The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea (6 page)

Cape Pond is one of hundreds of businesses jammed into the Gloucester waterfront. Boats come into port, offload their catch, and then spend the next week making repairs and gearing up for the next trip. A good-sized wave can bury a sword boat underwater for a few seconds—"It just gets real dark in here," is how Linda Greenlaw describes the experience—and undoing the effects of a drubbing like that can take days, even weeks. (One boat came into port
twisted.)
Most boats are repaired at Gloucester Marine Railways, a haul-out place that's been in business since 1856. It consists of a massive wooden frame that rides steel rollers along two lengths of railroad track up out of the water. Six-hundred-ton boats are blocked up, lashed down, and hauled ashore by a double-shot of one-inch chain worked off a series of huge steel reduction gears. The gears were machined a hundred years ago and haven't been touched since. There are three railways in all, one in the Inner Harbor and two out on Rocky Neck. The harbor railway is the least robust of the three and terminates in a greasy little basement, which sports a pair of strangely Moorish-looking brick arches. The other two railways are surrounded by the famous galleries and piano bars of Rocky Neck. Tourists blithely wander past machinery that could rip their summer homes right off their foundations.

The
Andrea Gail
had been touched up at the Railways, but most of her major work was done in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1987. Almost three feet were added to her stern to accommodate two 1,900-gallon fuel tanks; the whaleback deck was extended aft nine feet; and a steel bulwark on the port side was raised and extended eighteen feet. In addition, twenty-eight fuel-oil drums, seven water drums, and the ice machine were stored on the whaleback.

In all, perhaps about ten tons of steel, fuel, and machinery were added to the whaleback. The weight had been added high up, eight feet or so above the deck and perhaps twice that high above the waterline. The boat's center of gravity had been changed just a little. The
Andrea Gail
would now sit more deeply in the water, recover from rolls a bit more slowly.

On the other hand, she could now put to sea for six weeks at a time. That, after all, was the point; and no man on the boat would have disagreed.

GOD'S COUNTRY

Going to sea is going to prison, with a chance at drowning besides.

—
SAMUEL JOHNSON

BY
midafternoon the
Andrea Gail
is ready: The food and bait have been stowed away, the fuel and water tanks have been topped off, spare drums of both have been lashed onto the whaleback, the gear's in good order, and the engine's running well. All there remains to do is leave. Bobby climbs off the boat without saying anything to Bugsy—they're still morose after their fight—and walks across the parking lot to Chris's Volvo. They drive back across town to Thea's and trot up her front steps in a soft warm rain. Thea hears their feet on the stoop and invites them in and takes her cue from a quick glance from Chris. I've got some errands to do, I'll be back in a few hours, she says. Make yourselves at home.

Chris and Bobby tug each other into the dark bedroom and lie down on the bed. 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. Chris and Bobby lie together on Thea's bed, talking and smoking and trying to forget the fact that this is his last day, and after an hour the phone rings and Bobby jumps up to answer it. It's Sully on the line, calling from the Crow's Nest. It's five o'clock, Sully says. Time to go.

The mood is dark and grim when they get down to the Nest. Alfred Pierre is still locked in an upstairs room with his girlfriend and won't come out. Billy Tyne's just returned from a two-hour phone conversation with his ex-wife, Jodi. Murph's there with a pile of toys on the pool table, packing them into a cardboard box. Ethel's in the back room crying: Bobby's money problems, the black eye, the month offshore. The Grand Banks in October is no joke and everybody knows it. There won't be half a dozen boats out there from the whole East Coast fleet.

Alfred Pierre finally comes down and sidles into the bar. He's a big, shy man who's not well known around town, although people seem to like him. His girlfriend has come down from Maine to see him off and she's not handling it well, her eyes are red and she's holding him as if she might physically keep him from getting on the boat. Murph finishes strapping his package up with tape and asks Chris to run him across town on an errand. He wants to pick up some movies. Sully is talking to Bugsy in a corner, and everyone's congratulating Ethel's eldest son, Rusty, for his upcoming marriage next week. Most of the people in the room will be a thousand miles into the North Atlantic by then.

Chris and Murph return ten minutes later with a cardboard box spilling with videos. There's a VCR on the
Andrea Gail,
and someone off another boat offered Murph the movies. Alfred has a beer bottle clenched in one big hand and is still muttering about not wanting to go. Sully's saying the same thing; he's in a yellow slicker over by the pool table telling Bugsy how he's got a bad feeling about this trip. It's the money, he says; if I didn't need the money I wouldn't go near this thing.

Okay you guys, Billy says. One last drink. Everyone downs one last drink. Okay, one more, someone says. Everyone has one more. Bobby's drinking tequila. He's standing by Chris looking down at the floor and she's holding his hand and neither of them is saying much. Sully comes over and asks if they're going to be okay. Chris says, Sure, we'll be fine and then she says: Actually, I'm not sure. Actually, no, I don't think so.

Six men are leaving for a month and it feels as if things are shearing off into a new and empty direction from which they may never return. Ethel, trying to maintain her composure, goes around the room hugging all the men. The only person she doesn't hug is Alfred because she doesn't know him well enough. Bobby asks his mother if they can take the color TV above the bar. If it's okay with Billy, she says.

Billy looks up. Ethel, he says, they can take the TV, but if they watch it instead of doin' their work it's goin' straight overboard.

That's fine, Billy, that's fine, Ethel says.

Billy's girlfriend sees Bobby's shiner under the brim of his Budweiser cap and glances over at Chris. She's of the old school where ladies don't slug their men.

You northern gals, she says.

I didn't mean it, says Chris. It was a mistake.

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. If one of the crew backed out now he'd sit around for a month and then either go to a welcome-home party or a memorial service. Either would be horrible in its own way. 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
Andrea Gail.

Okay, Billy says. Let's go.

Everyone files out the big wooden door. The rain has stopped and there are even a few scraps of clear sky off to the west. Pale, late-summer blue. Chris and Bobby get into her Volvo and Alfred and his girlfriend get into their car and everyone else walks. They cross Rogers Street through the impatient stream of Friday afternoon traffic and then angle down through the gate in the chain-link fence. There are fuel tanks on iron scaffolds behind Rose's, and small boats up with tarps over them, and a battered sign that says "Carter's Boat Yard." One of the fuel tanks has a pair of humpback whales painted on it. Chris drives past the little group, tires crunching on the gravel, and comes to a stop in front of the
Andrea Gail.
The boat is tied up to a small piece of wharf behind Old Port Seafoods, next to the fire boat and a dockside fuel pump. Bobby looks over at her.

I don't want to do this, he says. I really don't.

Chris is holding onto him in the front seat of her Volvo, with everything she owns in the back. Well don't go then, she says. Well fuck it. Don't go.

I got to go. The money; I got to.

Billy Tyne walks over and leans in the window. You gonna be all right? he asks. Chris nods her head. Bobby is really starting to fight the tears and he looks away so that Billy doesn't see. Okay, Billy says to Chris. We'll see you when we get back. He walks across the dock and jumps down onto the deck of the boat. Then Sully comes over. He's known Bobby most of his life—without Bobby he probably wouldn't even have taken the trip—and he's worried about him now. Worried that somehow Bobby isn't going to make it, that the trip's a huge mistake. Are you two okay? he says. Are you sure?

Yeah, we're okay, says Chris. We just need a minute.

Sully smiles and slaps the car roof and walks away. Bugsy and Murph don't have anyone to linger over and so they waste no time getting on the boat; now it's just the two couples in their cars. Alfred detaches himself from his girlfriend in the front seat and gets out and walks across the dock. His girlfriend looks around, crying, and spots Chris in the Volvo. She draws two fingers down her cheeks—"Yes, I'm sad, too"—and then just sits there, tears running down her cheeks. There's nothing more to wait for now, nothing more to say. Bobby's trying to keep it together because of the other five guys on the boat, but Chris is not trying to keep it together.

Well, I gotta go now, he says.

Yep.

And Christina, you know, I'll always love you.

She smiles at him through her tears. Yeah, I know, she says.

Bobby kisses her and gets out of the car, still holding hands. He closes the door and gives her a final smile and then starts walking across the gravel. As Chris remembers it he doesn't look back, not once, and he keeps his face hidden the entire way.

ALMOST
as soon as the New World was discovered, Europeans were fishing it. Twelve years after Columbus, a Frenchman named Jean Denys crossed the Atlantic, worked the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, and returned home with a hold full of cod. Within a few years there were so many Portuguese boats on the Banks that their king felt compelled to impose an import tax in order to protect the fishermen at home. Codfish ran so thick off Newfoundland, it was said, that they slowed ships down in the water.

Codfish weren't quite that plentiful, but they were certainly worth crossing the Atlantic for. And they were easily transported: Crews salted them aboard ship, dried them when they got home, and then sold them by the hundreds of thousands. The alternative was to go over with two crews, one to fish and another to preserve the catch on shore. The fish were split down the middle and then laid on racks, called flakes, to cure all summer in the Newfoundland air. Either way, the result was a rugged slab of protein that could be treated as indelicately as shoe leather and then soaked back to a palatable form. Soon European ships were shuttling back and forth across the North Atlantic in a hugely lucrative—if perilous—trade.

For the first fifty years the European powers were content to fish off Newfoundland and leave the coastlines alone. They were jagged, gloomy places that seemed to offer little more than a chance to impale one's ship. Then, in 1598, a French marquis named Troilus de Mesgouez pulled sixty convicts from French prisons and deposited them on a barren strip of sand called Sable Island, south of Nova Scotia. Left to shift for themselves, the men hunted wild cattle, constructed huts from shipwrecked vessels, rendered fish oil, and gradually killed one another off. By 1603, there were only eleven left alive, and these unfortunates were dragged back to France and presented to King Henri IV. They were clothed in animal skins and had beards halfway down their chests. Not only did the king pardon them their crimes, he gave them a bounty to make up for their suffering.

It was around this time that Cape Ann was first sighted by Europeans. In 1605, the great French explorer Samuel de Champlain was working his way south from Casco Bay, Maine, when he rounded the rock ledges of Thatcher's, Milk, and Salt islands and cast anchor off a sandy beach. The natives drew for him a map of the coastline to the south, and Champlain went on to explore the rest of New England before returning to Cape Ann the following year. This time he was clawing his way up the coast in some ugly fall weather when he sought shelter in a natural harbor he'd missed on his previous trip. He was greeted by a party of Abenaki Indians, some of whom wore the scraps of Portuguese clothing they had traded for a hundred years before, and they made a great show of hospitality before launching a surprise attack from the woods of Eastern Point. The Frenchmen easily fended them off and on the last day of September, 1606, with the Indians waving goodbye from the shore and the oaks and maples rusting into their fall colors, Champlain set sail again. Because of the sheltered coves and thick shellfish beds he called the place "Beauport"—The Good Harbor. Seventeen years later a group of Englishmen sailed into Beauport, eyed the local abundance of cod, and cast their anchor. The year was 1623.

The ship was financed by the Dorchester Company, a group of London investors that wanted to start tapping the riches of the New World. Their idea was to establish a settlement on Cape Ann and use it to support a fleet of boats that would fish all spring and summer and return to Europe in the fall. The shore crew was charged with building a habitable colony and drying the catch as it came in. Unfortunately, luck was against the Dorchester men from the start. The first summer they caught a tremendous amount of fish, but the bottom dropped out of the cod market, and they didn't even make expenses. The next year prices returned to normal, but they caught almost no fish at all; and the third year violent gales damaged the boats and drove them back to England. The company was forced to liquidate its assets and bring its men home.