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

by Sebastian Junger

They’re the high rollers of the fishing world and a lot of them end up exactly where they started. “They suffer from a lack of dreams,” as one local said.

Chris asked Bobby if he’d found a card that she’d hidden in his seabag before he left. He had, he said. He read it every night. Yeah, right, said Chris. Bobby put her down in front of the door and recited the letter word for word.

“Most of them are single kids with no better thing to do than spend a lot of dough,”

One can hardly blame him: from now on his life would unfold in brutally short bursts between long stretches at sea, and all he’d have to tide him over would be photos taped to a wall and maybe a letter in a seabag.

“It’s wide open—I got all the solitude in the world,” says Reed. “Nobody pressurin’ me about nothin’. And I see things other people don’t get to see—whales breaching right beside me, porpoises followin’ the boat. I’ve caught shit they don’t even have in books—really weird shit, monstrous-looking things. And when I walk down the street in town, everyone’s respectful to me: ‘Hi, Cap, how ya doin’ Cap.’ It’s nice to sit down and have a 70-year-old man say, ‘Hi, Cap.’ It’s a beautiful thing.”

At memorial services in Gloucester people are always saying things like, “Fishing was his life,” or “He died doing what he loved,” but by and large those sentiments are to comfort the living. By and large, young men from Gloucester find themselves at sea because they’re broke and need money fast.

The only compensation for such mind-numbing work, it would seem, is equally mind-numbing indulgence.

For some, acting like the money means nothing is the only compensation for what it actually must mean.

That a fisherman is capable of believing he spent a couple thousand dollars in one night says a lot about fishermen. And that a bartender put the money away for safekeeping says a lot about how fishermen choose their bars.

They find places that are second homes because a lot of them don’t have real homes.

As a result, the Crow’s Nest has a touch of the orphanage to it. It takes people in, gives them a place, loans them a family.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Outside, the rain taps on. Chris and Bobby can’t see the ocean but they can smell it, a dank taste of salt and seaweed that permeates the entire peninsula and lays claim to it as part of the sea. On rainy days there’s no getting away from it, wherever you go you breathe in that smell, and this is one of those days.

It’s now way too late for anyone to back out. Not in the literal sense—any one of them could still take off running out the door—but people don’t work like that. More or less, they do what others expect them to.

There’s no reason to touch the wheel unless the boat has been taken off autopilot, and there’s almost no reason to take the boat off autopilot. From time to time the helmsman checks the engine room, but otherwise he just stares out at sea.

doing really well—“muggin’ ’em,” as swordfishermen say.

One night they lose $20,000 worth of bigeye to a pod of killer whales, but otherwise they’re pulling in four or five thousand pounds of fish a night.

There comes a point in every boat owner’s life—after the struggles of his twenties, the terror of the initial investment—when he realizes he can relax a bit. He doesn’t need to take late-season trips to the Banks, doesn’t need to captain the boat month in and month out. At thirty-six, it’s time to start letting the younger guys in, guys who have little more than a girlfriend in Pompano Beach and a pile of mail at the Crow’s Nest.

Of course, there’s also the question of odds. The more you go out, the more likely you are never to come back. The dangers are numerous and random: the rogue wave that wipes you off the deck; the hook and leader that catches your palm; the tanker that plots a course through the center of your boat. The only way to guard against these dangers is to stop rolling the dice,

At one point the captain glanced out the window and saw an enormous wave coming at them. Hey Charlie, look at this! he shouted to another crew member who was down below. Charlie sprinted up the companionway but didn’t get to the wheelhouse in time; the wave bore down on them, slate-colored and foaming, and blew the wheelhouse windows out.

then he went back inside and waited for the boat to sink. “We didn’t even bother calling the Coast Guard, we were just too far out,” he says. “There’s really nothing to do but rely on the other guys around you.”

And then there’s the crew. They get ugly at about the same rate as badly iced fish.

acting, in short, like men in prison, which in some ways they are.

and a few photos taped to the wall. The photos are of his two daughters,

Billie Jo got used to having a father around and took it hard when he went back on the boat. Erica was born four years later and has never known anything different; as far as she’s concerned, fathers are men who go away for weeks at a time and come home smelling of fish.

in the old days crews would be at the hand pumps for days at a stretch, and ships went down when the storms outlasted the men.

sword boat captains help each other out on the high seas whenever they can; they lend engine parts, offer technical advice, donate food or fuel. The competition between a dozen boats rushing a perishable commodity to market fortunately doesn’t kill an inherent sense of concern for each other. This may seem terrifically noble, but it’s not—or at least not entirely. It’s also self-interested. Each captain knows he may be the next one with the frozen injector or the leaking hydraulics.

If you look out the porthole and see whitewater, you’re still near the surface and relatively safe. If you see greenwater, at least you’re in the body of the wave. If you see blackwater, you’re a submarine.

It’s all over in twenty seconds: the crippled vessel settles in her stern, rears bow-up, and then sinks. She goes down so fast that it looks as if she’s getting yanked under by some huge hand. The last few moments of the film show the crew diving off the upended bow and trying to swim to the other boat fifty feet away. Half of them make it, half of them don’t. They’re sucked down by the vacuum of a large steel boat making for the deep.

On the other hand, it’s hard to find a fisherman in town who has anything good to say about him. Fishing’s a marginal business, though, and people don’t succeed in it by being well liked, they succeed by being tough.

Once you’re in the denial business, though, it’s hard to know when to stop.

He checks the photos of his daughters.

Fishermen say they can gauge how fast the wind is—and how worried they should be—by the sound it makes against the wire stays and outrigger cables. A scream means the wind is around Force 9 on the Beaufort Scale, forty or fifty knots. Force 10 is a shriek. Force 11 is a moan. Over Force 11 is something fishermen don’t want to hear.

For the next two hours, peak wave heights stay at a hundred feet and winds hit eighty miles an hour. The waves are blocking the data buoy readings, though, and the wind is probably hitting 120 or so. Eighty-mile-an-hour wind can suck fish right out of bait barrels. Hundred-foot waves are fifty percent higher than the most extreme sizes predicted by computer models. They are the largest waves ever recorded on the Scotian Shelf.

For all practical purposes, though, heights of waves are a function of how hard the wind blows, how long it blows for, and how much sea room there is—“speed, duration, and fetch,” as it’s known.

were the wind to stop, the waves would continue to propagate by endlessly falling into the trough that precedes them. Such waves are called gravity waves, or swells;

Unfortunately for mariners, the total amount of wave energy in a storm doesn’t rise linearly with wind speed, but to its fourth power. The seas generated by a forty-knot wind aren’t twice as violent as those from a twenty-knot wind, they’re seventeen times as violent. A ship’s crew watching the anemometer climb even ten knots could well be watching their death sentence. Moreover, high winds tend to shorten the distance between wave crests and steepen their faces. The waves are no longer symmetrical sine curves, they’re sharp peaks that rise farther above sea level than the troughs fall below it. If the height of the wave is more than one-seventh the distance between the crests—the “wavelength”—the waves become too steep to support themselves and start to break.

the Navy ran a series of wave tank tests to see what kind of stresses their fleet could take. (They’d already lost three destroyers to a typhoon in 1944. Before going down the ships had radioed that they were rolling through arcs of 140 degrees. They downflooded through their stacks and sank.) The Navy subjected model destroyers and aircraft carriers to various kinds of waves and found that a single nonbreaking wave—no matter how big it was—was incapable of sinking a ship. A single breaking wave, though, would flip a ship end over end if it was higher than the ship was long. Typically, the ship would climb the wave at an angle of 45 degrees, fail to gain the top, and then slide back down the face.

The instinct not to breathe underwater is so strong that it overcomes the agony of running out of air. No matter how desperate the drowning person is, he doesn’t inhale until he’s on the verge of losing consciousness. At that point there’s so much carbon dioxide in the blood, and so little oxygen, that chemical sensors in the brain trigger an involuntary breath whether he’s underwater or not. That is called the “break point”; laboratory experiments have shown the break point to come after 87 seconds. It’s a sort of neurological optimism, as if the body were saying, Holding our breath is killing us, and breathing in might not kill us, so we might as well breathe in. If the person hyperventilates first—as free divers do, and as a frantic person might—the break point comes as late as 140 seconds. Hyperventilation initially flushes carbon dioxide out of the system, so it takes that much longer to climb back up to critical levels. Until the break point, a drowning person is said to be undergoing “voluntary apnea,” choosing not to breathe. Lack of oxygen to the brain causes a sensation of darkness closing in from all sides, as in a camera aperture stopping down. The panic of a drowning person is mixed with an odd incredulity that this is actually happening. Having never done it before, the body—and the mind—do not know how to die gracefully. The process is filled with desperation and awkwardness. “So this is drowning,” a drowning person might think.

When the first involuntary breath occurs most people are still conscious, which is unfortunate, because the only thing more unpleasant than running out of air is breathing in water. At that point the person goes from voluntary to involuntary apnea, and the drowning begins in earnest. A spasmodic breath drags water into the mouth and windpipe, and then one of two things happen.

In about ten percent of people, water—anything—touching the vocal cords triggers an immediate contraction in the muscles around the larynx. In effect, the central nervous system judges something in the voice box to be more of a threat than low oxygen levels in the blood, and acts accordingly. This is called a laryngospasm. It’s so powerful that it overcomes the breathing reflex and eventually suffocates the person. A person with laryngospasm drowns without any water in his lungs.

In the other ninety percent of people, water floods the lungs and ends any waning transfer of oxygen to the blood. The clock is running down now; half-conscious and enfeebled by oxygen depletion, the person is in no position to fight his way back up to the surface. The very process of drowning makes it harder and ha...

I got clear under water and immediately struck out to reach the surface, only to go farther down. This exertion was a serious waste of breath, and after ten or fifteen seconds the effort of inspiration could no longer be restrained. It seemed as if I was in a vice which was gradually being screwed up tight until it felt as if the sternum and spinal column must break. Many years ago my old teacher used to describe how painless and easy a death by drowning was—“like falling about in a green field in early summer”—and this flashed across my brain at the time. The “gulping” efforts became less frequent, and the pressure seemed unbearable, but gradually the pain seemed to ease up. I appeared to be in a pleasant dream, although I had enough will power to think of friends at home and the sight of the Grampians, familiar to me as a boy, that was brought into my view. Before losing consciousness the chest pain had completely disappeared and the sensation was actually pleasant.

Water in the lungs washes away a substance called surfactant, which enables the alveoli to leach oxygen out of the air. The alveoli themselves, grape-like clusters of membrane on the lung wall, collapse because blood cannot get through the pulmonary artery. The artery has constricted in an effort to shunt blood to areas of the lungs where there is more oxygen. Unfortunately, those don’t exist. The heart labors under critically low levels of oxygen and starts to beat erratically—“like a bag full of worms,” as one doctor says. This is called ventricular fibrillation. The more irregularly the heart beats, the less blood it moves and the faster life functions decline. Children—who have proportionally stronger hearts than adults—can maintain a heartbeat for up to five minutes without air. Adults die faster. The heart beats less and less effectively until, after several minutes, there’s no movement at all. Only the brain is alive. The central nervous system does not know what has happened to the body; all it knows is that not enough oxygen is getting to the brain. Orders are still being issued—Breathe! Pump! Circulate!—that the body cannot obey. If the person were defibrillated at that moment, he might possibly survive. He could be given cardiopulmonary resuscitation, put on a respirator, and coaxed back to life. Still, the body is doing everything it can to delay the inevitable. When cold water touches the face, an impulse travels along the trigeminal and vagus nerves to the ce...

There are cases of people spending forty or fifty minutes under lake ice and surviving. The colder the water, the stronger the diving reflex, the slower the metabolic processes, and the longer the survival time.

But it’s a strange thing. There was no sentiment there, no time for fear. To me, fear is two AM, walking down a city street and someone’s following me—that to me is a terror beyond words.