The Perfect Storm: The Barrel of the Gun Summary & Analysis

In the swordfishing business, denial isn’t uncommon. Captains often overload their boats and ignore storm warnings. Coast Guard inspectors say that the idea of sinking is unthinkable to many captains, so they don’t even take precautions. But the Andrea Gail is too far from home to summon the Coast Guard anyway. While it’s very likely that Billy told his crew about the coming storm, nobody knows what precautions they took. Among other things, though, they would likely have secured the hatches, removed the scupper plates, and tied down anything loose.

The next morning, the seas are calm, but the winds are shifting to the southeast, which is usually an indication that bad weather is approaching. Billy receives another fax warning him that Hurricane Grace is accelerating straight toward Sable Island from Bermuda. The various boats of the swordfishing fleet deliberate about what to do; Albert Johnston heads to the colder, calmer seas of the Labrador current, and others stay put. Billy, with the Andrea Gail full of fish and a malfunctioning icemaker, decides to continue heading for home. Tommy Barrie, captain of a ship called the Allison, says that 90 percent of captains would have done the same.

At the National Weather Service office in Boston, meteorologist Bob Case is monitoring a slowly spinning front that’s moving eastward from the Great Lakes, gathering itself on the border between layers of warm and cold air. In a hurricane, by contrast, a line of squalls begins to rotate faster and faster around a warm-water disturbance, sucking in more and more air, until an “eye” is formed. Right now, late-season Hurricane Grace is barreling toward the Grand Banks. Normally, this hurricane would make landfall over the Carolinas, but the Great Lakes cold front is blocking it, forcing it northward. All of this is ultimately orchestrated by the jet stream, “a river of cold upper-level air” that pulls storms eastward, creating atmospheric irregularities called anticyclones. When these collide with storm fronts like the one moving off the Great Lakes, they form a “nor’easter.” Science can’t reliably predict exactly when nor’easters will form.

The nor’easter is first detected on October 26th, moving across Canada, Maine, and the Bay of Fundy. Early on October 28th, a gale rages north of Sable Island, and it’s strengthening as it moves southeast in Billy Tyne’s direction. Just short of his current position is a data buoy, which registers no activity through most of the day. At two o’clock that afternoon, however, it suddenly registers higher seas and gusting winds. Shortly thereafter, a hurricane warning is faxed to the fleet. In a deceptively calm sea, Billy is heading straight into a weather nightmare. At 7 p.m., the storm hits.

When the Andrea Gail moves into the storm, the change would have been as dramatic as if a person had stepped from one room into another. The wind would have been screaming through the rigging, eventually increasing to 104 miles an hour. (Fishermen have often been able to gauge a storm’s strength by the sound the wind makes; Linda Greenlaw said that she once heard hundred-mile-per-hour winds producing “a deep tonal vibration like a church organ,” but without any melody.) Meanwhile, the waves grow bigger and bigger—up to 70 feet high.

After receiving the latest weather report, Tommy Barrie calls Billy. He’s 600 miles to the east of the Andrea Gail and is wondering if he should set out bait that night. He asks Billy how the weather is looking. Billy reports that the winds are blowing between 50 and 80 knots at that point, with 30-foot seas. A short time later, he speaks to the whole fleet over the single-sideband radio: “She’s comin’ on boys, and she’s comin’ on strong.” At that point, his position indicates that he’s heading toward Nova Scotia—meaning that he’s changed course without notifying the rest of the fleet. But nobody is concerned except for Linda Greenlaw, who thinks that Billy’s last transmission sounded scared.

By this point, the storm is impacting New England, too. The Satori is off Cape Cod by this time, but Leonard continues to insist that they needn’t worry. On the Monday morning of their voyage, they’re in the midst of a full gale. After a brief respite, Tuesday finds Leonard, Stimpson, and Bylander taking turns at the helm, clipped into a safety line to avoid getting swept overboard while steering. Stimpson begins to worry, for the first time in her life, whether she might actually die at sea.

Nobody knows exactly what would have been happening on the Andrea Gail at this time. Charlie Reed imagines the crew staying huddled belowdecks, reading books. He figures it would have been “an awful frightening ride,” with giant waves simply dropping out from under the boat. Of the Andrea Gail crew, Murph had likely had the closest brushes with death in the past: getting bitten by a mako shark, getting hooked and dragged off the boat, and almost getting crushed to death when a British submarine collided with his boat. After all this, Murph resigned himself to the likelihood that he would die at sea—a belief he matter-of-factly shared with his parents and his wife, Debra.

By ten o’clock on Monday night, Billy was likely facing 45-foot waves every 8 to 9 seconds, having to constantly fight to keep the boat from rolling over. At this point, he must have decided to “bring his boat around” to face the waves head-on—a frightening maneuver that would have involved facing the waves broadside for about 30 seconds, a huge rollover risk. The significance of such a move is that it would mean, at this point, the Andrea Gail was just trying to survive. In other words, Billy’s options were narrowing.

Around 11 o’clock that night, Tommy Barrie calls Billy to ask him about weather conditions, but he doesn’t get a response. Then, he can’t get through at all—which suggests that the Andrea Gail is in serious trouble, whether that means her antennas are lost, that she’s sunk, or that her crew is frantically trying to avoid sinking. Barrie guesses it must be the antennas, but that also means the Andrea Gail would have lost her GPS and radio, effectively putting the ship back into the 19th century.