Since swordfish feed at night, each hook is also fixed with a Cylume lightstick that illuminates the bait. Cylumes are cigar-sized plastic tubes with phosphorescent chemicals inside them that activate when the tube is snapped in half. They cost a dollar apiece, and a sword boat might go through five thousand in a trip. The hooks and lightsticks are spaced about thirty feet apart, but the exact interval is determined by the speed of the boat. If the captain wants to fish the hooks closer together, he slows down; if he wants to spread them apart, he speeds up. The typical speed for setting-out on the Grand Banks is six or seven knots. At that speed it takes about four hours to set out thirty miles of line.
Every three hooks the baiter snaps on a ball drop, which floats on the surface and keeps the longline from sinking to the bottom. A typical arrangement is to hang your line at five fathoms and dangle your hooks to twelve—that's about seventy feet down. Depending on currents and the temperature breaks, that's where swordfish like to feed. Every four miles, instead of a ball drop, the baiter clips on a highflyer. The highflyer is a float and aluminum pole with a radar-reflecting square on top. It bobs along on the surface of the ocean and shows up very clearly on the radar screen. Finally, every eight miles, a radio transmitter is attached. It has a big whip antenna that broadcasts a low-frequency signal back to the boat. This allows the captain to track the gear down if it parts off midstring.
A fully baited longline represents a significant amount of money, and captains have been known to risk the lives of their crew to get them back. Forty miles of monofilament line goes for $1,800. Each of the radio beacon buoys costs $1,800, and there are six of them on a longline. The poly-balls cost six dollars apiece and are set every three hooks for 1,000 hooks. The hooks are a dollar, the lightsticks are a dollar, the squid is a dollar, and the gangions are two dollars. Every night, in other words, a sword boat drops $20,000 worth of gear into the North Atlantic. One of the biggest disputes on a sword boat is whether to set out or not. Crews have hauled in a full gale because their captain misjudged the weather.
The baiting usually gets finished up late in the evening, and the Andrea Gail crew hangs their rain gear in the tool room and tramps into the kitchen. They eat dinner quickly, and when they're done, Billy climbs up the companionway to take over the helm from Murph. He checks his loran bearings, which fix him on the chart, and the video plotter, which fixes him in relation to the mainline. The radar is always on and has a range of fifteen miles or so; the highflyers on the mainline register as small squares on the screen. The VHF is tuned to channel 16, and the single sideband is tuned to 2182 megahertz. They are both emergency channels, and if two boats need to communicate, they contact each other and switch to a separate working channel.
At 11:00 PM the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) broadcasts a weather forecast, and the captains generally check in with each other afterward to discuss its finer points. By then most of the crew has already turned in—they're into a stretch of twenty twenty-hour work days, and sleep becomes as coveted as cigarettes. The bunks are bolted against the tapered sides of the bow, and the men fall asleep listening to the diesel engine and the smack of waves against the hull. Underwater, the prop whine and the cavitation of hundreds of thousands of air bubbles radiate outward into the ocean. The sound wraps around the foreshores of Newfoundland, refracts off the temperature discontinuity of the Gulf Stream, and dissipates into the crushing black depths beyond the continental shelf. Low frequency vibrations propagate almost forever underwater, and the throb of the Andrea Gail's machinery must reach just about every life form on the Banks.
DAWN at sea, a grey void emerging out of a vaster black one. "The earth was without form and darkness was upon the face of the deep." Whoever wrote that knew the sea— knew the pale emergence of the world every morning, a world that contained absolutely nothing, not one thing.
A long blast on the airhorn.
The men stagger out of their bunks and pour themselves coffee under the fluorescent lights of the galley, squinting through swollen lids and bad moods. They can just start to make out shapes on deck when they go out. It's cold and raw, and under their slickers they have sweat shirts and flannel shirts and thermal tops. Dawn's not for another hour, but they start work as soon as they can see anything. At 43 degrees north, a week after the equinox, that's 5:30 in the morning.