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

by Sebastian Junger

Half the crew have misgivings about this trip, but they’re going anyhow; they’ve crossed some invisible line, and now even the most desperate premonitions won’t save them. Tyne, Pierre, Sullivan, Moran, Murphy, and Shatford are going to the Grand Banks on the

The Grand Banks are so dangerous because they happen to sit on one of the worst storm tracks in the world. Low pressure systems form over the Great Lakes or Cape Hatteras and follow the jet stream out to sea, crossing right over the fishing grounds in the process.

There was something so ominous about Georges that fishing captains refused to go near it for three hundred years. Currents ran in strange vortexes on Georges, and the tide was said to run off so fast that ocean bottom was left exposed for gulls to feed on. Men talked of strange dreams and visions they had there, and the uneasy feeling that dire forces were assembling themselves.

With the swiftness of a gull, she passed by, so near that I could have leaped aboard. The hopeless, terror-stricken faces of the crew we saw but a moment, as the doomed craft sped on her course. She struck one of the fleet a short distance astern, and we saw the waters close over both vessels almost instantly.

At dinner the crew talk about what men everywhere talk about—women, lack of women, kids, sports, horseracing, money, lack of money, work. They talk a lot about work; they talk about it the way men in prison talk about time.

Strangely, the sea doesn’t get tedious to look at—wave trains converge and crisscross in patterns that have never happened before and will never happen again.

It can take hours to tear one’s eyes away.

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.

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.

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.

The light angles and reddens and finally sinks into darkness with the decklights ruining the stars and the sharp cold air digging at memories of the New England

To a fisherman, the Grand Banks are as distinct and recognizable as, say, the Arizona deserts or the swamps of Georgia. They have their own particular water, light, wildlife, “feel.” No bluewater fisherman could ever wake up on the Grand Banks and think he was off Georges, say, or Long Island. Cliffs of fog move in and smother the boats for weeks at a time. Winter cold fronts come howling down off the Canadian Shield and make the water smoke.

The sea is so rich with plankton that it turns a dull green-grey

grey and swallows light rather than...

socialize much. One would think they would—my God, all that emptiness—but generally they’d rather socialize in a barroom or in bed with their wives. (A waterfront joke: What’s the second thing a fisherman does when he gets home? Puts down his bags.)

new moon rises behind them on October 7th, and they follow its pale suggestion all through the day until late that afternoon.

The sunset is a bloody rust-red on a sharp autumn horizon, and the night comes in fast with a northwest wind and a sky rivetted with stars. There’s no sound but the smack of water on steel and the heavy gargle of the diesel engine.

Fairhaven is a smaller version of New Bedford, which sits half a mile away across the Acushnet River. Both cities are tough, bankrupt little places that never managed to diversify during the century-long decline of the New England fishing industry. If Gloucester is the delinquent kid who’s had a few scrapes with the law, New Bedford is the truly mean older brother who’s going to kill someone one day. One New Bedford bar was the scene of an infamous gang rape; another was known to employ a Doberman pinscher as a bouncer. A lot of heroin passes through New Bedford, and a lot of swordfishermen get in trouble there. One of Johnston’s crew drew a $13,000 check in New Bedford and returned a week later without any shoes.

The faster the turnaround, the better—not only will his crew be more likely to survive New Bedford’s charms, but it’s getting late in the season to head out to the Grand Banks. The longer you wait, the worse the storms are. “You get in that kind of weather and if anything goes wrong—if a hatch busts off or one of the outriggers gets tangled up—you can really be in trouble,” says Johnston.

“Some of the guys get to where they feel invincible, but they don’t realize that there’s a real fine line between what they’ve seen and what it can get to. I know a guy who lost a 900-foot boat out there. It broke in half and sank with thirty men.” Sure enough, Johnston’s still fitting-out when

It’s a double-low that grinds off the coast and cranks the wind around to the southwest. The storm intensifies as it plows out to sea and catches Billy one morning while he’s hauling back. The wind is thirty knots and the waves are washing over the deck, but they can’t stop working until the gear is in. Late in the morning, they get slammed. It’s a rogue wave: steep, cresting, and ...

Jesus, we took a hell of a wave, Billy says. We went way over on our side. I didn’t think we’d make it back up. They discuss the weather and the fishing for a few minutes and then sign off. The story of the wave doesn’t sound good to Charlie Johnson—the Andrea Gail’s known as a tough little boat and shouldn’t go over that easily. Not with a bird in the water and twenty thousand pounds of fish in the hold. “I didn’t want to say anything, but it didn’t seem right,” Johnson says. “You’re in God’s country out there. You can’t make any mistakes.”

boat can’t stay indefinitely out at sea—supplies run low, the crew gets crazy, the fish get old. They’ve got to find some fish fast. Around mid-month they pull their gear and steam northeast all night to a set of shallows known as the Flemish Cap. The rest of the fleet is way off to the south and west: Tommy Barrie on the Allison, Charlie Johnson on the Seneca, Larry Horn on the Miss Millie, Mike Hebert on the Mr. Simon, and Linda Greenlaw on the Hannah Boden. There’s also a 150-foot Japanese longliner named the Eishin Maru 78. The Eishin Maru is carrying a Canadian Fisheries observer, Judith Reeves, who is the only person on board who has a survival suit or knows how to speak English. The Mary T is on her way out, and another boat named the Laurie Dawn 8 has just arrived in New Bedford to gear up.

The weather has turned raw and blustery and the men work in layers of sweatshirts and overalls and rubber slickers.

And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled with fire… —REVELATION 15

From 1987 to 1991, the total North Atlantic swordfish catch went from 45 million pounds to 33 million pounds, and their average size dropped from 165 pounds to 110. This was what resource management experts know as tragedy of the commons, a reference to over-grazing in eighteenth-century England.

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, and the man with a family and business back home is more likely to do that. More people are killed on fishing boats, per capita, than in any other job in the United States. Johnston would be better off parachuting into forest fires or working as a cop in New York City than longlining off the Flemish Cap. Johnston knows many fishermen who have died and more than he can count who have come horribly close. It’s there waiting for you in the middle of a storm or on the most cloudless summer day. Boom—the crew’s looking the other way, the hook’s got you, and suddenly you’re down at the depth where swordfish feed.

Back in 1983, a friend of Johnston’s ran into a fall gale in an 87-foot boat called the Canyon Explorer. Three lows merged off the coast and formed one massive storm that blew one hundred knots for a day and a half. The seas were so big that Johnston’s friend had to goose the throttle just to keep from sliding backward down their faces. The boat was forced sixty miles backwa...

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-col...

had to be cut; Alex Bueno, the captain, stripped to his underwear, tied a rope around his waist and waded out onto the deck with a welding torch. There was so much water coming over the deck that he had trouble keeping the torch lit. He finally managed to burn the chain free, and 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.”

Unfortunately, the Rush was in even more trouble than the Tiffany Vance. She had cable on her birds instead of chains, and the broken cable managed to wrap itself around the drive shaft and freeze the propeller. The boat went dead in the water and immediately turned side-to in the waves—in “a beam sea,” as it’s called. A boat in a beam sea can count her future in hours, maybe minutes.

There are stories of sword boats coming into port with crew members manacled to their bunks or tied to the headstay with monofilament line. It’s a kind of Darwinism that keeps the boats stocked with rough, belligerent men who have already established themselves in the hierarchy.

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.

The boat he was on was running downsea when she took “one wicked sea from hell.” The stern lifted, the bow dropped, and they started surfing down the face of the wave. When they got to the bottom there was nowhere to go but down, and the crest of the breaking wave drove them like a piling. Chris looked out the porthole, and all he could see was black. 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. “I felt the boat come to a complete stop,” says Chris. “I thought, ‘My God we’re goin’ down.’ We hung there a moment and then the buoyancy caught and it was as if she’d been thrown into reverse. We plowed right back out the way we came.”

Any number of things could have happened to Chris’s boat at that moment. The breather pipes could have gotten stuffed and killed the engine. The fish hatch could have given way and filled the hold. A tool could have gotten loose and knocked out some machinery. The wheelhouse windows could have exploded, a bulkhead could have failed, or thirty tons of ice and fish could have shifted in the hold. But even assuming the boat popped up like a cork, she would still be laboring under a crushing load of water. If anything were caught in the scuppers—a hatch cover, an old sleeping bag—the water would have been impeded as it drained off. All it takes is a moment of vulnerability for the next wave to roll you over: props in the air, crew on their ass, cargo avalanching. It’s the end.

Every boat has a degree of roll from which she can no longer recover. The Queen Mary came within a degree or two of capsizing off Newfoundland when a rogue wave ...

Two forces are locked in combat for a ship like that: the downward push of gravity and the upward lift of buoyancy. Gravity is the combined weight of the vessel and everything on it—crew, cargo, fishing gear—seeking the center of the earth. Buoyancy is the force...

To greatly simplify, the lateral distance between the two forces is called the righting arm, and the torque they generate is called the righting moment. Boats want a big righting moment. They want something that will right them from extreme angles of heel. The righting moment has three main implications. First of all, the wider the ship, the more stable she is. (More air is submerged as she heels over, so the righting arm is that much longer.) The opposite is also true: The taller the ship, the more likely she is to capsize. The high center of gravity reduces what is called the metacentric height, which determines the length of the righting arm. The lower the metacentric height, the less leverage there is with which to overcome the downward force of gravity. Finally, there always comes a point where the boat can no longer right herself. Logically, this would happen when her decks have gone past vertical and the center of gravity falls outside the center of buoyancy—the “zero-moment” point.

an angle of about sixty or seventy degrees starts to put a vessel’s lee gunwales underwater. That means there’s greenwater on deck, and the righting moment has that much more weight to overcome. The boat may eventually recover, but she’s spending more and more time underwater. The deck is subject to the full fury of the waves and a hatch might come loose, a bulkhead might fail, a door might burst open because someone forgot to dog it down. Now she’s not just sailing, she’s sinking.

The problem with a steel boat is that the crisis curve starts out gradually and quickly becomes exponential. The more trouble she’s in, the more trouble she’s likely to get in, and the less capable she is of getting out of it, which is an a...

With the engine gone, the boat has no steerageway at all and turns broadside to the seas. Broadsides exposes her to the full force of the breaking waves, and eventually a part of her deck or wheelhouse lets go. After that, downflooding starts to occur. Downflooding is the catastrophic influx of ocean water into the hold.

A few years earlier, she’d taken a big sea over the stern and was pushed so far over that her rudder came partway out of the water. Bob Brown was on board, and he sprinted up to the wheelhouse and put the helm around; at the same moment the boat rode up the face of another big sea. Slowly, the Andrea Gail righted herself and cleared her decks; everything was fine except that the bulwark had been flattened like a tin can.

that’s just what waves do—tear down what men put up.

Either way, the incident was unsettling. Brown blamed it on the inexperience of the man at the helm and said that it was his own quick action that saved the boat. The crew didn’t see it that way. They saw a boat pinned on her port side by a mass of water and then righted by freak wave action. In other words, they saw bad luck briefly followed by good.

On the one hand he’s a phenomenally successful businessman who started with nothing and still works as hard as any crew member on any of his boats. 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. Some—such as Gloucester fisherman “Hard” Bob Millard—are tough on themselves, and some are tough on their employees. Brown is tough on both.

That was in 1966; three years later he was working two hundred miles offshore in a forty-foot wooden boat. “Never so much as cracked a pane of glass,” he says. “Bigger doesn’t always mean better.” Eventually he was running four or five sword boats out of Gloucester and pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. One winter he and his son started accumulating ice on deck on their way back from Georges Bank. “If you’re making ice on Georges you know you’re going to be in real trouble closer to land,” he says. “We went back out and that night it blew a hundred from the northwest and snowed. The wind gauge only goes to a hundred and it was pegged for three days straight—pegged like it was broken. We were in a steel boat and it didn’t seem so bad, we were comfortable enough.

compared to wood, don’t let anyone tell you different. Anyone tells you different, they’re a romanticist. Steel goes down faster, though. It goes down…well, like a load of steel.”

The Sea Fever was a fifty-foot wooden boat with a crew of three that was hauling lobster traps off Georges Bank. It was late November and the Weather Service predicted several days of moderate winds, but they were catastrophically wrong. One of the worst storms on record had just drawn a deep breath off the Carolinas. It screamed northward all night and slammed into Georges Bank around dawn, dredging up seventy-foot waves in the weird shallows of the continental shelf. To make matters worse, a crucial offshore data buoy had been malfunctioning for the past two and a half months, and the Weather Service had no idea what was going on out there.

The Fair Wind got the worse end of the deal. She flipped end over end in an enormous wave and her four crew were trapped in the flooded pilothouse. One of them, a shaggy 33-year-old machinist named Ernie Hazard, managed to gulp some air and pull himself through a window. He burst to the surface and swam to a self-inflating life raft that had popped up, tethered, alongside the boat. The Fair Wind continued to founder, hull-up, for another hour, but the rest of the crew never made it out, so Hazard finally cut the tether and set himself adrift. For two days he scudded through the storm, capsizing over and over, until a Navy P-3 plane spotted him and dropped an orange smoke marker. He was picked up by a Coast Guard cutter and then rushed by helicopter to a hospital on Cape Cod. He had survived two days in his underwear on the North Atlantic. Later, when asked how long it took him to warm up after his ordeal, he said, without a hint of irony, “Oh, three or four months.”