The Perfect Storm: Gloucester, Mass., 1991 Summary & Analysis

In Gloucester, a soft rain is falling. Seagulls are calling, boats are creaking, and dockworkers are shouting. In the Crow’s Nest, overlooking Rose Marine and the State Fish Pier, Bobby Shatford is asleep. He has a black eye. Next to him sleeps his girlfriend, Christina Cotter, a blonde woman in her early 40s.

Bobby Shatford, along with five siblings, was raised in Gloucester by his mother, Ethel. The daughter of a fisherman, Ethel works as a bartender at the Crow’s Nest. All her sons have worked as fishermen at one time or another.

Bobby wakes up around eight o’clock. In a few hours, he’s supposed to be on the Andrea Gail, a swordfishing boat, for a month-long trip to the Grand Banks. When Chris finally wakes up, she notices Bobby’s eye and wonders how she did that.

Eventually, the two make their way to the front entrance of the Crow’s Nest. Inside they find Bobby’s shipmate Bugsy Moran blearily drinking a beer. The three decide to drive to a nearby diner for sandwiches, plus getting sunglasses to help with their hangovers. Later, they pick up a third crewmember, Dale Murphy, or “Murph.” The four go shopping for last-minute trip supplies and a cartful of toys for Murph’s young son. Then they wind up drinking at another bar, where Bobby’s sister, Mary Anne, stops by. She’s been mad at Bobby lately because of his drinking, but when Bobby tells her he loves her, she’s caught off guard.

Chris Cotter never thought she’d set foot in the Crow’s Nest, but thanks to her friend Mary Anne, she found herself becoming a regular. One day at the bar, she noticed Bobby staring at her. A month later, they hooked up on New Year’s Eve, and pretty soon they were spending all of their time together. At that time, Bobby was living in one of the rooms above the Crow’s Nest and fishing to help pay off a child-support debt. Bobby and Chris wanted to get married, but Bobby needed money first. He decided to take a job on the Andrea Gail, a lucrative sword boat captained by a family friend, Billy Tyne. Tyne, in turn, had taken over the boat from its previous captain, Charlie Reed.

Sword boats, also called longliners, are baited at intervals and then hauled back daily for 10 or 20 days. Sword boats follow the swordfish population to the North Atlantic’s Grand Banks in the summer and to the Caribbean in the winter. These boats can bring in big money, and the fishermen who crew them are “the high rollers of the fishing world,” as Junger describes them. All Bobby Shatford wants, though, is to put in a year’s worth of trips on the Andrea Gail so that he can hopefully earn enough to pay off his debts.

During Bobby’s first trip on the Andrea Gail, which left in August 1991, Chris spent a lot of time sitting in her car at the wharf, watching nervously for his return. When they were finally reunited at the Crow’s Nest, Chris says she must have spent about 20 minutes in Bobby’s arms, her legs wrapped around his waist. Bobby then recited, word for word, a card that Chris had hidden in his seabag before he left.

On the August 1991 trip, the Andrea Gail caught 15 tons of swordfish, which they sold for $136,812. The boat’s owner, Bob Brown, first deducted the expenses for things like fuel, tackle, bait, and repairs, then took home about half of what was left. The remainder was divided among the crew, with the biggest sum going to captain Billy Tyne. Because he had the least seniority, Bobby got one of the smaller shares of $4,537.

After a late night, the crew had to spend the day following their return hauling out the fish and ice, scrubbing the Andrea Gail’s decks, and stowing the gear. That night, the fishermen were paid half of what they were owed, and the partying resumed. Over the coming week, the men were expected to show up each day for work—primarily boat maintenance—but Bobby, still exhausted from the last trip and dreading the next one, often crawled back into bed in the morning. And if the fishing life was hard on the fishermen, it may have been harder on the women left at home. For example, Billy Tyne’s ex-wife, Jodi Tyne, felt that Billy would always choose his boat over her and that the pattern of their life would never change, so she divorced him.

Unlike many fishermen, Billy Tyne really loved his job, as did his predecessor on the Andrea Gail, Charlie Reed. Charlie loved the solitude aboard ship, the closeness to nature, and the respect of people in town, greeting him with “Hi, Cap.” Deckhands usually have a different experience, though. Their work is brutal and mind-numbing, and it’s generally a dead-end job that people take when they need money fast.

While in port, often for as little as six days at a time, fishermen tend to indulge. Flush with cash, they buy lottery tickets and round after round of drinks for everyone at the bar—sometimes spending a week’s worth of cash in one night. Chris recalls how much everyone drank before the Andrea Gail’s last voyage. She and Bobby had gotten physically violent on their final night together, which she says was because of the alcohol. She can’t believe she sent him off to sea with a black eye.

Junger likens the Crow’s Nest to the inn where Ishmael stays at the beginning of Moby Dick—a place where a down-and-out fisherman can find a safe harbor. Such places are second homes, because fishermen often don’t have real ones—especially the younger ones who tend to crew longline boats. Ethel Shatford takes on a motherly role toward such men. She’s never lived more than half a mile from the Crow’s Nest; some of Gloucester’s residents have never left the town. Gloucester has seen its share of problems, like an epidemic of heroin addiction and, at the end of the 1980s, the collapse of the Georges Bank ecosystem, which adversely affected the town’s economy.

Ethel has worked at the Crow’s Nest since 1980. Some people end up staying for years. For fishermen, truckers, and friends, the upstairs rooms have low rates, and the Crow’s Nest cashes checks, accepts mail, and even screens phone calls for fishermen who need it. Everyone knows each other, and fights rarely break out there.

Fishing in Gloucester has always been a deadly business. In the 1600s, fishermen ventured up the coast in open boats. Over time, fishing vessels evolved to include sturdier masts and shelter for the crew. These boats anchored in the deep-sea fishing grounds each spring, and each man was paid according to how many fish he hauled up on two lead-weighted lines. Sometimes they’d fish for a couple of months at a time—since the fish were typically dried, there was no hurry to get back to port. Sometimes captains would load up their holds until the boat’s decks were almost underwater—which was extremely dangerous in bad weather.

By the late 1700s, 1/6th of New England’s fishing fleet was based in Gloucester. By the time of the American Revolution, New England’s codfishing industry was worth over a million dollars a year. The Treaty of Paris included the provision that American fishermen could fish in Canadian waters and dry their fish on the remote beaches of Nova Scotia and Labrador. The best cod was then shipped to Spain and Portugal, the average-grade cod was sold back home, and the worst-quality cod was used to feed West Indian slaves—traded for goods like rum, molasses, and sugar. Gloucester’s fishing heyday was in the 1880s, by which time the port housed a fleet of up to 500 fishing schooners.

In the 1800s, a Massachusetts fisherman developed a “jig” (lure) which proved irresistible to mackerel, allowing Gloucester fishermen to enrich themselves in this industry as well. By midcentury, a type of net called the purse seine was invented, replacing the mackerel jig. Codfishermen invented a similar technology called tub trawling. This technology was more efficient, but it also proved to be deadlier for fishermen. The fishermen rowed out from the main ship each day in small open boats called dories. In bad weather, men could easily be thrown from their dories into the water. In one instance in November 1880, two men were thrown from their dory on the Grand Banks. While both managed to scramble back into the boat, one of them only survived by clinging to the barbed steel of the trawl line, mangling his hand in the process. After recovering from a faint, he nevertheless insisted on hauling in the rest of his line before returning to the schooner.

Worse could befall a fisherman on the Grand Banks, though. Because of the meeting of the warm Gulf Stream and chilly Canadian currents in this area, the Grand Banks is prone to severe fog. Every year or so, a dory might go adrift in the fog, and, if he made landfall, a frostbitten fisherman might spend days—or longer—wandering a deserted coast in search of rescue. Occasionally fishermen were blown as far as South America or all the way across the Atlantic. This meant that for families back home, there wasn’t necessarily a clear endpoint to their grief. A missing dory fisherman had no way to communicate with home, and he could turn up in Gloucester at any time.

Back in the present, Chris and Bobby eat lunch and wind up, with Bugsy, drinking beer at the apartment of Chris’s friend Thea. Then Bobby and Bugsy make a run for hotdogs for the trip, and as she watches the men load provisions onto the boat, Chris thinks about the future she and Bobby have planned. She’s going to use part of Bobby’s check from the last trip to secure an apartment for the two of them, she’s got two jobs lined up, and even with Bobby being away a lot, she figures they’ll get by. Interrupting Chris’s thoughts, another guy named Sully approaches Chris’s car, saying he’s just replaced a man who backed out.

The Andrea Gail is 72 feet long and was built in Florida in 1978. She has an angled bow and a pilothouse up front, which is on top of an elevated deck called the whaleback. Besides life preservers, survival suits, and life rafts, she also has something called an EPIRB on board—an Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon. She’s also outfitted with an ice machine, 40 miles of fishing line, and room for tons of baitfish. The Andrea Gail is a good boat. The only comparable sword boat in Gloucester’s harbor is the Hannah Boden, which is captained by a woman named Linda Greenlaw. Linda’s one of the only female captains out there and has a reputation as one of the best of all captains on the East Coast. Both the Hannah Boden and the Andrea Gail are owned by Bob Brown.

The Andrea Gail’s latest trip is off to a bad start. Its crew has been drinking a lot, the men are fighting, and no one wants to head back out. In fact, several of the men keep changing their minds about whether they’re going at all. This morning, one guy named Adam Randall left his position on the boat with no explanation. Though Randall had been out of work for three months, he looked over the Andrea Gail this morning, got a strange feeling, and drove off. Sully, or David Sullivan, is called in to replace him. Sully and Murph are sent to the Cape Ann Market to buy $4,000 worth of groceries to supply a month’s voyage.

On the voyage out, 20 tons of ice keep bait and groceries cold and then keep swordfish fresh on the way back. Ice makes modern commercial fishing possible. In the 1800s, fishermen salt-dried their catch, but in the 1840s, the advent of railroads meant that food could be transported much faster than before. To take advantage of this development, ice companies began to proliferate, cutting and selling chunks of pond ice to sell to schooners.

Now that there was a market for fresh fish, the industry changed dramatically. Rather than taking their time drying their catch, fishermen now raced back to port. This was critical because, if a boat were beaten to port by several other, fuller vessels, the slower boat might have to dump her entire catch, the market having already been saturated. This situation meant that overloaded boats rushed home even through heavy storms and were sometimes sunk. Yet those who survived stood to make a lot of money. One hundred fifty years later, boats are still rushing to shore, whether they have their own ice machines or, like their 19th-century forebears, buy their ice in bulk from a local company.

In addition to Cape Pond Ice, Gloucester’s waterfront is home to many other businesses, like Gloucester Marine Railways, which touches up damaged boats between trips. The Andrea Gail has been worked on there, though her most recent major renovations took place in St. Augustine, Florida. On that occasion, about 10 tons of “steel, fuel, and machinery” were added, resulting in a subtle shift in the boat’s center of gravity. This meant that the Andrea Gail sits a little deeper in the water and recovers from big waves more slowly. At the same time, she’s now better equipped to remain at sea for up to six weeks at a time.