Johnston ties up at Union Wharf alongside McLean's Seafood and North Atlantic Diesel. McLean's is a battered two-story building with cement floors for draining fishblood and a rabbit warren of offices upstairs where deals are cut. Dark, wild-haired young men stomp around in rubber boots and shout to each other in Portuguese as they heave fish around the room. With long knives they "loin" the fish— carve the meat off the bones—and then seal it in vacuum bags and load it onto trucks. A good worker can loin a full-sized fish in two minutes. McLean's moves two million pounds of swordfish a year, and a million pounds of tuna. They fly it overseas, ship it around the country, and sell it to the corner store.
Johnston's boat takes most of a day to unload, the next day he settles the accounts and starts fitting the boat out again. Food, diesel, water, ice, repairs, the usual. The faster the turnaround, the better—not only will his crew be more likely to survive New Bedford's charms, but it's getting late in the season to head out to the Grand Banks. The longer you wait, the worse the storms are. "You get in that kind of weather and if anything goes wrong—if a hatch busts off or one of the outriggers gets tangled up—you can really be in trouble," says Johnston. "Some of the guys get to where they feel invincible, but they don't realize that there's a real fine line between what they've seen and what it can get to. I know a guy who lost a 900-foot boat out there. It broke in half and sank with thirty men.
Sure enough, Johnston's still fitting-out when the first ugly weather blows through. It's a double-low that grinds off the coast and cranks the wind around to the southwest. The storm intensifies as it plows out to sea and catches Billy one morning while he's hauling back. The wind is thirty knots and the waves are washing over the deck, but they can't stop working until the gear is in. Late in the morning, they get slammed.
It's a rogue wave: steep, cresting, and maybe thirty feet high. It avalanches over the decks and buries the Andrea Gail under tons of water. One moment they're at the hauling station tending the line, the next they're way over on their side. Heavily, endlessly, the Andrea Gail rights herself, and Billy brings her around into the weather and checks for damages. The batteries have come out of their boxes down in the engine room, but that's about it. That evening Billy radios Charlie Johnson of the Seneca to tell him what happened. Charlie's in Bay Bulls, Newfoundland, getting a crankshaft fixed, and Billy calls him every evening to keep him updated on the fleet. Jesus, we took a hell of a wave, Billy says. We went way over on our side. I didn't think we'd make it back up.
They discuss the weather and the fishing for a few minutes and then sign off. The story of the wave doesn't sound good to Charlie Johnson—the Andrea Gail's known as a tough little boat and shouldn't go over that easily. Not with a bird in the water and twenty thousand pounds of fish in the hold. "I didn't want to say anything, but it didn't seem right," Johnson says. "You're in God's country out there. You can't make any mistakes."
The Andrea Gail fishes east of the Tail for another week and does very poorly, the trip's shaping up to be a total bust. A boat can't stay indefinitely out at sea—supplies run low, the crew gets crazy, the fish get old. They've got to find some fish fast. Around mid-month they pull their gear and steam northeast all night to a set of shallows known as the Flemish Cap. The rest of the fleet is way off to the south and west: Tommy Barrie on the Allison, Charlie Johnson on the Seneca, Larry Horn on the Miss Millie, Mike Hebert on the Mr. Simon, and Linda Greenlaw on the Hannah Boden.
There's also a 150-foot Japanese longliner named the Eishin Maru #78. The Eishin Maru is carrying a Canadian Fisheries observer, Judith Reeves, who is the only person on board who has a survival suit or knows how to speak English. The Mary T is on her way out, and another boat named the Laurie Dawn 8 has just arrived in New Bedford to gear up.
Billy's at 41 degrees west, way out on the edge. He's almost off the fishing charts. The weather has turned raw and blustery and the men work in layers of sweatshirts and overalls and rubber slickers. It's the end of the season, their last chance for a decent trip. They just want to get this thing done.
THE FLEMISH CAP
And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled with fire . . .
—REVELATION 15