This was a really intense book about a really intense storm. It's a little weird since the Andrea Gail lost radio contact, so there's not a ton to write about of the crew's actual experience. Junger fills the book with a long period of tension at the beginning, lots of facts about the sea and storms, and a long portion after the sinking of the Andrea Gail about the other people in the sea during the storm. One thing that gave me pause about the book was that it felt somewhat exploitative since the disaster happened so recently before the book was published. That made this feel more like true crime.
The town where the Andrea Gail departed from was a fishing town. Gloucester, Massachusetts, had always fished and lost men to the sea--losing a couple hundred men a year in peak years. Since 1650, 10,000 Gloucestermen have died at sea, more than in all of the United States' major wars. From Gloucester, swordfishermen go to the Grand Banks or Georges Bank, which happen to sit on the worst storm tracks in the world. Junger writes,
Low pressure systems form over the Great Lakes or Cape Hatteras and follow jet streams out to the sea, crossing right over the fishing grounds in the process . . . As dangerous as the Grand Banks were, though, Georges Bank--only 180 miles east of Cape Cod--was even worse. There was something so ominous about Georges that fishing captains refused to go near it for nearly 300 years. Currents ran in strange vortexes on Georges, and the tide was said to run off so fast that ocean bottom was left exposed for gulls to feed on.
But Georges was also home to huge amounts of marine life, and fishing resumed in the 19th century and was hugely profitable. But,
Because the fishing grounds were so small and close to shore, dozens of schooners might be anchored within sight of each other on a fair day. If a storm came on gradually, the fleet had time to weigh anchor and disperse into deeper water; but a sudden storm could pile ship upon ship until they all went down in a mass of tangled speared and rigging.
So the Andrea Gail went out to catch literal tons of swordfish, and were ready to head back after a month at sea when the storm came. The storm was really three storms. One was a hurricane from the south, another was a cold front coming off the Canadian Shield, and another was a storm off of the Great Lakes. They all converged at the Grand Banks. The decision of when to haul in the lines and return to port is a calculation about how much fish you think you can catch, how much you have in the hold that needs to get back to port before it rots, and how quickly you think you can get back. Weather can be a complicating factor. For the crew of the Andrea Gail, who were already heading back, the issue was that if they took a more circuitous path to avoid the storm, they might risk losing a huge amount of their catch. Moreover, they couldn't know where the storm would head next. In a short conversation over the radio with another captain, the last words out of the Andrea Gail are, "She's comin' on boys, and she's comin' on strong." The Andrea Gail diverts slightly north to find colder water, which doesn't feed a storm as well.
The Andrea Gail isn't the only ship caught up in the Perfect Storm. The Contship Holland a 542-footer 200 miles to the east has things written in its logbook like, "Ship labors hard in very high following seas," "water over deck and deck cargo, ship strains heavily...," and "ship no longer obeys." For reference, the Andrea Gail is just 72 feet long. And the waves are longer. Junger writes, "Forty-five foot waves have an angled face of sixty or seventy feet, which is nearly the length of the boat. There is a possible lull in the eye of the storm, that would have lasted until one AM. But if the Andrea Gail survived it, it would get worse. Bigger waves would come. On exceptionally big waves, the Andrea Gail has her stern in the trough and her bow still climbing toward the crest." The waves end up reaching 70 feet, which mean angled faces of over 100 feet, waves that very few people have ever seen and lived to tell the tale. It's very possible that the sea could have overwhelmed the Andrea Gail at that point, but another ship, a 55-footer, wasn't flipped until winds hit 100 knots and waves were 70 feet. Junger estimates that the Andrea Gail made it to the lull, but was heavily beaten, with windows out and electronics dead, the crew hoping to survive while soaked in complete darkness.
Some waves are worse than others. Gravity waves, or swells, are unlikely to sink a ship no matter how tall they are. A cork floating on the surface would not move side-to-side, just up and down. But in shallow water, waves break when the wave drags on the bottom and the top moves forward, falling over. In the open ocean, "the opposite happens: wind builds waves up so fast that the distance between crests can't keep up, and they collapse under their own mass." These waves don't ripple out, but break, transporting a huge amount of water.
The Coast Guard never receives a call from the Andrea Gail. This is probably because their radios are out, along with the rest of their electricity and lighting. The only link the ship has to the world is the EPIRB, an emergency device that can be triggered manually to call for rescue or is triggered by water. But at this point, there can be no rescue. No ship can reach the Andrea Gail fast enough, and no helicopter can reach the center of the storm. But the EPIRB is never tripped. That means that the captain must have thought that they could survive right until the moment they didn't. It probably means they were hit by a massive rogue wave that they couldn't see since it was pitch black. The only way to survive out there would be to meet every seventy-foot wave head on. But in the darkness, it would be impossible to see them coming. They would feel a big drop into the trough, "a lurch, and the boat starting up a slope way too steep to survive."
Junger proceeds to tell the reader all about what drowning is like. We know what it's like from people who have drowned and been miraculously saved. It's not really possible to inhale until a person its that the last moment of consciousness. the instinct not to try to breathe underwater is too strong. Usually, a person will hold their breath until their have so much carbon dioxide and so little oxygen in their blood that they take an involuntary breath. This happens, on average, after 87 seconds underwater. If the drowning person hyperventilates beforehand, like free divers do to flush out carbon dioxide, this might be extended to as long as 140 seconds. And then Junger writes an incredibly bleak passage that I'm just going to copy below.
Until the break point, a drowning person is said to be undergoing "voluntary apnea," choosing not to breathe. Lack of oxygen to the brain causes a sensation of darkness closing in from all sides, as in a camera aperture stopping down. The panic of a drowning person is mixed with an odd incredulity that this is actually happening. Having never done it before, the body—and the mind—do not know how to die gracefully. The process is filled with desperation and awkwardness. "So this is drowning," a drowning person might think. "So this is how my life finally ends."
Along with the disbelief is an overwhelming sense of being wrenched from life at the most banal, inopportune moment imaginable. "I can't die, I have tickets to next week's game," is not an impossible thought for someone who is drowning. The drowning person may even feel embarrassed, as if he's squandered a great fortune. He has an image of people shaking their heads over his dying so senselessly. The drowning person may feel as if it's the last, greatest act of stupidity in his life.
These thoughts shriek through the mind during the minute or so that it takes a panicked person to run out of air. When the first involuntary breath occurs most people are still conscious, which is unfortunate, because the only thing more unpleasant than running out of air is breathing in water. At that point the person goes from voluntary to involuntary apnea, and the drowning begins in earnest. A spasmodic breath drags water into the mouth and windpipe, and then one of two things happen. In about ten percent of people, water—anything—touching the vocal cords triggers an immediate contraction in the muscles around the larynx. In effect, the central nervous system judges something in the voice box to be more of a threat than low oxygen levels in the blood, and acts accordingly. This is called a laryngospasm. It's so powerful that it overcomes the breathing reflex and eventually suffocates the person. A person with laryngospasm drowns without any water in his lungs.
In the other ninety percent of people, water floods the lungs and ends any waning transfer of oxygen to the blood. The clock is running down now; half-conscious and enfeebled by oxygen depletion, the person is in no position to fight his way back up to the surface. The very process of drowning makes it harder and harder not to drown, an exponential disaster curve similar to that of a sinking boat.
Occasionally someone makes it back from this dark world, though, and it's from these people that we know what drowning feels like.
Miscellaneous Facts:
- Fish are not equally distributed in the water column and tend to collect at the meeting point of cold and warm water. So fishermen try to hang their bait there, and to leave long lines in faster currents to cover more area.
- "A waterfront joke: What's the second thing a fisherman does when he gets home? Puts down his bags."
- More people are killed on fishing boats, per capita, than in any other job in the United States.
- Sometimes the book shows its age being from 1997. I cracked up reading this: "Fishing boats use a global positioning system for bluewater navigation. GPS, as it's called, fixes a position relative to military satellites circling the earth and then converts it to longitude and latitude. It's accurate to within fifteen feet."
- Another one of these^ "There is some evidence that average wave heights are slowly rising . . . One cause may be the tightening of environmental laws, which has reduced the amount of oil flushed into the oceans by tankers [oil spreads over and calms waters]. Another explanation is that the recent warming trend--some call it the greenhouse effect--has made storms more frequent and severe."
- "A typical hurricane encompasses a million cubic miles of atmosphere and could provide all the electric power needed by the United States for three or four years."
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