sailboat in the perfect storm

Miracle on the Sea: Andrea Gail’s Crew Bodies Found

On October 28, 1991, the fishing boat had set out from Massachusetts for Newfoundland. But as it entered an area of intense weather that would later become kown as the Perfect Storm, it never returned.

The crew of six—Captain William Tyne, Robert Shatford, David Sullivan from Gloucester; Dale Murphy and Michael Moran from Bradenton Beach, FL; and Alfred Pierre from New York City—was lost at sea in the midt of 30 to 60 foot waves (some reports even say 100ft). After an extensive search effort that lasted nine days and included an Air National Guard helicopter running out of fuel and crashing off Long Island’s shore (resulting in one fatality), authorities called off the search due to the low probability of crew survival.

In August 1992, after months of uncertainty and mourning, fishermen discovered human remains onshore near Provincetown, MA. DNA testing confirmed it was one of the Andrea Gail’s crew members—Robert Shatford—ending months of anguish for his family. In November 1992, authorities found more remains from four additional crewmembers onshore in Maine. The last two bodies were never recovered.

The Andrea Gail tragedy is an example of life’s fragility and unpredictability at sea. Our thoughts are with all those affected by the loss of these brave fishermen who were taen too soon.

The Size of the Wave That Hit the Andrea Gail

The wave that hit the Andrea Gail was estimated to be approximately 75 feet high. This is based on data from October 1991, when winds of 60 miles per hour blew for nearly 24 hours near the last known position of the Andrea Gail. This generated a peak wave height of about 75 feet.

The Fate of the Andrea Gail Crew

Unfortunately, the crew of the Andrea Gail were never found. The ship, captained by William Tyne, was battered by huge waves estimated to be beween 30 and 60 feet–some reports even say 100 feet–and was lost at sea. Onboard were Robert Shatford and David Sullivan from Gloucester, Dale Murphy and Michael Moran from Bradenton Beach, Florida, and Alfred Pierre from New York City. No trace of the vessel or its crew was ever discovered.

The Fate of the Andrea Gail Wreckage

The wreckage of the Andrea Gail was ultimately found after a search was called off by authorities on November 9, 1991. The search yielded only some debris such as fuel drums, a fuel tank, an empty life raft, and other flotsam. Unfortunately, no crew members were ever located. This tragedy is remembered as one of the worst in commercial fishing history.

Number of Coast Guard Deaths in the Perfect Storm

Sadly, the 1991 Perfect Storm resulted in the loss of 13 lives, including one Coast Guard crew member. The victim was Petty Officer Robert “Bobby” Shatford, who was serving as a rescue swimmer on an HH-60 Jayhawk helicopter that crashed off the coast of Long Island during the storm. He is remembered and honored for his bravery and dedication to protecting others during the storm.

Did Any Boats Survive the ‘Perfect Storm’?

No boats survived The Perfect Storm, which occurred in October 1991 off the coast of Nova Scotia. The storm was one of the most powerful and destructive storms ever recorded in the North Atlantic. The storm generated waves up to 100-feet high and hurricane-force winds reaching up to 150 miles per hour. As a result, several fishing vessels were destroyed and sunk during the storm, with no survivors from any of them. This included both commercial fishing vessels as well as recreational boaters who were caught in the storm’s path. In addition, many oter vessels were severely damaged by the intense winds and waves, though some did manage to make it back to port with their crews safe.

The Loss of Life on the Andrea Gail

Six people were lost on the Andrea Gail during the Perfect Storm. The commercial fishing vessel was out of Gloucester, Massachusetts and was carrying a crew of six when it was lost at sea. This tragedy was part of a larger storm whih caused 13 deaths in total, as well as extensive damage to property with an estimated cost of $200 million.

Tragic Loss of the Crew of the Andrea Gail

The Andrea Gail tragically lost all six of its crew members: Captain Bill Tyne, 37, David Sullivan, 29, and Bob Shatford, 30, all of Gloucester; Dale Murphy and Michael Moran, both of Bradenton Beach, Florida; and Alfred Pierre, of New York City. All six brave fishermen were lost at sea without a trace in what has become known as the Perfect Storm of 1991.

Accuracy of the Movie ‘The Perfect Storm’

The movie The Perfect Storm is generally quite accurate in its depiction of the events of the real-life storm that occurred in 1991. While some aspects of the story have been exaggerated for cinematic effect, the storm itself was an incredibly powerful one. The meteorological data collected at the time shows that winds were sustained at more than 100 mph, and wave heights reached over 30 feet. What’s more, there have been reports of wave heights as high as 100 feet from eyewitnesses who were on board vessels in the area at the time. So whie some elements of the movie may be sensationalized, it is accurate in portraying what was a truly monstrous and destructive storm.

The Coast Guard’s Attempts to Rescue the Andrea Gail

Yes, the Coast Guard did try to save the Andrea Gail. On October 28th, 1991, Moore’s Coast Guard helicopter from Air Station Cape Cod was sent out to search for the missing fishing vessel. Unfortunately, due to limited fuel capacity and unfavorable weather conditions, the helicopter was forced to ditch. Despite not being able to locate the Andrea Gail and its crew, the Coast Guard crew did manage to rescue three crewmen from the Tamaroa and people from a nearby sailboat. The heroism and dedication of thse brave individuals should be celebrated for their willingness to put their lives at risk in order to save others.

Coast Guard Helicopter Loss During The Perfect Storm

Yes, the U.S. Coast Guard lost a helicopter during The Perfect Storm. On October 30, 1991, Major Robert Ruvola and his crew were flying Jolly 110, a Sikorsky HH-3F Pelican Helicopter on a rescue mission in the midt of the storm. With just twenty minutes of fuel remaining, Major Ruvola had to make the difficult decision to ditch the helicopter into the sea while the engines were still running. At 9:30 p.m., the Sikorsky’s number one engine flamed out from fuel starvation and all onboard were forced to abandon ship in their life rafts until they could be rescued by another Coast Guard vessel some hours later. Tragically, no lives were lost that day but the Coast Guard did lose an expensive piece of equipment during The Perfect Storm.

Is the Flemish Cap a Real Phenomenon?

Yes, The Flemish Cap is a real geographic feature located in the North Atlantic Ocean. It is an area of shallow waters that extends roughly between 47° and 48° north latitude, and 44° and 46° west longitude, or about 563 km (350 miles) east of St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. The Flemish Cap is a part of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, whch have been known since the 16th century for their abundance of fish species such as cod and haddock. The area has been an important fishing grounds for centuries, but has also become known for its hazardous weather conditions due to strong winds and storms.

The Depth of the Flemish Cap

The Flemish Cap is a shallow plateau of roughly 200 km in width, located east of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, and separated from them by the approximately 1200-m-deep Flemish Pass. The depths of the Flemish Cap range from depths of

Has a Coast Guard Cutter Ever Been Sunk?

Yes, a Coast Guard cutter has sunk. The most well-known incident occurred in 1989 when the CGC Mesquite ran aground near Keweenaw Point in Lake Superior. After being declared a total loss, the vessel was towed off the shoal and sunk in the lake as an artificial reef. This incident was significant as it marked the first time a U.S. Coast Guard cutter had been intentionally sunk for marine conservation purposes.

The CGC Mesquite is just one example of a Coast Guard cutter that has sunk over the years. In the early 1900s, several cutters were lost while patrolling during World War I and World War II, including CGC Acushnet which was sunk by a German U-boat in 1942 and CGC Tampa which went down during a storm in 1918 with all hands lost. Other cutters have also been lost to storms, collisions, fires, and other natural disasters or causes throughout history.

Has Storm Unice Resulted in Any Deaths?

Yes, Storm Eunice has killed at least four people. In England, three individuals died as a result of the storm. A man in his twenties was killed in Alton, Hampshire after the car he was travelling in collided with a tree. Additionally, two men were killed near Birmingham and the Isle of Wight respectively. In Ireland, one man was killed whle trying to secure his boat during the storm. Furthermore, another man is currently hospitalized with serious injuries related to the storm.

The Conflict Between Murph and Sully

Murph and Sully have a strained relationship due to Sully’s history with Murph’s ex-wife. It is implied that Sully had an affair with Murph’s ex-wife when they were still together, which led to the dissolution of their marriage. This created a rift beteen Sully and Murph, as Murph felt betrayed by Sully and held a grudge against him. Furthermore, while they are both caring fathers, they have different parenting styles which can clash at times.

The Andrea Gail was a vessel that sadly met its end during the 1991 Perfect Storm. With a crew of six men, Captain William Tyne, Robert Shatford, David Sullivan, Dale Murphy, Michael Moran and Alfred Pierre, it was lost at sea with catastrophic consequences. Winds of up to 60 miles per hour and waves reaching 75 feet caused the ship to break aprt and sink in the unforgiving Atlantic Ocean. Despite an extensive search effort, no trace of the vessel was ever found. The tragedy of the Andrea Gail serves as a reminder of how dangerous unpredictable weather can be on the high seas.

William Armstrong

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THE BOATING REPORT

THE BOATING REPORT; In the Real Storm, the Skipper, the Crew and the Boat All Survived

By Herb McCormick

• Aug. 6, 2000

About midway through ''The Perfect Storm,'' the film adaptation of Sebastian Junger's phenomenal best-seller, the skipper of the 32-foot sailboat Mistral, sporting a jaunty yachtsman's cap and a highbrow New England accent, makes an offhand remark about his vast offshore prowess. It's a setup line. He's silly, smug and about to get walloped.

As readers of the book know, the character is based on Ray Leonard, the skipper of Satori, a Westsail 32 that was abandoned by its crew in a North Atlantic gale during a United States Coast Guard rescue operation in the fall of 1991. Portrayed by Junger as a strange introvert with a fondness for the bottle, Leonard has now been skewered both in print and by Hollywood.

With each subsequent retelling of his story, the lines that define who Leonard is and what happened during that terrible, perfect storm become more blurred. In fact, Leonard is a retired research ecologist for the United States Forest Service, a former college administrator and an accomplished long-distance voyager with a Coast Guard license and tens of thousands of miles under his keel, and he does not fall within the neat, nasty boundaries of his depictions.

''I haven't seen the movie and I probably won't until I can borrow a copy of the video,'' Leonard said last week from the small home he is building for himself in western Vermont. ''But as for hats, I just wear a ball cap at sea. It keeps the sun out of my eyes.''

Junger, who did not speak to Leonard for his book, did not return a phone call seeking comment for this column. But in a 1997 interview about Leonard in The New York Observer, Junger said, ''He didn't sound like the kind of guy I wanted to talk to.''

That's a shame, because Junger, whose book focuses on the loss of the fishing vessel Andrea Gail and includes vivid writing about meteorology, long-line fishing and Coast Guard heroics, missed a grand opportunity to capture the passion of a long-distance sailor.

Leonard, 72, bought his Westsail in 1974, the same year the rugged little double-ended yacht was featured on the cover of Time as the perfect vessel for folks ready to chuck it all and head for the South Seas.

''Satori is the Buddhist word for enlightenment,'' Leonard said. ''I was at the midpoint of my career, and the boat gave me new insight into myself. Whenever I got into a bad fix with her, she always did better than I thought she would. She was very well named for me.''

From 1974 to '91, Leonard sailed Satori hard and often, mostly alone. The boat was well equipped with designated storm sails, and Leonard had plenty of chance to use them in roughly 60,000 miles of sailing. Divorced in 1985, he moved aboard Satori the same year. In October 1991, accompanied by Karen Stimson and Susan Bylander, two women he had spent the summer working with, Leonard and Satori set out from New Hampshire bound for Bermuda.

By all accounts, the voyage was a nightmare. Several days into the trip, after receiving a Mayday call relayed by a commercial vessel, a Coast Guard helicopter plucked Satori's crew from a roiled sea. While that fact is indisputable, the events leading up to the rescue remain unclear; there are two very different versions of Satori's fateful passage.

In Junger's book, which is based largely on interviews with Stimson, the sailors survive through the initiative of the women, who are forced to take action when Leonard, ''sullen and silent, sneaking gulps off a whiskey bottle,'' refuses to do so. In what he describes as 30-foot seas, Junger wrote that Satori was ''starting to lose the battle to stay afloat.''

Leonard, however, dismisses much of Junger's account. ''I'd guess the seas were 15 to 18 feet, tops,'' he said. ''Satori had been in much worse. It was a very uncomfortable ride, but the boat was sound and we weren't taking on water, except for a few gallons that came through the hatch. And the drinking bit is just totally untrue.''

Leonard was employing standard tactics for weathering extreme conditions: he had battened Satori down and was content to wait things out. ''You never head towards shore in a heavy storm,'' he said. ''It's too dangerous. And the weather forecast said a hurricane was heading towards Bermuda, so it didn't make sense to keep going that way.''

Leonard said he did not authorize a Mayday call, though he did give the women permission to radio the Coast Guard to update Satori's position. And when the chopper did arrive, he considered staying aboard Satori. Ultimately, when he was ordered to leave, he complied.

''When I knew the crew would have to jump in the water, I wasn't comfortable about having them go alone,'' he said. ''Also, I knew if I disobeyed I wouldn't be able to land in a U.S. port for several years, and I've seen expatriates in foreign ports. I didn't want to be one.''

Stimson, who was on vacation from her job in Maine last week, was unavailable for comment. Interestingly, according to a friend of hers, Stimson now owns a Westsail 32.

What transpired after the rescue supports Leonard's contention that Satori was still seaworthy when her crew leapt off her transom. Several days later, the boat washed up on a Maryland beach. A bag of personal items that Leonard had mistakenly dropped when he left Satori was still on the afterdeck.

''A park ranger found my phone number in it,'' Leonard said. ''He called me up and said come get your boat. It was fine. I went down and had her hauled off, cleaned her up, then sailed her to Florida.''

Leonard continued to sail Satori until this spring, when he sold the boat to a Texas couple. As for the fallout from Junger's book, which Leonard has read, he said: ''People who don't know me who've read it have preconceived notions. I've only had one boat delivery job, and I used to get plenty. I'm not bitter, but I don't think the book or movie explained what sailing's all about. Bluewater sailors are sharp, self-reliant, and proud.''

And while Leonard no longer owns Satori, he is still drawn to the sea. Earlier this year, fulfilling a lifelong dream, he went to Alaska in search of the same work that took the lives of the crew of the Andrea Gail. Once there, he signed on aboard a salmon trawler. Of all things, the sailor became a fisherman.

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Tragic Facts About The Perfect Storm, The Shipwreck Story No One Lived To Tell

The Perfect Storm 's true story of The Andrea Gail shipwreck is as gripping as the Hollywood adaptation—maybe even more so. In the early '90s, Mother Nature's unrelenting power lashed out in an epic storm that caught the fishing vessel Andrea Gail in its deadly grip. The real-life events behind the novel and subsequent movie are a chilling reminder of the unpredictable strength of the ocean and the brave souls who make their living on it. This wasn't just another fishing trip gone awry; it was a desperate battle for survival against a monstrous convergence of weather systems that spawned a storm like no other.

Tragically, all six crew members aboard the Andrea Gail were lost to the sea. Despite a heart-wrenching search effort, the shipwreck was never found. Coast Guard teams and rescue crews scoured the ocean in hopes of finding the fishermen and their vessel, launching an exhaustive search that spanned over ten days. The story of the Andrea Gail and her crew remains a poignant testament to the perils faced by those who venture into the deep sea—a tale entrenched in maritime history as a story of courage, loss, and the formidable forces of nature.

• The Perfect Storm/Warner Bros.

The Storm Took A Total Of 13 Lives

From October 26 through November 1, 1991, a massive storm pummeled the East Coast as it traveled from Nova Scotia to Florida. The storm  claimed a total of 13 lives, including those of the six crew members aboard the fishing boat  Andrea Gail . 

The Andrea Gail crew members who lost their lives were Michael "Bugsby" Moran and Dale R. "Murph" Murphy, both from Bradenton Beach, FL; Alfred Pierre from New York City, NY; and Frank William "Billy" Tyne Jr., Robert F. "Bobby" Shatford, and David "Sully" Sullivan, all from Gloucester, MA.

The Last Conversation The 'Andrea Gail' Captain Had Was 'Typical'

Linda Greenlaw, a fishing boat captain from Maine, was the last person to speak to any of the crew on board the  Andrea Gail . She said her last conversation with Captain Billy Tyne was "typical."

Greenlaw told the Gloucester Daily Times ,  "I wanted a weather report, and Billy wanted a fishing report. I recall him saying, 'The weather sucks. You probably won’t be fishing tomorrow night.'"

• Public Domain

No One Knows Exactly What Happened To The 'Andrea Gail'

It's still unclear exactly what became of the Andrea Gail and its crew . While it does seem the crew perished, the details are a matter of speculation. No distress signal was ever sent, very little wreckage was ever found, and there were no survivors to interview or remains to examine.

The lack of closure made the grieving process even more difficult for the crew's loved ones.

• Unknown USCG member

The Search For Survivors Was Called Off After 10 Days

While it seemed impossible for the  Andrea Gail to have survived the storm, the Coast Guard still led a massive  search covering  186,000 square miles over the course of 10 days. The only hint regarding the crew's fate was a small amount of wreckage , including an emergency beacon, an empty life raft, fuel drums, and a propane tank.

After 10 days, the search was called off due to the low probability of the crew's survival. 

The Storm Caused Nearly $500 Million In Damage

In addition to the human cost, the storm also racked up nearly  $500 million in damage. Hundreds of houses and businesses were lost in its wake. Roads and airports were closed, and  38,000 people lost power .

While this was substantial, the damages were actually less severe in many areas than those caused by other large storms.  The lighter toll was said to be attributed to the decreased amount of rainfall and a lack of foliage due to the winter season. 

• W. W. Norton & Company

The Families Weren't Thrilled With The Movie, But Most Appreciated The Book

Many people are aware of the Andrea Gail  tragedy thanks to  The Perfect Storm, the 2000 film starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg. Unfortunately, some of the families members of the departed crew were so unhappy with the movie that they filed a lawsuit .

Filed by the family of Captain Billy Tyne, the lawsuit charged Warner Bros. with "unauthorized commercial misappropriation and invasion of privacy." They claimed they had not given permission to use Tyne's likeness, and that the film had unfairly depicted him as incompetent. According to Warner Bros., the law did not require them to obtain permission to depict a historically important event. Ultimately, the Florida Supreme Court  threw out the case .

In contrast, Sebastian Junger's novel of the same name was considered to be quite fair and well researched. Maryanne Shatford, sister of crew member Bobby Shatford, told Boston.com she's glad to have both versions: "They were all like the characters in the book. It was the movie that was too Hollywood. They wanted it to be a story more than it was between the characters... but even though they didn’t get [them] all right, the people were unbelievably nice, all the actors and the producers."

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• CC BY-SA 2.5

Gloucester Has Found Many Ways To Memorialize Lost Sailors

In Gloucester, an official memorial is dedicated to the approximately 3,000 local fishermen who were lost at sea between 1623 and 1923. The bronze statue of a sailor at the wheel of his ship is called the Gloucester Fisherman’s Memorial. Services are held at the memorial every August, and they often leave the audience in tears. 

Gloucester also has less official ways of commemorating sailors who have passed. According to Maryanne Shatford, the best memorial to her brother and the rest of the crew is the family business, a local bar called the Crow’s Nest. The bar is decorated with photographs of the crew and includes a plaque that reads, "They will always be remembered by family and friends ."

These physical reminders help Shatford keep her brother alive in her heart. She told Boston.com :

His memory is never going to [fade] for me, but there are so many concrete things for me too. I can open the book, I can turn on the TV, people always want to talk to me about him, especially at the Crow’s Nest. His memory is here every single day. 

The Movie's Ship Was Used As A Memorial Too

The Perfect Storm may not have been a popular film with the crew's families, but one eatery was able to salvage something from the production. Boston restaurant Legal Seafood bought the ship used in the movie and turned it into a memorial for the Andrea Gail crew.

The memorial stayed up until the ship was damaged in a fire. 

• NOAA/Satellite and Information Service

Bob Case Dubbed It 'The Perfect Storm'

"Perfect" may not seem like the most appropriate word to describe a storm that took the lives of 13 people, but nevertheless, the "Perfect Storm" moniker stuck. Bob Case, a meteorologist at the Boston branch of the National Weather Service, coined the name when he noticed three separate storms set to  converge  off the coast of New England in October 1991.

"Perfect" in this case means perfectly terrible - it couldn't have been worse.

• The Perfect Storm
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Visiting the mysterious empty and sunken vessels of the deep blue sea.

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The Perfect Storm

An unusually intense storm pattern catches some commercial fishermen unaware and puts them in mortal danger. An unusually intense storm pattern catches some commercial fishermen unaware and puts them in mortal danger. An unusually intense storm pattern catches some commercial fishermen unaware and puts them in mortal danger.

• Wolfgang Petersen
• Sebastian Junger
• William D. Wittliff
• George Clooney
• Mark Wahlberg
• John C. Reilly
• 841 User reviews
• 133 Critic reviews
• 59 Metascore
• 4 wins & 28 nominations total

Top cast 66

• Bobby Shatford

• Dale 'Murph' Murphy

• Christina Cotter

• David 'Sully' Sullivan

• Mike 'Bugsy' Moran

• Alfred Pierre

• Linda Greenlaw

• Melissa Brown

• Edie Bailey

• Alexander McAnally III

• Irene 'Big Red' Johnson

• Ethel Shatford

• Sgt. Jeremy Mitchell

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• Lt. Rob Pettit
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Did you know

• Trivia In the film's beginning, the Andrea Gail is shown offloading an unimpressive catch, and Billy Tyne is depicted as having "lost his touch." In reality, Tyne and his crew returned from that trip with an abundant catch. Likewise, the relationship between Tyne and Linda Greenlaw was fictitious. Tyne and Greenlaw were barely acquainted in real life.
• Goofs When the Andrea Gail enters the eye of the storm, the waters become calm. In reality the air would be calm and the skies clearer, but the seas would be just as bad as ever, on account of churning from the surrounding hurricane's eye-wall winds.

Christina 'Chris' Cotter : [sitting on the dock next to each other looking out at the ocean] I'll be asleep, and all the sudden there he is, that big smile. You know that smile. And I say, 'Hey, Bobby - where you been?' but he won't tell me. He just smiles and says, 'Remember, Christina: I'll always love you; I loved you the moment I saw you; I love you now; and I love you forever. There's no goodbyes - there's only love, Christina; only love. Then he's gone. But he's always happy when he goes so I know he's got to be okay - absolutely okay.

Ethel Shatford : [holds her hand] I love your dream.

Billy's voice : The fog's just lifting. Throw off your bow line; throw off your stern. You head out to South channel, past Rocky Neck, Ten Pound Island. Past Niles Pond where I skated as a kid. Blow your air-horn and throw a wave to the lighthouse keeper's kid on Thatcher Island. Then the birds show up: black backs, herring gulls, big dump ducks. The sun hits ya - head North. Open up to 12 - steamin' now. The guys are busy; you're in charge. Ya know what? You're a goddam swordboat captain! Is there any thing better in the world?

• Connections Featured in Siskel & Ebert: Shaft/Boys and Girls/Jesus' Son/Titan A.E./Pop and Me (2000)
• Soundtracks Yours Forever (Theme from 'The Perfect Storm') Written by James Horner , John Mellencamp and George M. Green (as George Green) Produced by John Mellencamp , James Horner and Mike Wanchic (as Michael Wanchic) Performed by John Mellencamp Courtesy of Sony Music

User reviews 841

• Jul 23, 2000

Everything New on Paramount+ in August

• What is 'The Perfect Storm' about?
• Is 'The Perfect Storm" based on a book?
• What is a "perfect" storm?
• June 30, 2000 (United States)
• United States
• Warner Bros.
• Una tormenta perfecta
• Gloucester, Massachusetts, USA
• Baltimore Spring Creek Productions
• Radiant Productions
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• $140,000,000 (estimated)
• $182,618,434
• $41,325,042
• Jul 2, 2000
• $328,718,434

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 10 minutes
• Dolby Digital EX

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Widow, Friend Set Record Straight on Final Voyage of the Andrea Gail

The fishing village of Cortez curls along the northern shoreline of Sarasota Bay, its narrow streets and weathered bungalows huddled around the whitewashed concrete outline of the A.P. Bell Fish Co. the way other communities encircle clock towers and steeples.

Past the postage-stamp yards piled high with stone-crab traps and fishing buoys, across a washboard parking lot edged with mounds of shells, a score of commercial fishing boats clatter against the docks behind the staunch, two-story building.

Somewhere, a crew is applying a coat of fiberglass to the deck of a shrimp boat. Somewhere else, a bin filled with fish heads is broadcasting on the breeze. Front-loaders heft tubs of ladyfish, grouper and herring, then chug along the docks, across the wet concrete floor of the fish house, and disappear into the darkness past men wearing high rubber boots.

This is a working dock, not a scenic one. But to Jodi Tyne, it's a haven, one of the few places where all her chain-smoking brittleness and anger ebb away.

A fisherman who knew Billy Tyne comes up and gives her a quick, protective hug. She moves past him toward the edge of the dock. "I'm always more peaceful when I come down here," she says. "It's where I'm close to him. I know he's out there, somewhere."

She is not quite what the preservationists have in mind when they talk about the maritime heritage of this place: a woman, looking out at the water in the late afternoon sun, grieving for a man lost at sea.

But with Jodi Tyne there is a modern twist. She feels she lost him twice: once to the storm they called perfect, and again to the storm that came after.

JUST ONE MORE TRIP

Twenty-five years ago, at the age of 21, she married the owner of a small import shop in her hometown of Gloucester, Mass. His name was Billy Tyne. He soon gave up the shop for a more lucrative profession that was a natural attraction for many young men in that small, bluecollar port: swordfishing.

Tyne became very good at it. By the late 1980s, he had become one of the most successful captains in the commercial swordfishing fleet of small boats that set out long lines of hooks, in linked trails that stretched 20 miles or more across the sea. He followed the migration of his prey, fishing from Cortez in the winter and Gloucester in summer and fall.

He and Jodi had a tempestuous relationship, punctuated by divorce in 1990. They soon reconciled, says Jodi, and planned to move to Hawaii, where the fishing trips that had strained their marriage were not as long, nor as dangerous.

But first, the 35-year-old captain insisted on making one more trip. It was out of Gloucester, in October 1991, aboard a 72-foot longliner called the Andrea Gail.

The night before he left, he and Jodi had a three-hour telephone conversation, talking about the future, about Hawaii, about taking their two young daughters, Billie Jo and Erica, to Disney World when he returned.

But as Tyne and his crew of five were returning to port, they were caught in the middle of a rapidly developing storm caused by the collision of three weather systems, including a hurricane. It was a convergence so intense the meteorologists called it "perfect," meaning that it could not possibly have been more potent.

Billy Tyne was off Nova Scotia, trying to return home, when he radioed a warning to other boats in the area about the storm: "She's comin' on, boys, and she's comin' on strong."

Then he, his crew and the Andrea Gail disappeared.

In 1997, author Sebastian Junger's exhaustive factual account of the storm was published, detailing what happened to several vessels that nearly sank in the tempest, and speculating about what happened aboard the Andrea Gail. The book was called "The Perfect Storm." Three years later, Warner Bros., which had bought the film rights, released a movie of the same name.

That, says Jodi Tyne, was when she lost Billy for the second time.

`A BUNCH OF LIES'

Though the film, which has grossed more than $300 million worldwide, was widely advertised as being "based on a true story," it took liberties with personalities and events, as such movies do.

To heighten the drama, it presented Billy Tyne as a down-onhis-luck fisherman, desperate for a big catch, humiliated because his previous outing had been so paltry. The reality was that Billy and his crew had returned from that trip with a bountiful catch.

It invented a flirtatious relationship between Tyne, played by George Clooney, and fellow Gloucester swordfish captain Linda Greenlaw, whom he barely knew in real life.

It portrayed him as asking the crew for advice, and a vote of confidence, at a crucial moment. As any hardbitten seaman knows, a good captain maintains a distance between himself and his crew, and never gives up his authority.

"It was a bunch of lies," says Jodi Tyne. "It was all about money. They didn't care about the truth. He was a good fisherman. He was at the peak of his life. They make it look like he was greedy. He wasn't. He'd give you the shirt off his back."

So she decided to sue the movie studio. A longstanding pillar of libel litigation stood in her way: As far as the law is concerned, it is all but impossible to speak ill of the dead.

Libel laws were not designed to protect hurt feelings. They were meant to protect a victim whose earning power is diminished as a result of a wrongly besmirched reputation. Tyne was right: It really is all about money. The dead, so the legal logic goes, have no earning power. Therefore they cannot be defamed. Therefore the living cannot sue for libel on their behalf.

That is a hopelessly outdated perspective, says John Aquino, a media law attorney in Washington and it dates to a time when books quickly went out of print and movies were shown only at theaters and on late-night television.

Now, he says, with DVD, CDROM, video and the Internet, a false portrayal of someone's relation has an extended shelf life. "It can live on as the next generation's version of history," he says.

Besides, he argues, in today's world, the dead, particularly the famous dead, are better wageearners than a lot of us who still have alarm clocks and pulses. They continue to earn money for their heirs. Fred Astaire dances with a vacuum cleaner. Steve McQueen zips around in sporty cars.

Even so, say First Amendment advocates such as Ronald Collins, a scholar with Freedom Forum, a free-speech think tank, to allow living relations to file libel suits on behalf of the dearly departed would create havoc in publishing houses and movie studios.

"Where do you draw the line? If every time someone wants to write about or portray a dead person, and there is a chance that a cousin is going to pop up and sue -- that slope would be so slippery, you'd have to get out your skis."

A WIDOW UNDETERRED

Tyne, undeterred by lawyers who told her as much, eventually found her way to Winter Park entertainment attorney Ned McLeod (no relation to this reporter), who took on the case, enrolling Orlando trial lawyer Stephen Calvacca as his partner.

The attorneys decided on a novel approach: Rather than sue for libel, they sued using a Florida statute that prohibits the unauthorized use of a person's name or likeness, be he dead or alive, for a commercial purpose. Two others closely connected to the Andrea Gail and its crew added their names to the suit, which sought damages and a halt to further distribution of the film.

But the end-run strategy did not work. The case bounced from one court to another for four years until last month, when the Florida Supreme Court issued an opinion that effectively shot it down: The statute in question, said the judges, was simply not meant to apply to movies.

"For the dead, the door is shut," says Aquino.

FRIEND SPEAKS OUT

Sometimes the truth is not only stranger than fiction, but far more compelling.

Both the book and the movie version of "The Perfect Storm" largely overlooked one of the most interesting figures of the saga. His name is Doug Kosko.

Kosko, 51, a friend of Billy Tyne who also occasionally went out with him on swordfishing trips as a crew member, is mentioned, briefly, in Junger's book. He also is portrayed in two quick scenes in the movie. In the most significant one, Billy Tyne confronts him after they return to Gloucester with a meager catch, berating Kosko for refusing to go back out with him on the next trip.

Kosko says there is a lot more to the story, though he has never shared it publicly before.

In the fall of 1991, Kosko signed on with Tyne as a cook for three fishing trips, one after the other, aboard the Andrea Gail.

The first two trips went well, or as well as trips can go aboard a longliner, where there's no escaping the long hours of work, the heaving of the waves, the drone of the engine and the generator, the moods of your shipmates.

Near the end of the second trip, they ran into some good luck with the weather and the fishing. One day, the catch was so big that Tyne called down from the wheelhouse, ordering Kosko to come up on deck to help butcher the swordfish and ice them down.

Kosko had killed hundreds of swordfish without even thinking about it. But for reasons he has never been able to fathom, the course of his life was changed forever by a swordfish he saw that day on the deck of the Andrea Gail.

"I looked down at the fish, and it's staring up at me. It's big. It's beautiful. When you take them out of the water, and they're still alive, they've got all these colors. More colors than the rainbow. And as they start to die, the colors fade away, one by one. And it's looking up at me, I know it sees me. It's old, I don't know, 10, 20 years. I've taken it out of its environment. And it's like it's saying to me, `Please don't kill me. I have a family.' And I don't know why, but I just said, `If you let me live, I'll never kill another swordfish.' "

He slaughtered the fish. "I had to. That was a big fish. They would have killed me if I tried to throw it overboard."

But he could not shake the feeling that some deep spiritual communication had passed between him and the fish. On the way back into Gloucester, all he talked about was that he was never going swordfishing again.

"They thought I was crazy," he says. "They were saying, `Dougie fell off the boat' -- that was a way of saying you lost it."

All of the men who were laughing at him would return to sea, in a few days, on what was to be the final voyage of the Andrea Gail.

When they came into port, Kosko collected his pay, then disappeared, avoiding Billy, forgoing the usual post-trip celebration at the Crow's Nest, the bar where crews congregated between trips. He couldn't face Billy, who had confided in him when his marriage was breaking up, who had taken him to the graveyard in Gloucester where Tyne's brother, killed in action in Vietnam, was buried. Kosko didn't have the nerve to tell him about the fish, let alone that he wasn't going out for the third and final trip of the season. He slipped out of Gloucester and took a train back to Florida.

He learned that the Andrea Gail was missing when the Coast Guard called him, asking him to verify who was on board the boat.

For the next year, he had a recurring dream: He was trapped inside the boat, his face pressed up against a porthole, as it sank deeper and deeper into the sea.

THEY CAN'T FORGET

Jodi Tyne is 46 now, living in Bradenton, near the Cortez docks. She worked as a waitress for years, then as an insurance agent. She has never received any money from either the book or movie.

Her life has been rocky -there was an abusive relationship after Billy died -- but she has protected her children, sent them both through college.

"She does everything for everybody else," says her best friend, Charlotte Gipp.

Jodi had Billy's name carved on his parents' tombstone in Gloucester, for want of a proper grave of his own.

"I don't care how many movies and books they make," she says. "No one will ever know what happened out there."

Doug Kosko lives with four cats and a collection of vintage comic books in a tiny apartment in Fort Lauderdale. He does odd jobs and sells antiques and castoffs at a flea market near his home. He still has a whitish smear of a scar in the palm of his hand, from a time when a razorsharp hook dug into it as he was feeding a swordfishing longline into the sea.

Sometimes, these days, he works as first mate for his brother, Jeff, the captain of a private, $1.6 million, 51-foot Bertram.

Doug is a very good worker, his brother says.

"But when we go swordfishing, he won't help. He won't carry them off the boat. He won't gut the fish. He won't eat them. He just says: `I made a promise. And I'm sticking to it.' "

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The Original Story of ‘The Perfect Storm’

Six young men set out on a dead-calm sea to seek their fortunes. Suddenly, they were hit by the worst gale in a century, and there wasn’t even time to shout.

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“T hey that go down to the sea in ships…see the deeds of the Lord. They reel and stagger like drunken men, they are at their wits’ end. ” —Psalm 107

Gloucester, Massachusetts, is a tough town of 28,000 people, squeezed between a rocky coast and a huge tract of scrub pine and boulders called Dogtown Common. Local widows used to live in Dogtown, along with the forgotten and the homeless, while the rest of the community spread out along the shore. Today, a third of all jobs in Gloucester are fishing related, and the waterfront bars—the Crow’s Nest, the Mariners Pub, the Old Timer’s Tavern—are dark little places that are unmistakably not for tourists.

The Story Behind 'The Perfect Storm'

One street up from the coastline is Main Street, where the bars tend to have windows and even waitresses, and then there is a rise called Portugee Hill. Halfway up Portugee Hill is Our Lady of Good Voyage Church, a large stucco construction with two bell towers and a statue of the Virgin Mary, who is looking down with love and concern at the bundle in her arms. The bundle is a Gloucester fishing schooner.

September 18, 1991, was a hot day in Gloucester, tourists shuffling down Main Street and sunbathers still crowding the wide expanses of Good Harbor Beach. Day boats bobbed offshore in the heat shimmer, and swells sneaked languorously up against Bass Rocks.

At Gloucester Marine Railways, a haul-out place at the end of a short peninsula, Adam Randall stood contemplating a boat named the Andrea Gail . He had come all the way from Florida to go swordfishing on the boat, and now he stood considering her uneasily. The Andrea Gail was a 70-foot longliner that was leaving for Canada’s Grand Banks within days. He had a place on board if he wanted it. “I just had bad vibes,” he would say later. Without quite knowing why, he turned and walked away.

Longliners are steel-hulled fishing boats that gross as much as $1 million in a year. Up to half of that can be profit. Swordfish range up and down the coast from Puerto Rico to Newfoundland, and the longliners trail after them all year like seagulls behind a day trawler. The fish are caught with monofilament lines 40 miles long and set with a thousand hooks. For the crew, it’s less a job than a four-week jag. They’re up at four, work all day, and don’t get to bed until midnight. The trip home takes a week, which is the part of the month when swordfishermen sleep. When they get to port the owner hands each of them several thousand dollars. A certain amount of drinking goes on, and then a week later they return to the boat, load up, and head back out.

“Swordfishing is a young man’s game, a single man’s game,” says the mother of one who died at it. “There aren’t a lot of Boy Scouts in the business,” another woman says.

Sword boats come from all over the East Coast—Florida, the Carolinas, New Jersey. Gloucester, which is located near the tip of Cape Ann, a 45-minute drive northeast from Boston, is a particularly busy port because it juts so far out toward the summer fishing grounds. Boats load up with fuel, bait, ice, and food and head out to the Grand Banks, about 90 miles southeast of Newfoundland, where warm Gulf Stream water mixes with the cold Labrador current in an area shallow enough—”shoal” enough, as fishermen say—to be a perfect feeding ground for fish. The North Atlantic weather is so violent, though, that in the early days entire fleets would go down at one time, a hundred men lost overnight. Even today, with loran navigation, seven-day forecasts, and satellite tracking, fishermen on the Grand Banks are just rolling the dice come the fall storm season. But swordfish sells for around $6 a pound, and depending on the size of the boat a good run might take in 30,000 to 40,000 pounds. Deckhands are paid shares based on the catch and can earn $10,000 in a month. So the tendency among fishermen in early fall is to keep the dice rolling.

The Andrea Gail was one of maybe a dozen big commercial boats gearing up in Gloucester in mid-September 1991. She was owned by Bob Brown, a longtime fisherman who was known locally as Suicide Brown because of the risks he’d taken as a young man. He owned a second longliner, the Hannah Boden , and a couple of lobster boats. The Andrea Gail and the Hannah Boden were Brown’s biggest investments, collectively worth well over a million dollars.

The Andrea Gail , in the language, was a raked-stem, hard-chined, western-rig boat. That meant that her bow had a lot of angle to it, she had a nearly square cross-section, and her pilothouse was up front rather than in the stern. She was built of welded steel plate, rust-red below waterline, green above, and she had a white wheelhouse with half-inch-thick safety glass windows. Fully rigged, for a long trip, she carried hundreds of miles of monofilament line, thousands of hooks, and 10,000 pounds of baitfish. There were seven life preservers on board, six survival suits, an emergency position indicating radio beacon, and one life raft.

The Andrea Gail was captained by a local named Frank “Billy” Tyne, a former carpenter and drug counselor who had switched to fishing at age 27. Tyne had a reputation as a fearless captain, and in his ten years of professional fishing he had made it through several treacherous storms. He had returned from a recent trip with almost 40,000 pounds of swordfish in his hold, close to a quarter of a million dollars’ worth. Jobs aboard Tyne’s boat were sought after. So it seemed odd, on September 18, when Adam Randall walked back up the dock at Gloucester Marine Railways and returned to town.

Randall’s replacement was 28-year-old David Sullivan, who was mildly famous in town for having saved the lives of his entire crew one bitter January night two years before. When his boat, the Harmony , had unexpectedly begun taking on water, Sullivan had pulled himself across a rope to a sister ship and got help just in time to rescue his sinking crew. Along with Sullivan were a young West Indian named Alfred Pierre; 30-year-old Bobby Shatford, whose mother, Ethel, tended bar at the Crow’s Nest on Main Street; and two men from Bradenton Beach, Florida—Dale Murphy, 30, and Michael “Bugsy” Moran, 36.

On September 20, Billy Tyne and his crew passed Ten Pound Island, rounded Dogbar Breakwater, and headed northeast on a dead-calm sea.

For several generations after the first British settlers arrived in Gloucester, the main industries on Cape Ann were farming and logging. Then around 1700 the cod market took off, and Gloucester schooners began making runs up to the Grand Banks two or three times a year. French and Basque fishermen had already been working the area from Europe since 1510, perhaps earlier. They could fill their holds faster by crossing the Atlantic and fishing the rich waters of the Banks than by plying their own shores.

The Gloucester codfishermen worked from dories and returned to the schooners each night. Payment was reckoned by cutting the tongues out of the cod and adding them up at the end of the trip. When fog rolled in, the dories would drift out of earshot and were often never heard from again. Occasionally, weeks later, a two-man dory crew might be picked up by a schooner bound for, say, Pernambuco or Liverpool. The fishermen would make it back to Gloucester several months later, walking up Main Street as if returning from the dead.

The other danger, of course, was storms. Like a war, a big storm might take out all the young men of a single town. In 1862, for example, a winter gale struck 70 schooners fishing the dangerous waters of Georges Bank, east of Cape Cod. The ships tried to ride out 50-foot seas at anchor. By morning 15 Gloucester boats had gone down with 125 men. At least 4,000 Gloucestermen have been lost at sea, but some estimates run closer to 10,000. A bronze sculpture on the waterfront commemorates them: THEY THAT GO DOWN TO THE SEA IN SHIPS 1623-1923. It shows a schooner captain fighting heavy weather, his face framed by a sou’wester hat.

In the early days, a lot of superstition went into seafaring. Occasionally men stepped off of ill-fated boats on a hunch. Captains refused to set sail on Fridays, since that was the day their Lord had been crucified. Boats often had lucky silver coins affixed to the base of their masts, and crew members took care never to tear up a printed page because they never knew—most of them being illiterate—whether it was from the Bible.

The Andrea Gail took nearly a week to reach the fishing grounds. The six crewmen watched television, cooked and ate, slept, prepared the fishing gear, talked women, talked money, talked horse racing, talked fish, stared at the sea. Swordfishermen seldom eat swordfish when they’re out. Like many ocean fish, it’s often full of sea worms, four feet long and thick as pencils, and though the worms are removed prior to market, many of the men who catch swordfish consider it fit only for the landlubbing public. At sea a fisherman will eat steak, spaghetti, chicken, ice cream, anything he wants. On ice in the Andrea Gail ‘s hold was $3,000 worth of groceries.

The boat arrived at the Grand Banks around September 26 and started fishing immediately. On the main deck was a huge spool of 600-pound-test monofilament, the mainline, which passed across a bait table and paid out off the stern. Baiters alternate at the mainline like oldtime axmen on a Douglas fir. They are expected to bait a hook with squid or mackerel every 15 seconds; at this rate it takes two men four hours to set 40 miles of line. After they are done they shower and retire to their bunks. Around four in the morning the crew gets up and starts hauling the line. A hydraulic drum on the wheelhouse deck slowly pulls it in, and the crew unclips the leaders as they come. When there’s a fish at the end of a leader, deckhands catch it with steel gaffs and drag it, struggling, aboard. They saw the sword off, gut and behead the fish with a knife, and drop it into the hold.

The crew has dinner in midafternoon, baits the line again, and sets it back out. They might then have a couple of beers and go to bed.

The Andrea Gail had been out 38 days when the National Weather Service suddenly started issuing fax bulletins about a low-pressure system that was building over southern Quebec and heading out to sea: “DEVELOPING STORM 45N 73W MOVING E 24 KTS. WINDS INCREASING TO 35 KTS AND SEAS BUILDING TO 16 FT.” Meanwhile, the Weather Service was keeping a close eye on the mid-Atlantic, where Hurricane Grace, which had developed in the vicinity of Bermuda two days before, was now tracking steadily northwest toward the Carolina coast.

It was Sunday, October 27, very late to be pushing one’s luck on the Grand Banks. Most of the fleet was well to the east of Tyne, out on the high seas, but a 150-foot Japanese swordboat named the Eishan Maru and the 77-foot Mary T were fishing nearby. Tyne told Albert Johnston, the Mary T ‘s captain, that he had 40,000 pounds of fish in his hold—an impressive catch—and now he was heading home.

The question was, could he make it through the Canadian storm that was rapidly coming his way? He would have to cross some very dangerous water while passing Sable Island, a remote spit 120 miles southeast of Nova Scotia, whose shoals are known to fishermen as the Graveyard of the Atlantic. That night Linda Greenlaw, the captain of Bob Brown’s other longliner, the Hannah Boden , radioed in and asked Tyne if he’d received the weather chart. “Oh, yeah, I got it,” Tyne replied. “Looks like it’s gonna be wicked.” They set some channels to relay information to Bob Brown and decided to talk the following night.

Though Billy Tyne had no way of knowing it, the heavy weather that was now brewing in the North Atlantic was an anomaly of historic proportions. Three years later, professional meteorologists still talk animatedly about the storm of ’91, debating how it formed and exactly what role Hurricane Grace played in it all. Generally, hurricanes this late in the season are anemic events that quickly dissipate over land. Hurricane Grace, though, never made it to shore; a massive cold front, called an anticyclone, was blocking the entire eastern seaboard. Well off the Carolinas, Grace ran up against the cold front and literally bounced off. She veered back out to sea and, though weakened, churned northeast along the warm Gulf Stream waters.

At the same time, the low-pressure system that had developed over Quebec and moved eastward off the Canadian Maritimes was beginning to behave strangely. Normally, low-pressure systems in the region follow the jet stream offshore and peter out in the North Atlantic, the usual pattern of the well-known nor’easter storms. But this system did the opposite: On Monday, October 28, it unexpectedly stalled off the coast of Nova Scotia and began to grow rapidly, producing record high seas and gale-force winds. Then it spun around and headed back west, directly at New England, a reversal known as a retrograde.

Meteorologists still disagree on what caused the storm to grow so suddenly and then to retrograde. But the best theory offered by the National Weather Service and its Canadian equivalent, Environment Canada, is that it was caught between the counter-clockwise spin of the dying hurricane and the clockwise swirl of the anticyclone, creating a funnel effect that forced it toward the coast at speeds of up to ten knots. The farther west it tracked, the more it absorbed moisture and energy from the remnants of Hurricane Grace—and the more ferocious it became.

The technical name for the new storm was a “midlatitude cyclone.” The people in its path, however, would later call it the No Name Hurricane, since it had all the force of a hurricane, but was never officially designated as one. And because the brunt of the storm would strike the eastern seaboard around October 31, it would also acquire another name: the Halloween Gale.

Around 6 P.M. on Monday, October 28, Tyne told the skipper of a Gloucester boat named the Allison that he was 130 miles north-northeast of Sable Island and experiencing 80-knot winds. “She’s comin’ on, boys, and she’s comin’ on strong,” he said. According to Tyne, the conditions had gone from flat calm to 50 knots almost without warning. The rest of the fleet was farther east and in relative safety, but the Andrea Gail was all alone in the path of the fast-developing storm. She was probably running with the waves and slightly angled toward them—”quartering down-sea,” as it’s called—which is a stable position for a boat; she’ll neither plow her nose into the sea nor roll over broadside. A wave must be bigger than a boat to flip her end-over-end, and the Andrea Gail was 70 feet long. But by this point, data buoys off Nova Scotia were measuring waves as high as 100 feet—among the highest readings ever recorded. Near Sable Island the troughs of such monsters would have reached the ocean floor.

Tyne would have radioed for help if trouble had come on slowly—a leak or a gradual foundering, for example. “Whatever happened, happened quick,” a former crew member from the Hannah Boden later said. Tyne didn’t even have time to grab the radio and shout.

Waves of unimaginable proportions have been recorded over the years. When Sir Ernest Shackleton skippered an open sailboat off the South Georgian Islands in May 1916, he saw a wave so big that he mistook the foaming crest for a break in the clouds. “It’s clearing, boys!” he yelled to his crew, and then, moments later: “For God’s sake, hold on, it’s got us!” By some miracle they managed to survive. In 1933 in the South Pacific an officer on the USS Ramapo looked to stern and saw a wave that was later calculated to be 112 feet high. In 1984 a three-masted schooner named the Marques was struck by a single wave that sent her down in less than a minute, taking 19 people with her. Nine survived, including a strapping young Virginian who managed to force his way up through a rising column of water and out an open hatch.

Oceanographers call these “extreme waves” or “rogues.” Old-time Maine fishermen call them “queer ones.” They have roared down the stacks of navy destroyers, torn the bows off container ships, and broken cargo vessels in two.

When the rogue hit the Andrea Gail , sometime between midnight and dawn on October 29, Tyne would probably have been alone in the wheelhouse and already exhausted after 24 hours at the helm. Captains, unwilling to relinquish the wheel to inexperienced crew, have been known to drive for two or even three days straight. The crew would have been below deck, either in the kitchen or in their staterooms. Once in a while one of the men would have come up to keep Tyne company. In the privacy of the wheelhouse he might have admitted his fears: This is bad, this is the worst I’ve ever seen. There’s no way we could inflate a life raft in these conditions. If a hatch breaks open, if anything lets go…

Tyne must have looked back and seen an exceptionally big wave rising up behind him. It would have been at least 70 feet high, maybe 100 feet. The stern of the boat would have risen up sickeningly and hurled the men from their bunks. The Andrea Gail would have flipped end-over-end and landed hull-up, exploding the wheelhouse windows. Tyne, upside-down in his steel cage, would have drowned without a word. The five men below deck would have landed on the ceiling. The ones who remained conscious would have known that it was impossible to escape through an open hatch and swim out from under the boat. And even if they could—what then? How would they have found their survival suits, the life raft?

The Andrea Gail would have rolled drunkenly and started to fill. Water would have sprayed through bursting gaskets and risen in a column from the wheelhouse stairway. It would have reached the men in their staterooms and it would have been cold enough to take their breath away. At least the end would have come fast.

It wasn’t until Tuesday afternoon that the boats on the Grand Banks were able to check in with one another. The Eishan Marti , which was closest to Billy Tyne’s last known location, reported that she was completely rolled by one huge wave; her wheelhouse windows were blown out, and she was left without rudder or electronics. The Lori Dawn Eight had taken so much water down her vents that she lost an engine and headed in. The Mary T had fared well but had already taken $165,000 worth of fish in nine days, so she headed in, too. The Hannah Boden , the Allison , the Mr. Simon , and the Miss Millie were way to the east and “had beautiful weather,” in Albert Johnston’s words. That left the Andrea Gail .

By Wednesday, October 30, the storm had retrograded so far to the west that conditions at sea were almost tolerable. At that point the worst of it was just hitting Gloucester. The Eastern Point neighborhood, where the town’s well-to-do live, had been cut in half. Waves were rolling right through the woods and into some of the nicest living rooms in the state. On the Back Shore, 30-foot waves were tearing the facades off houses and claiming whole sections of Ocean Drive. The wind, whipping through the power lines, was hitting pitches that no one had ever heard before. Just up the coast in Kennebunkport, some Democrats were cheered to see boulders in the family room of President George Bush’s summer mansion.

“The only light I can shed on the severity of the storm is that until then, we had never-ever had a lobster trap move offshore,” said Bob Brown. “Some were moved 13 miles to the west. It was the worst storm I have ever heard of, or experienced.”

By now the storm had engulfed nearly the entire eastern seaboard. Even in protected Boston Harbor, a data buoy measured wave heights of 30 feet. A Delta Airlines pilot at Boston’s Logan Airport was surprised to see spray topping 200-foot construction cranes on Deer Island. Sitting on the runway waiting for clearance, his air speed indicator read 80 miles per hour. Off Cape Cod, a sloop named the Satori lost its life raft, radios, and engine. The three people in its crew had resigned themselves to writing good-bye notes when they were finally rescued 200 miles south of Nantucket by a Coast Guard swimmer who jumped, untethered, from a helicopter into the roiling waves. An Air National Guard helicopter ran out of fuel off Long Island, and its crew had to jump one at a time through the darkness into the sea. One man was killed and the other four were rescued after drifting throughout the night. All along the coast, waves and storm surge combined to act as “dams” that prevented rivers from flowing into the sea. The Hudson backed up 100 miles to Albany and caused flooding, so did the Potomac.

The stern would have risen up sickeningly, and the Andrea Gail would have flipped and landed hull-up, exploding the wheelhouse windows. Tyne, upside-down in his steel cage, would have drowned without a word.

Brown tried in vain all day Wednesday to radio Tyne. That evening he finally got through to Linda Greenlaw, who said she’d last heard Billy Tyne talking to other boats on the radio Monday night. “Those men sounded scared, and we were scared for them,” she said later. Later that night Brown finally alerted the U.S. Coast Guard.

“When were they due in?” the dispatcher asked.

“Next Saturday,” Brown replied.

The dispatcher refused to initiate a search because the boat wasn’t overdue yet. Brown then got the Canadian Coast Guard on the line. “I’m afraid my boat’s in trouble, and I fear the worst,” he told the dispatcher in Halifax. At dawn Canadian reconnaissance planes, which were already in the area, began sweeping for the Andrea Gail .

Two days later, a U.S. Coast Guard cutter and five aircraft were also on the case. But there was no clue about the missing boat until November 5, when the Coast Guard positively identified the Andrea Gail ‘s radio beacon and propane tank, which had washed up on Sable Island.

“The recovered debris is loose gear and could have washed overboard during heavy weather,” said Petty Officer Elizabeth Brannan. “No debris has been located that indicates the Andrea Gail has been sunk.”

The search had covered more than 65,000 square miles at that point. In heavy seas it’s hard for a pilot to be sure he is seeing everything—one Coast Guard pilot reported spotting a 500-foot ship that he had completely missed on a previous flight—so no one was leaping to any conclusions. Two days and 35,000 square miles later, though, it was hard not to assume the worst: Now the Andrea Gail ‘s emergency position—indicating radio beacon had been found. It, too, had washed up on the beaches of Sable Island.

An EPIRB is a device about the size of a bowling pin that automatically emits a radio signal if it floats free of its shipboard holster. The signal travels via satellite to onshore listening posts, where Coast Guard operators decode the name of the boat and her location to within two miles. EPIRBs have been required equipment for fishing vessels on the high seas since 1990. The only catch is that the device must be turned on, something captains do automatically when they leave port. (“It’s not the sort of thing you forget,” says one captain.) Though Bob Brown insists that the Andrea Gail ‘s EPIRB had been turned on when it left port, it was found on Sable Island disarmed.

The Coast Guard called off the search on November 8, 11 days after the Andrea Gail had presumably gone down. Search planes had covered 116,000 square miles of ocean. “After taking into account the water temperature and other factors, we felt the probability of survival was minimal,” Coast Guard Lieutenant Brian Krenzien told reporters at the time. The water temperature was 46 degrees. When a man falls overboard on the Grand Banks that late in the year, there usually isn’t even time to turn the boat around.

“I finally gave up after the Coast Guard called the search off,” says Ethel Shatford, Bobby Shatford’s mother, at the Crow’s Nest. “It was very hard, though. You always read stories about people being found floating around in boats. The memorial was on November 16. There were more than a thousand people. This bar and the bar next door were closed, and we had enough food for everyone for three days. Recently we had a service for a New Bedford boat that went down last winter. None of the crew was from here, but they were fishermen.”

The Crow’s Nest is a low, dark room with wood-veneer paneling and a horseshoe bar where regulars pour their own drinks. On the wall below the television is a photo of Bobby Shatford and another of the Andrea Gail , as well as a plaque for the six men who died. Upstairs there are cheap guest rooms where deckhands often stay.

Ethel Shatford is a strong, gray-faced Gloucester native in her late fifties. Three of her own sons have fished, and over the years she has served as den mother to scores of young fishermen on the Gloucester waterfront. Four of the six men who died on the Andrea Gail spent their last night on shore in the rooms of the Crow’s Nest.

“My youngest graduated high school last June and went fishing right off the b-a-t,” she says. “That was what he always wanted to do, fish with his brothers. Bobby’s older brother, Rick, used to fish the Andrea Gail  years ago.”

She draws a draft beer for a customer and continues. “The Andrea Gail crew left from this bar. They were all standing over there by the pool table saying good-bye. About the only thing different that time was that Billy Tyne let them take our color TV on the boat. He said, Ethel, they can take the TV, but if they watch it instead of doing their work, the TV’s going overboard.’ I said, That’s fine, Billy, that’s fine.’

That was the last time Shatford ever saw her son. Recently a young guy drifted into town who looked so much like Bobby that people were stopping and staring on the street. He walked into the Crow’s Nest, and another bartender felt it necessary to explain to him why everyone was looking at him. “He went over to the picture of Bobby and says, `If I sent that picture to my mother, she’d think it was me.’

Linda Greenlaw still comes into the bar from time to time, between trips, swearing that some day she’s going to “meet the right guy and retire to a small island in Maine.” Bob Brown settled out of court with several of the dead crewmembers’ families after two years of legal wrangles. Adam Randall, the man who had stepped off the Andrea Gail at the last minute, went on to crew with Albert Johnston on the Mary T . When he found out that the Andrea Gail had sunk in the storm, all he could say was, “I was supposed to have been on that boat. That was supposed to have been me.”

During the spring of 1993 the Mary T was hauled out for repairs, and Randall picked up work on a tuna longliner, the Terri Lei, out of Georgetown, South Carolina. On the evening of April 6, 1993, the crew of the Terri Lei set lines. In the early morning, there were reports of gusty winds and extremely choppy seas in the area. At 8:45 A.M. the Coast Guard in Charleston, South Carolina, picked up an EPIRB signal and sent out two aircraft and a cutter to investigate. By then the weather was fair and the seas were moderate. One hundred and thirty-five miles off the coast, they found the EPIRB, some fishing gear, and a self-inflating life raft. The raft had the name Terri Lei stenciled on it. There was no one on board.

Sebastian Junger went on to publish The Perfect Storm in 1997, based on the story of the Andrea Gail .

15 Things You Might Not Know About The Perfect Storm

The tragic true story of a confluence of storms destroying the Andrea Gail and its crew off the shore of Gloucester, Massachusetts was first written about in a best-selling book by Sebastian Junger. Then, 15 years ago today, it became a hit movie starring George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, John C. Reilly, and Diane Lane. Here are 15 things you might not know about The Perfect Storm .

1. MEL GIBSON, HARRISON FORD, AND NICOLAS CAGE ALL TURNED DOWN PARTS.

Unlike Cage and Ford , Gibson simply wanted too much money ($25 million) . Gibson’s The Patriot ended up opening on the same weekend as The Perfect Storm and came in second.

2. GEORGE CLOONEY WANTED TO PLAY BOBBY.

Director Wolfgang Petersen convinced Clooney that he was the perfect age to play the 37-year-old captain Billy Tyne.

3. CLOONEY AND WAHLBERG DIDN’T WANT TO HAVE BOSTON ACCENTS.

Wahlberg spent a lot of time and effort getting rid of his local accent, and called it “a real turnoff” that he would have to resurrect his old speaking habits. Clooney flat out refused , saying audiences would focus on his accent rather than pay attention to the movie.

4. THE FAMILIES OF THE ANDREA GAIL CREW MEMBERS UNSUCCESSFULLY SUED THE PRODUCERS.

They were upset that the names of their family members weren’t changed, but some facts from the 1991 incident were. Among the major discrepancies: Linda Greenlaw never actually placed a distress call , because she didn’t hear any urgency in Tyne’s voice. There was also no romance between Tyne and Greenlaw.

5. ONLY ONE CHARACTER WAS MADE UP FOR THE MOVIE.

Irene “Big Red” Johnson was pure invention.

6. MICHAEL IRONSIDE WAS ALMOST TOO PERFECTLY CAST AS BOB BROWN.

The actor looked so much like him that a Gloucester local thought Ironside was Brown.

7. WAHLBERG SLEPT IN BOBBY SHATFORD’S ROOM WITH BOBBY’S BROTHER.

He wanted to pay his respects and do his research. He briefly lived in Bobby’s tiny room about The Crow’s Nest bar with Bobby’s brother, Rick.

8. THE DIRECTOR FELT PRESSURE FROM A LOCAL BOAT CAPTAIN TO GET IT RIGHT.

A drunk Gloucester captain didn’t know Petersen’s background when he told him at The Crow's Nest to “make it real.” It motivated Petersen—who grew up in the German port city of Hamburg and had previously directed Das Boot —even more to get it right.

9. AT LEAST HALF OF THE CAST AND CREW GOT SEASICK.

Wahlberg vomited at least once . The cast and crew had to deal with going out on the water during Tropical Storm Floyd and with water tanks, wave machines , and water cannons. The galley was set on a rocking platform. Karen Allen thought she might drown and nobody would notice.

10. CHRISTOPHER MCDONALD HAD TO SAY THE NAME OF THE MOVIE 25 TIMES.

Petersen made sure that McDonald (who played meterologist Todd Gross) said his line—“This could be ... the perfect storm”—just right.

11. YES, CLOONEY DID HIS PRACTICAL JOKES ON SET.

John Hawkes (Bugsy), Wahlberg, and Diane Lane (Christina) all claimed that his jokes were funny and lightened up the sometimes grueling shooting, but none got into specifics.

12. JAMES HORNER COMPOSED THE SCORE.

The accomplished film composer also worked on and won an Oscar for that other ship disaster movie, Titanic . Tragically, he recently died in a plane crash .

13. NO FISH WERE HARMED IN THE MAKING OF THE FILM.

The fish caracasses were rubber . The live fish were robotic.

14. THE STUDIO DIDN’T WANT JOURNALISTS OR ACTORS TO SPOIL THE ENDING.

Considering that it was based on a real-life event and a best-selling book, some journalists thought it was ridiculous that, in the official press kit, Warner Bros. asked writers to not give away the ending. The actors were given the same mandate, too; John C. Reilly confirmed that he was told not to reveal how the movie ends on a Daily Show appearance promoting the film , but he did offer that “not everyone makes it out alive.”

15. THE BOAT FROM THE MOVIE CAUGHT FIRE.

The Lady Grace was sold on eBay for $145,000 to Legal Sea Foods (the company earmarked funds for the families of the Andrea Gail crew.) It was later bought by seafood processor Intershell, and was under construction to become a clamming vessel in 2004 when it caught fire, causing about $150,000 worth of damages.

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This Day In History : October 30

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“Perfect storm” intensifies in the North Atlantic

On October 30, 1991, the so-called “perfect storm” intensifies in the North Atlantic , producing remarkably large waves along the New England and Canadian coasts. Over the next several days, the storm spread its fury over the ocean off the coast of Canada. The fishing boat Andrea Gail and its six-member crew were lost in the storm. The disaster spawned the bestselling book The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger and a blockbuster Hollywood movie of the same name.

On October 27, Hurricane Grace formed near Bermuda and moved toward the coast of the southeastern United States. Two days later, Grace continued to move north, where it encountered a massive low pressure system moving south from Canada. The clash of systems over the Atlantic Ocean caused 40-to-80-foot waves on October 30—unconfirmed reports put the waves at more than 100 feet in some locations. This massive surf caused extensive coastal flooding, particularly in Massachusetts ; damage was also sustained as far south as Jamaica and as far north as Newfoundland.

The storm continued to churn in the Atlantic on October 31; it was nicknamed the “ Halloween storm.” It came ashore on November 2 along the Nova Scotia coast, then, as it moved northeast over the Gulf Stream waters, it made a highly unusual transition into a hurricane. The National Hurricane Center made the decision not to name the storm for fear it would alarm and confuse local residents. It was only the eighth hurricane not given a name since the naming of hurricanes began in 1950.

Meanwhile, as the storm developed, the crew of the 70-foot fishing boat Andrea Gail was fishing for swordfish in the Grand Banks of the North Atlantic. The Andrea Gail was last heard from on October 28. When the boat did not return to port on November 1 as scheduled, rescue teams were sent out.

The week-long search for the Andrea Gail and a possible cause of its demise were documented in Junger’s book, which became a national bestseller. Neither the Andrea Gail nor its crew—David Sullivan and Robert Shatford of Gloucester, Mass.; William Tyne, Dale Murphy and Michael Moran of Bradenton Beach, Fla.; and Alfred Pierre of New York City—was ever found.

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The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea Paperback – Deckle Edge, June 29, 2009

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"There is nothing imaginary about Junger's book; it is all terrifyingly, awesomely real." ― Los Angeles Times

It was the storm of the century, boasting waves over one hundred feet high―a tempest created by so rare a combination of factors that meteorologists deemed it "the perfect storm." In a book that has become a classic, Sebastian Junger explores the history of the fishing industry, the science of storms, and the candid accounts of the people whose lives the storm touched. The Perfect Storm is a real-life thriller that makes us feel like we've been caught, helpless, in the grip of a force of nature beyond our understanding or control.

Winner of the American Library Association's 1998 Alex Award.

• Print length 248 pages
• Language English
• Publisher W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date June 29, 2009
• Dimensions 5.5 x 0.7 x 8.3 inches
• ISBN-10 0393337014
• ISBN-13 978-0393337013
• Lexile measure 1140L
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company (June 29, 2009)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 248 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393337014
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393337013
• Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1140L
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.7 x 8.3 inches
• #1 in New England U.S. Biographies
• #7 in Weather (Books)
• #8 in Natural Disasters (Books)

About the author

Sebastian junger.

Sebastian Junger is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of War, The Perfect Storm, Fire, and A Death in Belmont. Together with Tim Hetherington, he directed the Academy Award-nominated film Restrepo, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. He is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and has been awarded a National Magazine Award and an SAIS Novartis Prize for journalism. He lives in New York City.

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Customers find the emotional conclusion riveting, heartbreaking, and frightening. They also appreciate the content as masterfully gripping and the writing quality as awesome and simple. Opinions are mixed on readability, with some finding it fascinating and others finding it boring and hard to get into.

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Customers find the writing quality of the book superb, and praise the author's research and storytelling. They also say it's an awesome read, with an incredible story.

"A good edition of a good book! Good quality ! Thanks!" Read more

"... Great read and being a boater myself learned quite a lot." Read more

"...I did like the simple language of it , and the fact that most of the time I didn't feel that pressure of "let me mesmerize you, my dear reader, with..." Read more

"...It is a fascinating and extremely well-written and researched account of the 1991 collision of Hurricane Grace with a nor'easter, creating a massive..." Read more

Customers find the book very informative, riveting, detailed, and descriptive. They also say it's more factual than fiction and has historical content. Readers also say the book gives a good overview of the men that work to provide us fish to eat. They say the author does a superb job capturing a true and terrifying story of men.

"...Are the facts selected fair? Hard to say. Is the presentation masterfully gripping ? Definitely!— Definitely recommend." Read more

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"...is a page turner filled with knowledge, excitement, happiness, and sorrow . Well worth the time." Read more

"...Sebastian makes you relate to the victims , shudder at the process of drowning, tremble at the power and mystery of the ocean, and cheer for the..." Read more

Customers find the book fascinating, while others find it boring and hard to connect with the story. They also complain about structural problems in the narrative and mention that the book contains so much fiction.

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"... I found it fascinating . And if you think the movie exaggerated things, go read about Ernie Hazard, the Fair Wind, and pitch-poling." Read more

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"...There's a lot of grammar issues that I noticed early on, or that other reviews mention...." Read more

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‘The Perfect Storm,’ what it really was, and the real source of that phrase

The weatherman who came up with the phrase -- and lament its misuse.

We were saddened to read about the sinking of the Tamaroa , the ship involved in a daring rescue during the Halloween Storm of 1991, the so-called Perfect Storm, scuttling dreams of its becoming a floating museum.

In a previous life, the cutter, whose Navy name was The Zuni, won four battle stars in World War II, and of 800 U.S. ships involved in the Iwo Jima invasion, it was the last survivor.

As a Coast Guard vessel, the Tam, it executed its heroism during the powerful North Atlantic cyclone that had ingested Hurricane Grace and mutated into a whorl of destruction.

It famously drowned six people aboard the swordfish boat Andrea Gail off the New England coast, and that tragedy was the subject of the book and movie The Perfect Storm .

In the movie, the phrase is credited to a TV meteorologist. In real life, the creator was a National Weather Service meteorologist, the late Bob Case, who worked in the Boston office.

In an interview with us years ago, he recalled using those words in a 1993 conversation with author Sebastian Junger. Thus, the title for a best-seller was born.

Case was un-resentful that the moviemakers but the words in the mouth of a TV weatherman, however he was unhappy with the way the phrase became overused, and often misused.

He said he was talking about a rarity, if not something unique. To be a perfect storm, a "certain number of meteorological conditions" had to be in place, that "nature had to be in a perfect setup."

The system actually had its beginnings as a forgettable disturbance in the Ohio Valley migraing toward the Atlantic.

Once off the coast of Nova Scotia, it deepened rapidly, and consumed Grace, and that was "like pouring gasoline into a fire," said Case.

While it will forever be tied to the Andrea Gail tragedy, the storm had tremendous impacts all along the Northeast coast, inciting massive swells.

It was blamed for $125 million worth of damage to the Jersey Shore, where tide heights topped  those of the devastating Ash Wednesday storm of March 1962.

It also signaled a change in the coastal-storm climate that stirred a debate over whether the nation could hold its shorelines against the onslaughts of storms.

Don't expect that particular storm to end.

What You Didn’t Know About The Andrea Gail & ‘Perfect Storm’ Location

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• Andrea Gail's last communication revealed critical information, hinting at the storm's unexpected strength and its tragic consequences.
• Multiple factors contributed to Andrea Gail's sinking, from modifications to seaworthiness issues, leading to solemn speculations about its fate.
• Even though the crew was never recovered, haunting items traced back to the ship were found, creating a reminder of the storm's devastating impact.

In the fall of 1991, a catastrophic storm swept the northeastern coast of the U.S., wreaking havoc along the coast of Massachusetts. The storm struck the coast with no name, afterward only gaining the 'perfect storm' title and inspiring a movie of the same name. It made landfall suddenly with no one anticipating its hurricane-strength devastation, with those on land feeling its effects but those at sea having a first-hand account of the strength of its winds and rain.

The Andrea Gail set out from Gloucester on what was meant to be a month-long fishing trip off the coast of Newfoundland, covering a total of 900 miles. What they didn't know was that the storm heading up the coast would take the lives of 13 people and cause millions of dollars in damage from Florida all the way up to Nova Scotia.

Winds from the storm reached strengths of 120 miles per hour, and when no communication was heard from the 72-foot Andrea Gail , which was right in the center of the storm, the search was called off in a matter of ten days. To this day, the trawler, and its crew, have never been recovered.

Here's what you never knew about the Andrea Gail's last communication, speculation about what exactly happened, and the haunting clues that have surfaced since.

The Andrea Gail's Last Communication Revealed Its Final Known Location

The andrea gail radioed the hannah boden during its final hours.

The last anyone had heard from Andrea Gail was communication between Captain Billy Tyne and Captain Linda Greenlaw, the captain of Andrea Gail's sister ship, the Hannah Boden. During the communication, Tyne gave Greenlaw his location, which is how the last known position of Andrea Gail was recorded.

The biggest problem with the ship's location was that it sat on the convergence line of three separate storms (hence the name the 'perfect' storm), resulting in powerful winds and seas that were wholly unexpected by the captain and crew. Captain Greenlaw thinks that the nor'easter formed over the Andrea Gail , creating conditions that were nearly unavoidable and, ultimately, fatal to a ship of that size.

One of the main issues here was that the Andrea Gail was tiny: 72 feet, to be exact. With winds of nearly 120 MPH, this small fishing boat had no chance once the storm made its way. It's also haunting because the boat was in the center of the storm, becoming a prime target of nature's wrath.

To this day, no bodies have been recovered. Many speculate they could have sunk to the bottom of the water or traveled miles away in the high winds.

Multiple Things Were Believed To Have Led To The Sinking Of The Andrea Gail

The andrea gail never had a fighting chance, according to various theories.

• Many people believe that multiple storm systems converging led to the deaths of those on board Andrea Gail.

First and foremost, the terrible weather, brought on by three separate storm systems converging, is what ultimately brought down the ship. However, other details were believed to contribute to the vessel's seaworthiness.

One of them was the modifications to the boat before it headed out on its last voyage. The ship was prone to riding low in the water with full fish tanks and fuel, which meant that water could quickly flood the deck, especially with waves as high as they were.

Secondly, the ship's port side had weather siding that prevented water from draining correctly and allowed it to remain trapped on the deck. According to the script consultant for The Perfect Storm , Captain Richard Haworth, the ship encountered a wave that rolled the Andrea Gail, forcing it to heave to one side.

Jack Flaherty, a fisherman, believes that the storm muddied the fuel in the ship's tank with a combination of algae, rust, sediment, or even air, which resulted in the ship's engine failure during the storm.

Several Items From The Andrea Gail Were found That Same Year

The andrea gail's crew was never recovered, but items from the ship were found later.

• Many items from Andrea Gail were found on Sable Island, including a fuel tank, flotsam, and an empty life raft.

On Sable Island, which was not far from the last known position of the Andrea Gail, several items washed ashore that were identified as belonging to the ship. A fuel tank, flotsam, and an empty life raft were among them.

These items were traced back to the boat with the emergency position indicator radio, and roughly 180 artifacts sat between the ship's recorded position and the island itself.

It's believed that the ship encountered waves that were roughly 30-foot seas with winds that were about 50 to 80 knots.

One bizarre fact about Andrea Gail's last position is that she was believed to have gone down in the same area as the Titanic, which also has plenty of lore, including the rumor that the captain may have survived .

Six Crew Members Perished With The Andrea Gail

Captain Tyne's last known words were, "She's comin' on boys, and she's comin' on strong!" over the radio to the coast guard. After that, there was radio silence from the Andrea Gail.

Captain William Tyne from Gloucester, Robert Shatford from Gloucester, Dale Murphy from Bradenton Beach, Florida, David Sullivan from Gloucester, Michael Moran from Bradenton Beach, and Alfred Pierre from New York City lost their lives on that tragic day.

Their names are among the 500 inscribed on the Fisherman's Memorial in Gloucester, Massachusetts . The Gloucester Fishermen's Memorial Service pays tribute to them, and the 30 or more other lives lost every year.

The Damages From The Storm Were Huge

In addition to the lives lost because of the storm, there were also material losses and damages of up to $500 million. Those included the loss of hundreds of businesses, homes, and more. 38,000 people lost access to power, and airports and roads were closed.

10 Abandoned Ghost Ships & The Stories Behind Them (& Where To 'See' Them)

From the Mary Celeste to the Bel Amica, the chilling stories of these abandoned ghost ships around the world blur the line between history and legend.

However, such large storms usually result in much more severe material losses. This particular storm resulted in more minor damage due to the decreased amount of rainfall and a lack of foliage due to winter. That is one positive aspect of this deadly storm system, as if there had been more to throw around, we're sure the "perfect storm" would have done so.

This often becomes a major complication during hurricanes in the Southern US, as plants, trees, and even buildings go flying. If anything, the perfect storm proved to be the deadliest for those on the water.

Sadly, the Andrea Gail is far from the only ship that has disappeared without hardly a trace.

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News & features, winter center, news / weather news, 30 years later, 'perfect storm' remains a haunting weather event.

To this day, the story of the storm and the ship that vanished in it occupies a unique place in the American psyche. Little was ever found, save for a few items that turned up days later in a place known as the "Graveyard of the Atlantic."

By Zachary Rosenthal , AccuWeather staff writer

Updated Oct 29, 2021 12:48 PM PDT

Thirty years ago, a trio of atmospheric factors came together to form a storm so uniquely dangerous and powerful that its mesmerizing development could only be described in one way: perfect.

That's how Bob Case, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Boston, categorized the storm at the time. Case's use of the term perfect would go on to serve as inspiration for author Sebastian Junger, who wrote a critically acclaimed 1997 novel about the storm, detailing the tragic fate of the Andrea Gail , a commercial fishing vessel from Gloucester, Massachusetts, that was lost at sea with six crew members on board following a fishing trip in the northern Atlantic.

Three years after the book's publication, the storm was immortalized on the big screen in a movie of the same name. George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg and Diane Lane led a cast that turned the film into a box office smash hit and cemented the storm's legacy in the pop-culture consciousness.

All of this was predicated by what turned out to be an extraordinary meteorological setup.

The Perfect Storm began with a strong disturbance that passed through New England on Oct. 27, 1991. A high-pressure system built over southeast Canada, allowing a low-pressure system that tailed the front to intensify rapidly. This process was enhanced when what remained of Hurricane Grace, approaching from the south, passed through the area and provided ample tropical energy to create an intense storm.

“These circumstances alone could have created a strong storm,” Case said in an interview with The Associated Press back in 2000 around when the movie was released. "But then, like throwing gasoline on a fire, a dying Hurricane Grace delivered immeasurable tropical energy to create the Perfect Storm."

As Hurricane Grace weakened and the circulation that would become the Perfect Storm continued to strengthen, Grace got pulled into the developing Perfect Storm.

"The capture of Grace into the Perfect Storm led to further strengthening due to the temperature contrast between the warm moist unstable air within Grace’s circulation and the colder circulation within the developing storm," said AccuWeather Hurricane Expert Dan Kottlowski.

With the Perfect Storm dropping to a pressure of 28.70 inches (972 mb) and a strong high-pressure system to the north, an intense pressure gradient formed, kicking up strong winds from the Carolina coast northward, which caused massive waves.

"It was an unprecedented set of circumstances,” Case, who died in 2008, said of the Perfect Storm.

According to the United States Coast Guard's investigation into what happened to the Andrea Gail , the doomed vessel sent its last transmission at around 6 p.m. on Oct. 28, 1991, about 162 mi (261 km) east of Sable Island, located about 180 miles offshore of Halifax, Nova Scotia. The captain, Billy Tyne, gave a final weather report to Linda Greenlaw, captain of a fellow swordfishing boat, the  Hannah Boden , noting that he and his crew were experiencing winds of more than 90 miles per hour and 30-foot-tall waves.

The 'Perfect Storm' as seen on satellite Oct. 31, 1991, before fully developing. (NOAA)

Some of the waves that slammed into the Andrea Gail were at least 39 feet high, approaching the height of a typical four-story building. In fact, Canadian weather buoys in the area reported peak wave heights in excess of 60 feet tall, with wind gusts approaching major hurricane force, according to the Coast Guard's investigation .

An all-out search for the crew and the Andrea Gail involving U.S. and Canadian militaries began Oct. 31, after the ship's owner, Robert Brown, reported it overdue from the fishing expedition the day prior.

The search effort covered about 109,000 square miles and covered areas from the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, where the ship had been fishing, to Cape Cod, according to the Coast Guard report. The search effort was suspended late on the evening of Nov. 9 due to the "low probability of crew survival." 

On Nov. 6, just days before the search was called off, a fishing net, a propane cylinder and an Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon were found by members of Canada's air rescue operations on the southwest corner of Sable Island, a small slice of land in the northwest Atlantic about 185 miles south of Halifax. The island is known by the ominous nickname " Graveyard of the Atlantic ." The items recovered by the air rescue crew were believed to belong to the Andrea Gail . 

Meanwhile, on Nov. 8, the Hannah Boden spotted a white full barrel with the initials A.G. on the side. But the barrels weren't retrieved, and a positive identification wasn't able to be made, according to the report. No distress calls were ever reported or received from the Andrea Gail.

Around the same time that the Andrea Gail was first reported missing, the Coast Guard cutter Tamaroa , a World War II-era ship, was sent out into the Perfect Storm on several daring rescue missions. On Oct. 30, the Coast Guard first saved the three-person crew of a 32-foot sailboat called the Satori , which was on its way from New Hampshire to Bermuda before it became overwhelmed by the raging seas, south of Nantucket Island, Massachusetts.

After rescuing the Satori crew, the Tamaroa had to alter its course and head four hours toward Long Island to help rescue the crew of a New York Air National Guard helicopter that had to ditch its mission due to a failed refueling attempt about ninety miles south of Montauk, New York. 

Four out of the five crewmen were rescued, but the body of pararescueman Rick Smith was never recovered. During the dangerous rescue mission, water swept over the deck of the Tamaroa , with the ship's engine crew working hard to keep the ship running.

The Perfect Storm did eventually become a full-fledged hurricane by early November 1991, but it was never officially named by the National Hurricane Center, as the NHC feared naming the storm would have been confusing as with much of the Northeast was already recovering from the previous extratropical system. If named, the storm would have been known as Henri, a moniker that was later used in 2003, 2019, 2015, and in 2021 .

All told, buoys recorded waves of 101 feet, with swells and waves causing considerable damage to coastal areas along the East Coast of the United States, according to Kottlowski.

A large lobster boat and tangled lobster traps are seen wrecked along the shore in Rockport, Mass., Nov. 2, 1991, victims of the high winds and seas that struck the New England coast. Coastal homes and boats along the New England coast were destroyed in the storm. (AP Photo/Jon Chase)

The Perfect Storm caused significant damage up and down the East Coast, despite never making landfall in the United States. Extreme waves alongside high tides damaged properties from North Carolina to Maine, with a pier destroyed as far south as Florida and high waves in Puerto Rico sweeping a man out to sea.

The home of former President George H.W. Bush in Kennebunkport, Maine, suffered significant damage as the storm blew out windows, flooded the property and caused structural damage, according to the National Park Service .

The atmospheric components came together to form a uniquely historic storm three decades ago, but is it unlikely that such a storm ever takes shape again? Kottlowski doesn't think so.

" Given that water temperatures are even warmer than what they were back in 1991, it would not be surprising if a similar setup like what happened in 1991 [happens] again within the next few years," said Kottlowski.

In fact, almost 30 years exactly after the Perfect Storm, a similar storm was being tracked by AccuWeather meteorologists during the final week of October 2021. An early-season nor'easter that thrashed parts of the mid-Atlantic and New England had the potential to develop into a tropical or subtropical system several hundred miles off the Atlantic coast.

The Fisherman's Memorial Statue overlooks the harbor in Gloucester, Mass. (AP Photo/Lisa Poole, File)

Thirty years on, as a result of the remarkable confluence of weather conditions and the ensuing book and blockbuster movie, the storm occupies a unique space in the American psyche. And all these years later, the tragedy echoes most, perhaps, in the coastal fishing town from where the Andrea Gail set sail on its fatal voyage.

The city of Gloucester has had an important relationship with the sea since the city's founding in the 17th century. A vital fishing and shipbuilding center, Gloucester is home to the nation's oldest fishing seaport , fresh seafood and picturesque lighthouses.

City officials have taken steps to make sure crew members of the Andrea Gail will never be forgotten. Their names -- Michael Moran, Dale Murphy, Alfred Pierre, Robert Shatford, David Sullivan, Frank "Billy" Tyne Jr. -- were inscribed at the base of an eight-foot-tall fisherman's memorial that overlooks Gloucester Harbor along with those of hundreds of other anglers who have lost their lives out on the high seas.

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Bayesian Yacht Sinking: Climate Change Created Perfect Storm for Waterspouts

The waterspout blamed for the deadly sinking of a luxury superyacht carrying the British tech billionaire Mike Lynch in Italy has been called a freak “black swan” event. But scientists believe this kind of marine tornado is becoming more common with global warming.

While the cause of the sinking of the Bayesian hasn’t officially been determined, weather conditions and witness reports from Sicily, where the yacht was anchored off the coast, have led experts to suspect a waterspout, a whirling column of air and water mist. The key factor for waterspout formation is warm water—and the past year has seen the ocean surface heat up to record-breaking temperatures , in part due to climate change.

“If this rate of warming is going to be continuing in the future, it’s very possible these phenomena will be common and not rare,” says Michalis Sioutas, a meteorology PhD who studies waterspouts in Greece and is a board member of the Hellenic Meteorological Society. “It’s very possible to talk about waterspouts or even tornadoes and extreme storms becoming common.”

The 180-foot Bayesian sank in a matter of minutes after being caught in a sudden storm with strong winds and intense lightning at around 4 am on Monday. Fifteen people who had been aboard were rescued, and one person was found dead. Six people are missing, including British tech billionaire Mike Lynch, who was recently cleared of fraud charges over the sale of his company to Hewlett-Packard. On Wednesday, the bodies of five people were recovered from the sunken ship but have yet to be identified.

Fishermen saw a waterspout near the yacht shortly before it sank, and a nearby schooner was tossed about by what its captain, Karsten Borner, called a “hurricane gust,” which he believes capsized the Bayesian . Experts have said the conditions were ripe for a waterspout.

This extreme weather phenomenon occurs when warm, moist air rises rapidly over water, spinning as winds change direction at different heights. The result is a long, bending funnel of spray between the water and the clouds, tapering off as it rises as much as 10,000 feet into the heavens.

It comes in two flavors. The more vanilla kind is a fair weather waterspout , which forms in relatively calm and even sunny conditions, often under a billowy cumulus cloud. It happens more often in places like the Great Lakes and the Florida Keys, reaches wind speeds of 50 miles per hour, and usually breaks up before it can cause significant damage.

Then there are severe waterspouts, essentially tornadoes over water, which “are another beast” entirely, according to Wade Szilagyi, a retired forecaster at the Meteorological Service of Canada who now directs the International Center for Waterspout Research. These tornadic waterspouts can move from land to water, or vice versa, and twist at 125 miles per hour or more. They’ve been known to throw debris, rip apart buildings, and overturn boats.

A waterspout documented by Sioutas in Methoni, Greece, in 2004 picked up a boat and sent it sailing through the air, striking and killing a 10-year-old boy. Last year, a sudden storm and waterspout with winds of over 40 miles per hour overturned a tourist boat carrying off-duty intelligence agents on Italy’s Lake Maggiore, killing four. Sioutas says waterspouts can even generate “massive water displacements similar to tsunamis,” citing the gigantic waves that struck the coast of the Greek island of Samos during a 2004 cyclone, tossing boulders like toys.

Tornadic waterspouts spring up only in stormy weather with strong winds, lightning, and sometimes hail, and are the product of two main ingredients: wind shear and rising, unstable air. The process begins when masses of cold and warm air collide. This brings together winds from different directions that start to spin around each other, creating vortices. If a thunderstorm also converges in the area, it can provide the instability, sucking warm air up into itself at dizzying speeds. Over water, it starts carrying moisture up as well. Szilagyi compares the waterspout’s development to a twirling figure skater.

“You can think of the skater, if she just spins around normally, that’s like the little vortex that’s already started,” he says. “But if she brings her arms in, then that’s like the column of that unstable warm air, pulling, stretching that vortex upward. She starts to spin faster.”

Waterspouts have been known and feared since ancient times. In the 1550s in Malta, a waterspout plowed through the harbor of Valletta, reportedly destroying an armada of warships and killing hundreds of people. It’s even thought that old stories of fish or frogs raining down on land may be the product of waterspouts sweeping the creatures up into the clouds.

Now global warming may be supercharging the phenomenon. The International Panel on Climate Change has not found a definite link—there hasn’t been much research into how climate change may be affecting waterspouts—but experts say that the conditions for waterspouts to form are happening more often. A 2022 study of 234 waterspouts in the Spanish Mediterranean over the past three decades found that they were more likely to break out when the sea surface was warmer, especially above 23 degrees Celsius (73 degrees Fahrenheit). And water temperatures are now at unprecedented levels.

Last year was the warmest on record for the ocean. The heat content of the upper 6,500 feet of the seas was the highest ever seen. The seas broke temperature records every single day between May 2023 and May 2024. Marine heat waves struck areas from Antarctica to the Mediterranean.

“Warmer oceans have more energy and more humidity to transfer to the atmosphere, the most important fuels for storms,” says Luca Mercalli, president of the Italian Meteorological Society. “The contrast of warm sea and colder air that flows over energizes vertical winds that could result in downbursts or waterspouts.” (A downburst is a powerful cascade of wind and rain from a thundercloud.)

That perfect storm of waterspout conditions hit Italy around the time the Bayesian sank. In recent days, a mass of high-level cold air has swept down from the Alps and over the country’s western coast, meeting the exceptionally warm air just above the sea surface. Four days before the Bayesian went down, sea surface temperatures were the hottest ever recorded across the Mediterranean Sea, with a daily median of 28.71 degrees Celsius. The ocean near where the Bayesian was anchored has reached almost 30 degrees Celsius this week, four degrees higher than the 20-year summer average, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Cold and warm air clashed. Winds started spinning, and overheated water provided the ingredient of instability needed for a waterspout outbreak. As a result, a total of 28 waterspouts were documented off the western coast of Italy from August 17 to August 20, according to the International Center for Waterspout Research.

The total number of waterspouts reported has been increasing in recent years, although a major factor has been that more people are able to capture them with phone cameras and post them on social media, Szilagyi says. But he says that warming waters and a longer waterspout season due to climate change are also contributing. In particular, he believes the number of severe waterspouts are on the rise.

“With the increased water temperatures, that’s probably resulting in more frequent tornadic waterspouts,” Szilagyi says. “There’s no scientific evidence yet that they’re getting even stronger. It’s just that they’re becoming more frequent.”

Warming sea waters are also expected to boost other extreme weather events like Mediterranean hurricanes, or “medicanes,” one of which contributed to the flash flood that killed thousands of people in Libya last year .

In this brave new world, countries need to improve early-warning systems and invest more in research to forecast and observe trends in waterspouts, scientists say. “We have to prepared for more dangerous waterspouts possibly in the future,” Sioutas says. “Significantly warmer waters contribute very significantly to the creation of waterspouts, especially the violent ones.”

Updated 8-22-2024 1:15 pm BST: A previous version of the story stated that the ship’s mast had snapped; this detail has been removed as damage to the mast has not been confirmed.

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