readings at different depths; with a Doppler you get the velocity and direction of subsurface currents at three different levels. You want to set in “fast water” because the gear covers more area. You might anchor one end of the gear in cold water, which moves more slowly, because then you know where to find it. You want to hang the bait between layers of warm and cold water because the food chain tends to collect there. Squid feed on cold-water plankton, and swordfish dart out of pockets of warm Gulf Stream water to feed on the squid. Warm-water eddies that spin off the Gulf Stream into the North Atlantic are particularly good places to fish; captains track them down with daily surface temperature maps from NOAA weather satellites. Finally, you want to avoid the dark of the moon when you plan your trips. No one knows why, but for several days before and after, the fish refuse to feed.

Sword boat captains are required by law to keep records of every position fished, every set made, every fish caught. Not only does this help determine whether the boat is adhering to federal regulations, but it allows marine biologists to assess the health of the swordfish stock. Migratory patterns, demographic shifts, mortality rates—it can all be inferred from catch logs. In addition, observers for the National Marine Fisheries Service occasionally accompany boats offshore to get a better understanding of the industry they’re charged with regulating. On August 18, 1982, the principal planner for the Massachusetts Coastal Zone Management Program, Joseph Pelczarski, left on such a trip. He steamed out of New Bedford aboard the Tiffany Vance, a California longliner that was going to try gillnetting off Georges Bank. (The gillnet was new to the East Coast and Pelczarski wanted to see how it worked.) Spotter planes, as it turned out, reported almost no swordfish on Georges, but infrared satellite imagery revealed an enormous warm water eddy at the Tail of the Banks. Alex Bueno, the ship’s captain, decided to try longlining up north, and Pelczarski went with him. Pelczarski’s account had almost no impact on gillnet regulations—they made just one set and caught just one fish—but it gave government biologists and statisticians one of their few glimpses of life on a longliner:

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