In Gloucester there is a sculpture of the Virgin Mary between two tall bell towers of the Our Lady of Good Voyage Church. She has a bundle in her arms that she lovingly gazes at. The bundle is not the infant Jesus; it’s a Gloucester schooner. Fishing the Grand Banks has always been extremely dangerous. Dories rowed out to haul in lines, back-breaking work at best, and disappeared into dense fog never to be seen again; or, occasionally the seafarers might walk up the lane months later having returned from Europe where they had been blown, surviving on dew and whatever fish they could catch. This area routinely spawns devastating storms. Some ten thousand Gloucester fishermen have been killed in the past three hundred years, and commercial fishing has the highest per capita death rate of any profession. Risks today have only been slightly lessened with the use of special survival suits and lifeboats. Most of the fishing is out of the range of rescue helicopters.Sebastian Junger has recreated the tragedy of the Andrea Gail in The Perfect Storm. He reconstructed as best he could what might have happened. In the process, we learn a great deal about the swordfishing industry. The Andrea Gail was a good ship and swordfishing could be particularly lucrative. On a good trip, the captain might receive a $20,000 share after all expenses had been paid; the lowest seniority crewman, $5,000 for a month’s work. Swordfish are not gentle creatures. They have a four to five foot bony “sword” that is used for slashing and eviscerating schools of fish. They have been known to attack fishermen when hooked and there is a case on record of one mauling a clipper ship. Commercial fishermen avoid the thrill by baiting hooks on miles of lines that are trolled behind the vessel. The baiting process is interesting and extremely dangerous. It’s done on the fly as the line is played out. Large #10 hooks are baited and snapped on to the line. Should the hook catch on the baiter’s clothing as it goes by, he goes over the side with it. If he’s extremely lucky, he can grab a knife that is always kept ready and cut the line before he drowns. The bait is illuminated with Cyclume sticks costing $1.00 each — swordfish feed at night and the light sticks are supposed to illuminate the bait — and during a trip, the ship might use 5000 of them. The trolling line is usually about thirty miles long. Buoys and radio beacons as well as radar reflectors are added every so often to keep the hooks suspended at the feeding depth of seventy feet, so one trolling line might be worth $20,000.
The storm that destroyed the Andrea Gail was of truly awesome proportions, and Junger does a brilliant job of mixing in the scientific understanding of hurricane physics, wave mechanics, and storm development with analysis of human and ship behavior. One huge container ship that traversed a less intense area of the storm lost 37 containers (huge tractortrailer sized shipping units that are securely attached to the decks of large vessels). After it limped into New York, an officer walked off and declared he would never set foot on board a ship again. Meteorologists calculated it was the worst storm in one hundred years. Significant wave heights were measured by instruments at over 97 feet. Peak wave heights would have been more than twice that. That’s as high as a twenty story building. Waves that high have never been measured, but it’s suspected that “they would destroy anything in a position to measure them.” An example of what can happen during such a storm was recounted by another Gloucester fisherman named Chris, whose boat was hit by a tremendous boarding sea in a lesser storm. As Junger recounted, “The stern lifted, the bow dropped, and they started surfing down the face of the wave. When they got to the bottom there was nowhere to go but down, and the crest of the breaking wave drove them like a piling. Chris looked out the porthole, and all he could see was black. If you look out the porthole and see whitewater, you’re still near the surface and relatively safe. If you see greenwater, at least you’re in the body of the wave. If you see blackwater, you’re a submarine. ‘I felt the boat come to a complete stop. . . . We hung there a moment and then the buoyancy caught and it was as if she’d been thrown into reverse. We plowed right back out the way we came.’”
