The Perfect Storm

[…] from now on his life would unfold in brutally short bursts between long stretches at sea, and all he'd have to tide him over would be photos taped to a wall and maybe a letter in a seabag. And if it was hard on the men, it was even harder on the women. "It was like I had one life and when he came back I had another," says Jodi Tyne, who divorced Billy over it. "I did it for a long time and I just got tired of it, it was never gonna change, he was never gonna quit fishin’, though he said he wanted to. If he had to pick between me and the boat he picked the boat."

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.

After talking to Barrie, Billy picks up the microphone on his single sideband and issues one last message to the fleet: She's comin' on boys, and she's comin' on strong. The position he’d given Linda Greenlaw on the Hannah Boden— 44 north, 56.4 west—is a departure from his original heading. It appears to be more the heading of a man bound for Halifax, Nova Scotia, or maybe even Louisbourg, Cape Breton Island, than Gloucester, Massachusetts. […] Whatever the reason, Billy changes course sometime before 6 PM and neglects to tell the rest of the fleet.

In a sense Billy’s no longer at the helm, the conditions are, and all he can do is react. If danger can be seen in terms of a narrowing range of choices, Billy Tyne’s choices have just racheted down a notch. A week ago he could have headed in early. A day ago he could have run north like Johnston. An hour ago he could have radioed to see if there were any other vessels around. Now the electrical noise has made the VHF practically useless, and the single sideband only works for long range. These aren’t mistakes so much as an inability to see into the future. No one, not even the Weather Service, knows for sure what a storm's going to do.

The Andrea Gail crew, all experienced fishermen, are probably trying to shrug it off as just another storm—they’ve been through this before, they'll go through it again, and at least they're not puking. Billy's undoubtedly working too hard at the helm to give drowning much thought. Ernie Hazard claims it was the last thing on his mind. "There was no conversation, just real business-like," he says of going down off Georges Bank. "You know, 'Let’s just get this thing done.'” […]

Be that as it may, certain realities still must come crashing in. At some point Tyne, Shatford, Sullivan, Moran, Murphy, and Pierre must realize there's no way off this boat.

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. […] Or maybe their steering’s gone and, like the Eishin Maru, they’re just careening westward on the weather.

The body could be likened to a crew that resorts to increasingly desperate measures to keep their vessel afloat. Eventually the last wire has shorted out, the last bit of decking has settled under the water. Tyne, Pierre, Sullivan, Moran, Murphy, and Shatford are dead.

And then, on the afternoon of November 5th, an EPIRB washes up on Sable Island. […] Like the bottled note thrown overboard from the schooner Falcon a century ago, the odds of something as small as an EPIRB winding up in human hands are absurdly small. And the odds of Billy Tyne disarming his EPIRB—there's no reason to, it wouldn’t even save batteries—are even smaller. Bob Brown, Linda Greenlaw, Charlie Reed, no one who knows Billy can explain it.