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

by Sebastian Junger

Billy’s at 44 north, 56 west and heading straight into the mouth of meteorological hell. For the next hour the sea is calm, horribly so. The only sign of what’s coming is the wind direction; it shifts restlessly from quadrant to quadrant all afternoon. At four o’clock it’s out of the southeast. An hour later it’s out of the south-southwest. An hour after that it’s backed around to due north. It stays that way for the next hour, and then right around seven o’clock it starts creeping into the northeast. And then it hits. It’s a sheer change; the Andrea Gail enters the Sable Island storm the way one might step into a room. The wind is instantly forty knots and parting through the rigging with an unnerving scream. 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. Linda Greenlaw, captain of the Hannah Boden, was in a storm where the wind registered a hundred miles an hour before it tore the anemometer off the boat. The wind, she says, made a sound she’d never heard before, a deep tonal vibration like a church organ. There was no melody, though; it was a church organ played by a child. By eight o’clock the barometric pressure has dropped to 996 millibars and shows no sign of levelling off. That means...