Extract from The Perfect Storm
by Sebastian Junger

Finally, around midnight, Barrie on the fishing boat Allison tries to raise Billy, captain of the Andrea Gail. He can’t get through, which is serious. It means the Andrea Gail has sunk, has lost her antennas, or there’s such pandemonium on board that no one can get to the radio. Barrie guesses it’s the antennas—they’re bolted to a steel mast behind the wheelhouse, and although they’re high up, they’re fragile. Losing the antennas would mean they’d lost their GPS, radio, weather fax, and loran. And a wave that had taken out their antennas may well have also stripped them of their radar, running lights and floodlight. Not only would Billy not know where he was, he wouldn’t be able to communicate with anyone or detect other boats in the area. There’s not much he could do but keep the Andrea Gail pointed into the seas and hope the windows don’t get blown out.

Around midnight a curious thing happens: the Sable Island storm eases up a bit. The centre of the low is now directly over the Andrea Gail. The winds drop a few knots and maximum wave heights fall about ten feet. Their periods lengthen as well, meaning there are fewer breaking waves. Instead of crashing through walls of water, the Andrea Gail rises up the face of each wave and plunges down its backside. Forty-five-foot waves have an angled face of sixty or seventy feet, which is nearly the length of the boat. On exceptionally big waves the Andrea Gail has her stern in the trough and her bow still climbing towards the crest.

The reprieve doesn’t last long. Within a couple of hours the waves are back up to seventy feet. A 70-foot wave has an angled face of well over a hundred feet. The sea state has reached levels that no one on the boat, and few people on earth, have ever seen.

When the Contship Holland finally limped into port several days later, she’d lost 36 land-sea containers over the side, and the ship’s owners promptly hired an American meteorological consultant to help defend them against lawsuits. ‘The storm resulted in large-scale destruction of offshore shipping and coastal instal­lations from Nova Scotia to Florida,’ wrote Bob Raguso of Weathernews New York. ‘It was called an extreme nor’easter by US scientists and ranked as one of the five most intense storms from 1899–1991. Some scientists termed it the hundred year storm.’

The Andrea Gail is at the epicentre of this storm and almost on top of the Sable Island shoals. It’s very likely that Billy manages to get through the ten o’clock spike in weather conditions but takes a real beating—she has lost her antennas, the windows are out, the electronics are dead and the crew is terrified. For the first time they are completely, irrevocably on their own.

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