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

by Sebastian Junger

When the Tamaroa arrives he’ll have to abandon ship, which is an almost unthinkable act for a captain. The Satori is his home, his life, and if he allows himself to be taken off by the Coast Guard he’ll probably never see her again. Not intact, anyway. At some point that night, lying on his bunk waiting for dawn, Ray Leonard decides he won’t get off the boat. The women can leave if they want to, but he’ll see the vessel into port.

It’s unclear whether Leonard is serious or just trying to save face. Either way, the Coast Guard is having none of it. Two helicopters, two Falcon jets, a medium-range cutter, and a hundred air-and seamen have already been committed to the rescue; the Satori crew are coming off now. “Owner refuses to leave and says he’s sailed through hurricanes before,” the Comcen incident log records at 12:24 that afternoon. “Tamaroa wants manifestly unsafe voyage so that o/o [owner-operator] can be forced off.” A “manifestly unsafe voyage” means that the vessel has been deemed an unacceptable risk to her crew or others, and the Coast Guard has the legal authority to order everyone off.

“When I got up into the helicopter I remember everyone looking in my and Sue’s faces to make sure we were okay,” says Stimpson. “I remember the intensity, it really struck me. These guys were so pumped up, but they were also human—real humanity. They’d take us by the shoulders and look us in the eyes and say, ‘I’m so glad you’re alive, we were with you last night, we prayed for you. We were worried about you.’

“Everybody was drunk cause that’s what we do, but the crisis made it even worse, just drinkin’ and drinkin’ and cryin’ and drinkin’, we just couldn’t conceive that they were gone. It was in the paper and on the television and this is my love, my friend, my man, my drinking partner, and it just couldn’t be.

Adam Randall settles onto the couch in his home in East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, to watch the evening news. It’s a rain-lashed Halloween night, and Randall has just come back from taking his kids out trick-or-treating. His girlfriend, Christine Hansen, is with him. She’s a pretty, highly put-together blonde who drives a sports car and works for AT&T. The local news comes on, and Channel Five reports a boat named the Andrea Gail missing somewhere east of Sable Island. Randall sits up in his seat. That was my boat, honey, he says. What? That’s the boat I was supposed to go on. Remember when I went up to Gloucester? That’s the boat. The Andrea Gail.

Water is the only element that offers more resistance the harder you hit it, and at fifty miles an hour it might as well be concrete.

For the first time since the ordeal began, Spillane has the time to contemplate his own death. He isn’t panicked so much as saddened by the idea.

The Mustang suits all have strobe lights on them, and it is the first real evidence he has that someone else has survived the ditching. Spillane’s immediate reaction is to swim toward them, but he stops himself. There is no way he is going to live out the night, he knows, so he might as well just die on his own. That way he won’t inflict his suffering on anyone else. “I didn’t want them to see me go,” he says. “I didn’t want them to see me in pain. It’s the same with marathons—don’t talk to me, let me just suffer through this by myself.

What finally drove me to them was survival training. It emphasizes strength in numbers, and I know that if I’m with them, I’ll try harder not to die. But I couldn’t let them see me in pain, I told myself. I couldn’t let them down.”

Rick Smith’s wife, Marianne, is at Suffolk Airbase for the event, and several people express concern over her watching the airmen reunited with their families. What do they think, that I want those women to lose their husbands, too? she wonders.

Finally, after ten days of hell, Debra sits her three-year-old son, Dale Jr., down and explains that his father’s not coming back. Her son doesn’t understand, and wants to know where he is. He’s fishing, honey, she answers. He’s fishing in heaven. Dale knows his father fishes lots of places—Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Massachusetts. Heaven must be just another place where his father fishes. Well, when’s he coming back from fishing in heaven? he asks.

“It’s—how can I put it—a nomadic existence,” says Ansel. “These guys don’t come home for dinner at five o’clock. They’re gone three or four months at a time.”

Kosco is uncooperative to the point of belligerence. He says that when he heard about the Andrea Gail he went into a three-month depression that cost him his job and nearly put him in the hospital. At one point Dale Murphy’s parents invited him over to dinner but he couldn’t deal with it; he never went. He’d known Murph as well as Bugsy and Billy, and all he could think was: That was supposed to have been me. Had Kosco gone on the trip, it’s possible that he would’ve spent his last few moments pleading for his life—for this life, the one he’s now leading. His wish was granted, in a sense, and it destroys him.

Anyone who has been through a severe storm at sea has, to one degree or another, almost died, and that fact will continue to alter them long after the winds have stopped blowing and the waves have died down. Like a war or a great fire, the effects of a storm go rippling outward through webs of people for years, even generations.

Marianne takes her children to a memorial service in Rick’s hometown in Pennsylvania, but not to the one on Long Island, because she knows there are going to be a lot of television cameras there. (“Children don’t grieve in front of crowds—they grieve in bed saying, ‘I want Daddy to read me a book,’” she says.)

Marianne discovers that, as a widow, she makes people extremely uncomfortable; either they avoid her or treat her like a cripple.