The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea by Sebastian Junger

Author:Sebastian Junger
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Autobiography, Social Science, Northeast storms - New England, Specific Groups, Storms, Northeast storms, Natural Disasters, Ecosystems & Habitats - Oceans & Seas, Customs & Traditions, Alex award, Transportation, Nature, New England, Gloucester (Mass.), Fisheries, Specific Groups - General, Movie novels, SCIENCE, Earth Sciences, Oceans & Seas, Hurricane Grace, Ships & Shipbuilding, Historical, 1991, Ecology, 1997, Meteorology & Climatology, Tropical Storm Grace, Halloween Nor'easter, General, Weather, Swordfish fishing, Biography & Autobiography, Biography
ISBN: 9780060977474
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1999-09-23T07:00:00+00:00

GRAVEYARD OF THE ATLANTIC

In a few days the El Dorado expedition went into the patient wilderness, that closed upon it like the sea closes over a diver. Long afterwards the news came back that all the donkeys were dead.

—JOSEPH CONRAD, Heart of Darkness

ALBERT JOHNSTON:

I was the first one to know how bad it was really gonna be. Halifax called for twenty meter seas and when we heard that we thought, Oh boy. You don't really have time to run to land so we tried to get into the coldest water we could find. The colder the water, the denser it is and the waves don't get as big. Also, I knew we'd get a northeast-northwest wind. I wanted to make as much headway as possible 'cause the Gulf Stream was down south and that's where the warm water and fast current are.

There was an awful lot of electrical noise along the leading edge of this thing, there was so much noise you couldn't hear anything on the radio. I was up in the wheelhouse, when it's bad like that I usually stay up there. If it looks like it's settlin' down a bit and I can grab a little sleep, then I will. The crew just racks out and watches videos. Everybody acknowledged this was the worst storm they'd ever been in—you can tell by the size of the waves, the motion of the boat, the noise, the crashing. There's always a point when you realize that you're in the middle of the ocean and if anything goes wrong, that's it. You see so much bad weather that you kind of get used to it. But then you see really bad weather. And that, you never get used to.

They had ship reports of thirty meter seas. That's ninety feet. I would imagine—truthfully, in retrospect—that if the whole U.S. swordfish fleet had been caught in the center of that thing, everybody would've gone down. We only saw, I don't know, maybe fifty foot waves, max. We went into it until it started to get dark, and then we turned around and went with it. You can't see those rogue waves in the dark and you don't want to get blasted and knock your wheelhouse off. We got the RPM tuned in just right to be in synch with the waves; too fast and we'd start surfing, too slow and the waves would just blast right over the whole boat. The boat was heavy and loaded with fish, very stable. It made for an amazingly good ride.

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