Sebastian Junger - The Perfect Storm

Yeah, I'm worried too, says Brown. Keep trying him. I'll check back.

At six o'clock that night, the time he generally checks in with his boats, Brown tries one last time to raise the Andrea Gail. Not a sign. Linda Greenlaw hasn't been able to raise her, either, nor has anyone else in the fleet. At 6:15 on October 30th, two days to the hour after Billy Tyne was last heard from, Brown calls the Coast Guard in Boston and reports the vessel missing. I'm afraid my boat's in trouble and I fear the worst, he says. He adds that there have been no distress calls from her and no signals from her EPiRb. She has disappeared without a trace. In some senses that's good news because it may just mean she's lost her antennas; a distress call or EPIRB signal would be a different matter entirely. It would mean absolutely that something has gone wrong.

Meanwhile, the news media have picked up on the story. Rumors are flying around Gloucester that the Allison has gone down along with the Andrea Gail, and that even the Hannah Boden may be in trouble. A reporter from News Channel Five calls Tommy Barries wife, Kimberly, and asks her about the Allison. Kimberly answers that she talked to her husband the night before by single sideband and that, although she could barely hear him, he seemed to be fine. Channel Five broadcasts that tidbit on the evening news, and suddenly every fisherman's wife on the East Coast is calling Kimberly Barrie to ask if she has any news about the fleet. She just repeats that she talked to her husband on the 29th, and that she could barely hear him. "As soon as the storms move offshore the weather service stops tracking them," she says. "The fishermen's wives are left hanging, and they panic. The wives always panic."

In fact the eastern fleet fared relatively well; they heave-to under heavy winds and a longdistance swell and just wait it out. Barrie even contemplates fishing that night but decides against it; no one knows where the storm is headed and he doesn't want to get caught with his gear in the water. Barrie keeps trying Billy every couple of hours throughout the night of the 28th and the following day, and by October 30th he thinks Billy may have drifted out of range. He radios Linda and tells her that something is definitely wrong, and Bob Brown should get a search going. Linda agrees. That night, after the boats have set their gear out, the captains get together on channel 16 to set up a drift model for the Andrea Gail. They have an extremely low opinion of the Coast Guard's ability to read ocean currents, and so they pool their information, as when tracking swordfish, to try to figure out where a dead boat or a life raft would have gone. "The water comes around the Tail and wants to go up north," Barrie says. "By talking to boats at different places and putting them together, you can get a pretty detailed map of what the Gulf Stream is doing."

Late on the night of the 30th, Bob Brown calls the Canadian Coast Guard in Halifax and says that the Andrea Gail is probably proceeding home along a route that cuts just south of Sable Island. He adds that Billy usually doesn't call in during his thirty-day trips. The Canadian cutter Edward Cornwallis— already at sea to help the Eishin Maru—starts calling for the Andrea Gail every quarter hour on channel 16. "No joy on indicated frequency for contacting Andrea Gail" she reports later that morning. Halifax initiates a communications search as well, on every frequency in the VHF spectrum, but also meets with failure. The fishing vessel Jennie and Doug reports hearing a faint "Andrea Gail'' at 8294 kilohertz, and for the next twelve hours Halifax tries that frequency but cannot raise her. Judith Reeves on the Eishin Maru thinks she hears someone with an English accent radioing the Andrea Gail that he's coming to their aid, but she can't make out the name of the vessel. She never hears the message again. A SpeedAir radar search picks up an object that might possibly be the Andrea Gail, and Halifax tries to establish radio contact, without success. At least half a dozen vessels around Sable Island—the Edward Cornwallis, the Lady Hammond, the Sambro, the Degero, the Yankee Clipper, the Melvin H. Baker, and the Mary Hitchins—are conducting communications searches, but no one can raise them. They've fallen off the edge of the world.

The Rescue Coordination Center in New York, meanwhile, is still trying to figure out exactly who is on the crew. Bob Brown doesn't know for sure—often owners don't even want to know—and even the various friends and family aren't one hundred percent certain. Finally the Coast Guard gets a call from a Florida fisherman named Douglas Kosco, who says he used to fish on the Andrea Gail and knows who the crew are. He runs down the list of crew as he knows it: Captain Billy Tyne, from Gloucester. Bugsy Moran, also from Gloucester but living in Florida. Dale Murphy from Cortez, Florida. Alfred Pierre, the only black guy on board, from the Virgin Islands but with family in Portland.

Kosco says that the fifth crew member was from the Haddit—Tyne's old boat—and that Merrit Seafoods in Pompano has his name. I was supposed to go on this trip, but I got off at the last moment, he says. I don't know why, I just got a funny feeling and stepped off.

Kosco gives the Coast Guardsman a phone number in Florida where he gets messages. (He's offshore so much that he doesn't have his own phone.) I think they may have gone shorthanded—I hope they did, he says. I don't think Billy could've found anyone else so fast. . .

It's wishful thinking. The morning Kosco left, Billy called up Adam Randall and asked him if he wanted a job. Randall said yes, and Billy told him to get up to Gloucester as fast as possible. Randall showed up with his father-in-law, checked the boat over, and got spooked like Kosco had. He walked off. So Billy called David Sullivan and happened to catch him at home. Sully reluctantly agreed to go, and arrived at the State Fish Pier an hour later with his seabag over his shoulder. The Andrea Gail went to sea with six men, a full crew. Kosco doesn't know this, though; all he knows is that a last-minute decision five weeks ago probably saved his life.

At about the same time that Kosco confesses his good luck to the Coast Guard, 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.

MEANWHILE, the worst crisis in the history of the Air National Guard has been unfolding offshore. At 2:45 that afternoon—in the midst of the Satori rescue—District One Command Center in Boston receives a distress call from a Japanese sailor named Mikado Tomizawa, who is in a sailboat 250 miles off the Jersey coast and starting to go down. The Coast Guard dispatches a C-130 and then alerts the Air National Guard, which operates a rescue group out of Suffolk Airbase in Westhampton Beach, Long Island. The Air Guard covers everything beyond maritime rescue, which is roughly defined by the fuel range of a Coast Guard H-3 helicopter. Beyond that—and Tomizawa was well beyond that—an Air Guard H-60 has to be used, which can be refueled in midflight. The H-60 flies in tandem with a C-130 tanker plane, and every few hours the pilot comes up behind the tanker and nudges a probe into one of the hoses trailing off each wing. It's a preposterously difficult maneuver in bad weather, but it allows an H-60 to stay airborne almost indefinitely.