The Perfect Storm: Graveyard of the Atlantic Summary & Analysis

Junger quotes Albert Johnston saying that he was the first of the fleet to know how bad conditions were going to get. After hearing the weather forecast, there wasn’t time to get to land, so instead Johnston headed for colder, denser water—the waves wouldn’t get as big there. Meanwhile, most of his crew hunkered down to watch TV, sensing this was the worst storm they’d ever faced. “There’s always a point,” Johnston says, “when you realize that you’re in the middle of the ocean and if anything goes wrong, that’s it.”

While Johnston and the Mary T manage to stay north of the very worst, conditions south of Sable Island are off the charts. A weather buoy records winds at 80 miles per hour and waves as high as 100 feet—among the highest ever recorded anywhere. According to Junger, scientists don’t entirely understand how such enormous waves work. Wave height is a function of how hard and for how long the wind blows, as well as “fetch”—the amount of open water available. In other words, waves on Lake Michigan will never get as big as waves on the open ocean.

All waves begin as little ripples, or capillary waves, on the surface of the water. These ripples allow the wind to “catch” on the water, and the harder the wind blows, the bigger the waves start to get. (Even if the wind stopped, the waves would continue to fall into the trough that preceded them—these are called swells.) As wind speed increases, wave energy rises not linearly, but to the fourth power. In other words, seas generated by 40-knot winds aren’t twice as violent as seas generated by 20-knot winds, but 17 times as violent. Further, as the waves get higher, they also get steeper, and they tend to collapse under their own weight, displacing huge amounts of water. When a boat is in a breaking wave, it will either get flipped over by the wave, or the wave will break on the boat, threatening to inundate it.

Ships are built to withstand what’s called 25-year stress, meaning the worst conditions a ship will likely face in 25 years. But this is simply a guess made by naval architects; ships can and do encounter conditions that exceed their stress rating. Waves that exceed this rating are called “non-negotiable waves” or “rogue waves.” Such waves are generally steep, with a huge trough in front of them, or a “hole in the ocean.” When a ship is caught in a rogue wave and can’t get its bow up fast enough, the ship’s back will be broken.

If a rogue wave blows out the windows of a boat’s wheelhouse, the boat’s wiring can become soaked, or else the boat can fill up with water very quickly. In such a scenario, crew members might be sent onto the deck with plywood to board up the window—a terribly dangerous task in stormy conditions. Aside from that, there isn’t much to do but keep heading into the storm and radio for help. If Billy had simply said “mayday” into a Coast Guard-monitored channel, a rescue plane would have been dispatched immediately, and other boats would have tried to converge on the Andrea Gail to help. But the Coast Guard is never called, suggesting that the Andrea Gail’s radios are out by this point in the storm. Billy could also have tripped the switch on his EPIRB, but he never does—suggesting that “he’s hopeful about their chances right up until […] they have no chance at all.”

It’s hard to guess how the men on the Andrea Gail might have reacted to the realization that they were likely going down at sea. Another fisherman, Ernie Hazard, recalls that when his boat sank off Georges Bank, he and his crew were too busy trying to survive to dwell on the possibility of dying. The same would probably have been true for the crew of the Andrea Gail—though it’s easy to imagine that Bobby Shatford, especially, would have recalled his misgivings and how close he came to skipping the trip altogether.

Although it’s impossible to know what was happening aboard the Andrea Gail at this time, the Eishin Maru, a Japanese longliner, was likely facing similar conditions. About 200 miles southwest, the Eishin Maru was struck by a huge wave a little past 8 p.m. on the night of October 29th. A Canadian observer named Judith Reeves was aboard the Eishin Maru when this wave blew out a window. Even though the boat was twice the length of the Andrea Gail, its decks were buried by waves. Just before dawn the next morning, the boat’s electronics are blown out by another rogue wave.

Because Reeves is the only person aboard the Eishin Maru who can speak English, she’s summoned to the radio room to speak to the ship’s agent about the damage they’ve sustained. The Coast Guard cuts in to ask if they need rescue, and the Japanese radio operator points to a sentence in his English phrase book: “We are helpless and drifting. Please render all assistance.” That’s when Reeves realizes that the ship is going down, and that with the hatches battened down, she’s probably never getting out.

At this time, Billy is probably a bit south-southwest of Sable Island, which is essentially a 20-mile-long sandbar, historically uninhabited except for a scattering of lighthouses and a herd of wild horses. Ships have often sought shelter on its beaches, only to get battered to death by waves off its coast. It’s typically shrouded in fog because of the convergence of the Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current. Five thousand people are believed to have drowned in the island’s shallows. Those who survived would sometimes spend months camped out on the island, awaiting better weather and a rescue ship.

Nowadays, there are just two lighthouses, a Coast Guard station, and a weather station on Sable Island. It’s notoriously difficult to navigate around Sable because of the currents, and if his electronics are down, then Billy Tyne would be trying to navigate by chart, compass, and wind conditions (a process known as “dead reckoning”). It’s possible that he strays into the deadly shallows around Sable, or else loses steering altogether and is at the mercy of the weather, much like the Eishin Maru. Nobody knows for sure what happens—only that, around midnight on October 28th, “something catastrophic happens aboard the Andrea Gail.”