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

by Sebastian Junger

The Sea Fever fared a little better, but not much. She took a huge sea and lost all her windows; the half-inch safety glass burst as if it had been hit by a wrecking ball. The captain, who happened to be Bob Brown’s son, turned downsea to avoid any more flooding, but the wave put them on their beam ends and swept one of the crew out of the wheelhouse and over the side. The man’s name was Gary Brown (no relation); while one of the remaining crew scrambled below deck to restart the engine, the other threw a lifesaver overboard to save Brown. It dropped right in front of him but he made no attempt to grab it. Brown just drifted away, a dazed look in his eyes.

The first five sets of Johnston’s trip are on what’s called the “frontside” of the moon, the quarters leading up to full. Boats that fish the frontside tend to get small males on the line; boats that fish the backside get large females. Johnston’s record is twenty-seven consecutive hooks with a fish on each, mostly small males. On the day of the full moon the catch abruptly switches over to huge females and stays that way for a couple of weeks. “You might go from an average weight of seventy pounds, all males, to four or five 800-pounders, all females,” Johnston says. “They lose their heads on the full moon, they feed with reckless abandon.”

Billy’s been out through the dark of the moon, which may explain his bad luck, but things start to change around the 18th. The whole fleet, in fact, starts to get into a little more fish with the approach of the full moon. Tyne doesn’t tell anyone how much he’s catching, but he’s rapidly making up for three weeks of thin fishing. He’s probably pulling in swordfish at the same rate Johnston’s pulling in bigeye, five or six thousand pounds a day. By the end of the month he has 40,000 pounds of fish in his hold, worth around $160,000. “I talked with Billy on the 24th and he said he’d hatched his boat,” Johnston says. “He was headed in while the rest of us were just starting our trips. You could just tell he was happy.”

Billy has a failing ice machine and a twelve hundred mile drive ahead of him. He’ll be heading in while the rest of the fleet is still in mid-trip, and he’ll make port just as they’re finishing up. He’s two weeks out of synch. Ultimately, one could blame some invisible contortion of the Gulf Stream for this: The contortion disrupts the swordfish, which adds another week or two to the trip, which places the Andrea Gail on the Flemish Cap when she should already be heading in. The circumstances that place a boat at a certain place at a certain time are so random that they can’t even be catalogued, much less predicted, and a total of fifty or sixty more people—swordfishermen, mariners, sailors—are also converging on the storm grounds of the North Atlantic.

been heading there, unavoidably, for months; others made a bad choice just a few days ago.

The weather was so warm that the crew were in t-shirts on deck and the sky was the watery blue of Indian summer. A light wind came in from the west, a backing wind. The Satori ran down the Piscataqua under power, rendezvoused with another boat, cleared Kittery Point, and then bore away to the east. The two boats were headed for the Great South Channel between Georges Bank and Cape Cod, and from there they would sail due south for Bermuda. Bylander stayed below to sort out the mountain of food and gear in the cabin while Stimpson and Leonard sat above deck and talked. Fog rolled in before they’d even cleared Isle of Shoals, and by dark the Satori was alone on a strangely quiet sea.

Buzzard’s Bay is at the western end of the Cape Cod Canal. One could, if the weather were bad enough, go nearly all the way from Boston to New York City by protected waterways. It’s not particularly beautiful, but it’s safe. “Ray was used to sailing solo, so having me on board may have made him feel more invulnerable,” Stimpson says. “And there’s a point at which you’re so far out that you don’t want to turn back, you just run offshore. In the future I will listen to the weather forecast, I will decide, as crew, whether I’m willing to keep sailing. It will be immaterial to me the level of experience of the owner-captain.”

BILLY, like Leonard, has undoubtedly heard the forecast, but he’s even less inclined to do anything about it than Leonard is. The lead time for an accurate forecast is only two or three days, and it takes twice that long for a sword boat to make port. Weather reports are vitally important to the fishing, but not so much for heading home; when the end of the trip comes, captains generally just haul their gear and go. Because errors compound, the longer the trip, the more careful the captain has to be when he sets his initial heading for home. An error of just one degree puts a boat thirty miles off-course by the time she gets back to Gloucester; a captain could add a day to each trip with a month of such errors.

Even with two electronic systems, though, mistakes happen—iron-bearing landmass, electrical interference, all kinds of things skew the output.

The diesel engine has been throbbing relentlessly for a month now and, without the distraction of work, it suddenly seems hellishly loud. There’s no way to escape the noise—it gets inside your skull, shakes your stomach lining, makes your ears ring. If the crew weren’t so sleep-deprived it might even bother them; as it is they just wallow in their bunks and stand watch at the helm twice a day.

Around nightfall a Canadian weather map creaks out of the satellite fax. There’s a hurricane off Bermuda, a cold front coming down off the Canadian Shield and a storm brewing over the Great Lakes. They’re all heading for the Grand Banks. A few minutes after the fax, Linda Greenlaw calls. Billy, you seen the chart? she asks. Yeah I saw it, he says. What do you think? Looks like it’s gonna be wicked. They agree to talk the next day so Billy can give her a list of supplies he’s going to need. He has no desire at all to talk to Bob Brown. They sign off, and then Billy hands the helm off to Murph and goes below for dinner. They’re in a big steel boat with 40,000 pounds of fish in the hold, plus ice. It takes a lot to sink a boat like that. Around nine o’clock, a half-moon emerges off their port quarter. The air is calm, the sky is full of stars. Two thousand miles away, weather systems are starting to collide.

Oceanographers have calculated that the maximum theoretical height for wind-driven waves is 198 feet; a wave that size could put down a lot of oil tankers, not to mention a 72-foot sword boat.

One of the videos on file with the Portland Coast Guard—shown as often as possible to local fishermen—was shot from the wheelhouse of a commercial boat during a really bad blow. It shows the bow rising and falling, rising and falling over mammoth,

white-streaked seas. At one point the captain says, a little smugly, “Yep, this is where you wanna be, right in your wheelhouse, your own little domain—.” At that moment a wall of water the size of a house fills the screen. It’s no bigger than the rest of the waves but it’s solid and foaming and absolutely vertical. It engulfs the bow, the foredeck, the wheelhouse, and then blows all the windows out. The last thing the camera sees is whitewater coming at it like a big wet fist.

Dawn creeps in with a few shreds of salmon-pink sky, and the wind starts to inch into the southeast. That’s called a backing wind; it goes counterclockwise around the compass and usually means bad weather is coming. A backing wind is an ill wind; it’s the first distant touch of a low-pressure system going into its cyclonic spin.

Since early the previous day, Case has been watching something called a “short-wave trough aloft” slide eastward from the Great Lakes. On satellite photos it looks like an S-curve in the line of clear dry air moving south from Canada. Cold air is denser than warm air, and huge, slow undulations develop along the boundary between them and roll eastward—on their side, as it were—much like an ocean swell. The undulation gets more and more pronounced until the “crest” gets separated from the rest of the warm front and just starts to spin around itself. This is called a cutoff low, or an occluded front. Air gets sucked in toward the center, the system spins faster and faster, and within hours you have a storm.

Likewise, a drop in air temperature causes water vapor to precipitate out as rain and release its latent energy back into the atmosphere. The air above one square-foot of equatorial water contains enough latent energy to drive a car two miles. A single thunderstorm could supply four days’ worth of the electrical power needed by the United States.

As long as there’s a supply of warm water, the thunderstorm sustains itself, converting moisture into sheeting rain and downdraft winds. Other thunderclouds might line up along the leading edge of a cold front into a “squall line,” a towering convective engine that stretches from horizon to horizon. Hurricanes start when a slight kink—a disturbance in the trade winds, a dust storm blowing out to sea off the Sahara—develops in the upper-level air. The squall line starts to rotate around the kink, drawing in warm, volatile air and sending it up the gathering vortex at its center. The more air that gets drawn in, the faster it spins, and the more water is evaporated off the ocean. The water vapor rises up the core of the system and releases rain and latent heat. Eventually the system starts spinning so fast that inward-spiralling air can no longer overcome the centrifugal force and make it into the center.

A mature hurricane is by far the most powerful event on earth; the combined nuclear arsenals of the United States and the former Soviet Union don’t contain enough energy to keep a hurricane going for one day. A typical hurricane encompasses a million cubic miles of atmosphere and could provide all the electric power needed by the United States for three or four years.

During the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, winds surpassed 200 miles an hour and people caught outside were sandblasted to death. Rescue workers found nothing but their shoes and belt buckles. So much rain can fall during a hurricane—up to five inches an hour—that the soil liquefies. Hillsides slump into valleys and birds drown in flight, unable to shield their upward-facing nostrils.

Wind is simply air rushing from an area of high pressure to an area of low; the greater the pressure difference, the faster it blows. An Arctic cold front bordering a hurricane-fortified low will create a pressure gradient that meteorologists may not see in their lifetime.

They are called anticyclones because the cold air in them flows outwards and clockwise, the opposite of a low. It is along the leading edge of these anticyclones that low-pressure waves sometimes develop; occasionally, one of these waves will intensify into a major storm. Why, and when, is still beyond the powers of science to predict. It typically happens over areas where a leg of the jet stream collides with subtropical air—the Great Lakes, the Gulf Stream off Hatteras, the southern Appalachians.

The barometric pressure is dropping more than a millibar an hour, and the Sable Island storm is sliding away fast to the southeast with 65-knot winds and thirty-foot

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...

After nine o’clock every graph line from data buoy 44139 starts climbing almost vertically. Maximum wave heights peak at forty-five feet, drop briefly, and then nearly double to seventy. The wind climbs to fifty knots by 9 PM and gradually keeps increasing until it peaks at 58 knots. The waves are so large that they block the anemometer, and gusts are probably reaching ninety knots. That’s 104 miles an hour—Gale Force 12 on the Beaufort Scale. The cables are moaning.

You see so much bad weather that you kind of get used to it. But then you see really bad weather. And that, you never get used to.

Due south of Sable Island, data buoy 44137 starts notching 75-foot waves on the afternoon of the 29th and stays up there for the next seventeen hours. Significant wave height—the average of the top third, also known as HSig—tops fifty feet. The first hundred-foot wave spikes the graph at 8 PM, and the second one spikes it at midnight. 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. They are among the very highest waves measured anywhere in the world, ever.

A gale blowing across a thousand miles of ocean for sixty hours would generate significant wave heights of 97 feet; peak wave heights would be more than twice that. Waves that size have never been recorded, but they must be out there. It’s possible that they would destroy anything in a position to measure them.

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.

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. In shallow water, waves break because the underwater turbulence drags on the bottom and slows the waves down, shortening the wavelength and changing the ratio of height to length. In open ocean the opposite happens: wind builds the waves up so fast that the distance between crests can’t keep up, and they collapse under their own mass. Now, instead of propagating with near-zero energy loss, the breaking wave is suddenly transporting a huge amount of water.

A general rule of fluid dynamics holds that an object in the water tends to do whatever the water it replaces would have done. In the case of a boat in a breaking wave, the boat will effectively become part of the curl. It will either be flipped end over end or shoved backward and broken on. Instantaneous pressures of up to six tons per square foot have been measured in breaking waves. Breaking waves have lifted a 2,700-ton breakwater, en masse, and deposited it inside the harbor at Wick, Scotland. They have blasted open a steel door 195 feet above sea level at Unst Light in the Shetland Islands. They have heaved a half-ton boulder 91 feet into the air at Tillamook Rock, Oregon.

The standard practice is to build ships to withstand what is called a 25-year stress—the most violent condition the ship is likely to experience in 25 years. The wave that flooded the wheelhouse of the Queen Mary, ninety feet up, must have nearly exceeded her 25-year stress. North Sea oil platforms are built to accommodate a 111-foot wave beneath their decks, which is calculated to be a one-hundred-year stress.

Mariners call them “rogue waves” or “freak seas.” Typically they are very steep and have an equally steep trough in front of them—a “hole in the ocean” as some witnesses have described it. Ships cannot get their bows up fast enough, and the ensuing wave breaks their back. Maritime history is full of encounters with such waves. When Sir Ernest Shackleton was forced to cross the South Polar Sea in a 22-foot open life boat, he saw a wave so big that he mistook its foaming crest for a moonlit cloud. He only had time to yell, “Hang on, boys, it’s got us!”

In February 1883, the 320-foot steamship Glamorgan was swept bow-to-stern by an enormous wave that ripped the wheelhouse right off the deck, taking all the ship’s officers with it.

In 1966, the 44,000-ton Michelangelo, an Italian steamship carrying 775 passengers, encountered a single massive wave in an otherwise unremarkable sea. Her bow fell into a trough and the wave stove in her bow, floode...

South Africa’s “wild coast,” between Durban and East London, is home to a disproportionate number of these monsters. The four-knot Agulhas Current runs along the continental shelf a few miles offshore and plays havoc with swells arriving from Antarctic gales. The current shortens their wavelengths, making the swells steeper and more dangerous, and bends them into the fastwater the way swells are bent along a beach.

In 1974, the 132,000-ton Norwegian tanker Wilstar fell into a huge trough (“There was no sea in front of the ship, only a hole,” said one crew member) and then took an equally huge wave over her bow. The impact crumpled inch-thick steel plate like sheet-metal and twisted railroad-gauge I-beams into knots. The entire bow bulb was torn off.

Early on the morning of February seventh, the watch officer glanced to stern and saw a freak wave rising up behind him that lined up perfectly with a crow’s nest above and behind the bridge. Simple geometry later showed the wave to be 112 feet high.

Others are waves that overlay long-distance swells from earlier storms. Such accumulations of energy can travel in threes—a phenonemon called “the three sisters”—and are so huge that they can be tracked by radar. There are cases of the three sisters crossing the Atlantic Ocean and starting to shoal along the 100-fathom curve off the coast of France. One hundred fathoms is six hundred feet, which means that freak waves are breaking over the continental shelf as if it were a shoreline sandbar. Most people don’t survive encounters with such waves, and so firsthand accounts are hard to come by, but they do exist.

An Englishwoman named Beryl Smeeton was rounding Cape Horn with her husband in the 1960s when she saw a shoaling wave behind her that stretched away in a straight line as far as she could see. “The whole horizon was blotted out by a huge grey wall,” she writes in her journal. “It had no curling crest, just a thin white line along the whole length, and its face was unlike the sloping face of a normal wave. This was a wall of water with a completely vertical face, down which ran white ripples, like a waterfall.” The wave flipped the 46-foot boat end over end, snapped Smeeton’s harness, and threw her overboard.

He must figure that the kind of sea that took out their windows probably won’t hit again—or that, if it does, they’ll be able to take it. Statistically a forty-knot wind generates thirty-or forty-foot breaking sea every six minutes or so—greenwater over the bow and whitewater over the house. Every hour, perhaps, Billy might get hit by a breaking fifty-footer. That’s probably the kind of wave that blew out the windows. And every 100 hours, Billy can expect to run into a nonnegotiable wave—a breaking seventy-footer that could flip the boat end over end. He’s got to figure the storm’s going to blow out before his hundred hours are up.

“We had no steerage and we were right in the eye of the storm,” she says. “It was a confused sea, all the waves were coming from different directions. The wind was picking up the tops of the waves and slinging them so far that when the search-and-rescue plane arrived, we couldn’t even see it. The whole vessel would get shoved over on its side, so that we were completely upside-down. If you get hit by one wave and then hit by another, you can drive the vessel completely down into the water. And so that second before the vessel starts to come up you’re just holding your breath, waiting.”

“Either I jump ship, or I go down with the ship. As for the first possibility, I thought about it for a while until I realized that they’d hammered all the hatches down. I thought, ‘God, I’ll never get off this friggin’ boat, it will be my tomb.’ So I figured I’d do whatever I had to do at the time, and there was no point in really thinking about it because it was just too frightening. I was just gripped by this feeling that I was going to have to do something very unpleasant. You know, like drowning is not going to be pleasant. And it wasn’t until the moment we lost steerage that I actually thought we were going to die. I mean, I knew there was a real possibility, and I was going to have to face that.” Soon after losing steerage, a communications officer in New York asks Reeves how it’s going. Not too well, she says. Is your survival suit out? Yeah, it’s here, she says. Well, how many Japanese can you fit into it? Reeves laughs; even that slight joke is enough to ease the desperateness of the situation. A couple of hours later the satellite phone rings. Improbably, it’s a Canadian radio reporter who wants to interview her. His name is Rick Howe.

Billy isn’t right on top of the bars yet, but he’s getting close. In the old days it was known that most shipwrecks on Sable occurred because of errors in navigation; the westerly current was so strong that it could throw boats off by sixty to a hundred miles. If Billy has lost his electronics—his GPS, radar, and loran—he’s effectively back in the old days. He’d have a chart of the Grand Banks on the chart table and would be estimating his position based on compass heading, forward speed, and wind conditions. This is called dead reckoning. Maybe the currents and the storm winds push Billy farther west than he realizes, and he gets into the shallows around Sable. Maybe he has turned downsea on purpose to keep water out of the wheelhouse, or to save fuel. Or maybe their steering’s gone and, like the Eishin Maru, they’re just careening westward on the weather. Whatever it is, one thing is known for sure. Around midnight on October 28th—when the storm is at its height off Sable Island—something catastrophic happens aboard the Andrea Gail.

THE ZERO-MOMENT POINT Behold a pale horse, and his name who sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. —REVELATION 6:8

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. Her stern would bury itself into the trough, and the crest of the wave would catch her bow and flip her over. This is called pitch-poling;

Another is a succession of waves that simply drives the boat under—“founders,” as mariners say. The dictionary defines founder as “to cave in, sink, fail utterly, collapse.” On a steel boat the windows implode, the hatches fail, and the boat starts to downflood. The crew is prevented from escaping by the sheer force of the water pouring into the cabin—it’s like walking into the blast of a firehose. In that sense, pitch-poling is better than foundering because an overturned boat traps air in the hold and can stay afloat for an hour or more.

The storm hit on their last trip of the year, late November. The crew were all good friends; they celebrated the end of their season at a steakhouse and then left for Georges Bank late the next morning. The winds were light and the forecast called for several more days of fair weather. By dawn it was blowing a hundred:

It happened quick. We were close to the edge of the continental shelf and the seas were getting large, starting to break. Cresting. I remember looking out the pilothouse and this monster wave came and broke over the bow and forced us backwards. There was nothing to hold us there and we must have dug the stern in and then spun around. Now we’re in a full following sea. We never went more than one more wave when we buried our bow in the trough and flipped over.

There was the wave breaking and then a sensation of the boat turning, and the next thing I knew we were upside-down. Floating inside the boat.