The guy's name was Adam Randall, and he was supposed to replace Doug Kosco, who'd crewed on the previous trip. Randall had driven up from East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, with his father-in-law that morning to take the job; he pulled into the dirt parking lot behind Rose's and got out to look the boat over. Randall was a lithe, intensely handsome thirty-year-old man with a shag of blond rock-star hair and cold blue eyes. He was a welder, an engineer, a scuba diver, and had fished his whole life. He knew an unsafe boat when he saw one—he called them "slabs"—and the Andrea Gail was anything but. She looked like she could take an aircraft carrier broadside. Moreover, he knew most of her crew, and his girlfriend had practically told him not to bother coming home if he didn't take the job. He hadn't worked in three months. He walked back across the lot, told his father-in-law that he had a funny feeling, and the two of them drove off together to a bar.
People often get premonitions when they do jobs that could get them killed, and in commercial fishing—still one of the most dangerous pursuits in the country—people get premonitions all the time. The trick is knowing when to listen to them. In 1871, a cook named James Nelson shipped aboard the schooner Sachem for a fishing trip to Georges Bank. One night he was awakened by a recurring dream and ran aft to tell the captain. For God's sake get clear of the Banks, he begged, I've had my dream again. I've been shipwrecked twice after this dream.
The captain was an old salt named Wenzell. He asked what the dream was. I see women, dressed in white, standing in the rain, Nelson replied.
There was hardly a breath of wind and Wenzell was not impressed. He told Nelson to go back to bed. A while later a little breeze sprang up. Within an hour it was blowing hard and the Sachem was hove-to under close-reefed foresail. The hull started to open up and the crew manned the pumps.
They couldn't keep up with the leak, and Wenzell desperately signalled to a nearby Gloucester schooner, the Pescador. The Pescador put dories over the side and managed to save the Sachem's crew. Within half an hour the Sachem rolled over, settled bow-down into the sea, and sank.
Even today, instincts are heeded and fears are listened to. Randall walked off and suddenly Tyne had another site to fill. He called around and finally got twenty-eight-year-old David Sullivan. Sully, as he's known, was mildly famous in town for having saved his entire crew one frigid January night. His boat, the Harmony, was tied to another boat when she began to take on water out at sea. Her crew started screaming for help but couldn't wake up the men on the other boat, so Sully jumped overboard and pulled himself across on a rope, legs dragging through the icy North Atlantic. Sullivan, in other words, was a good man to have on board.
Tyne said he'd be over to pick him up in half an hour. Sully packed a bag and made a few phone calls to tell people he'd be away for a while. Suddenly his plans for that evening were off; his life was on hold for the next month. Billy showed up around two o'clock and they drove back to Rose's just in time to see Bobby and Bugsy going at it. Wonderful, Sully thought. He stopped to say hello to Chris and then Billy sent him off to the Cape Ann Market to get the food for the trip. Murph went with him. Bulging in Sully's pocket was $4,000 cash.
One of the things about commercial fishing is that everything seems to be extreme. Fishermen don't work in any normal sense of the word, they're at sea for a month and then home celebrating for a week straight. They don't earn the same kind of money most other people do, they come home either busted or with a quarter-million dollars' worth of fish in their hold. And when they buy food for the month, it's not something any normal person would recognize as shopping; it's a retail catastrophe of Biblical proportions.