The rest of the crew are wedged into a dark little room across from the galley. The bunks are stacked along the inner wall and the starboard hull, and the floor is covered with the detritus that accumulates around young men—clothes, cassette tapes, beer cans, cigarettes, magazines. Along with the magazines are dozens of books, including a few ragged paperbacks by Dick Francis. Francis writes about horse racing, which seems to appeal to swordfishermen because it's another way to win or lose huge amounts of money. The books get passed around the fleet "at about four hundred miles an hour," as one swordfisherman put it, and they've probably been to the Grand Banks more times than the men themselves. Most fishermen tape photos of their girlfriends to the wall, alongside pages ripped from Penthouse and Playboy, and the crew of the Andrea Gail are undoubtedly no different.
The galley is the largest room on the boat, other than the fish hold. At first glance it could almost be a kitchen in a house trailer: wood veneer, fluorescent panel lights, cheap wood cabinets. There's a four-burner gas stove, an industrial stainless steel refrigerator, and a Formica table angled into the forward wall. A bench runs along the length of the port side, and there's a single porthole above the bench. It's too small for a man to wiggle out of. A door at the aft end of the galley exits into a small holding area and a companionway that goes down into the engine room. The companionway is protected by a watertight door that screws down securely with four steel dogs. The fo'c'sle and pilothouse doors are watertight as well; in theory, the entire forward end of the boat can be sealed off, with the crew inside.
The engine, an eight-cylinder, 365-horsepower turbo-charged diesel, is slightly more powerful than the largest tractor-trailer rigs on the highway. The engine was refurbished in 1989 because the boat flooded at dock after a discharge pipe froze, cracking the weld. The engine drives a propeller shaft that runs through a cutout in the aft bulkhead of the compartment and through the fish hold to the stern of the boat. Most boats have a gasket that seals the prop as it passes through the bulkhead, but the Andrea Gail does not. This is a weak point; flooding in the fish hold could conceivably slosh forward and kill the engine, crippling the boat.
The machinery room sits just forward of the engine and is crammed with tools, spare parts, lumber, old clothes, a backup generator, and three bilge pumps. The job of the pumps is to lift water out of the hold faster than it comes in; in the old days crews would be at the hand pumps for days at a stretch, and ships went down when the storms outlasted the men. The tools are stored in metal lockboxes on the floor and include just about everything you'd need to rebuild the engine—vise grips, pry bar, hammer, crescent wrenches, pipe wrenches, socket wrenches, Allen wrenches, files, hacksaw, channel-lock pliers, bolt cutters, ball peen hammer. Spare parts are packed in cardboard boxes and stacked on wooden shelves: starter motor, cooling pump, alternator, hydraulic hoses and fittings, v-belts, jumper wires, fuses, hose clamps, gasket material, nuts and bolts, sheet metal, silicone rubber, plywood, screw gun, duct tape, lube oil, hydraulic oil, transmission oil, and fuel filters.
Boats try at all costs to avoid going into Newfoundland for repairs. Not only does it waste valuable time, but it costs obscene amounts of money—one infamous repair bill amounted to $50,000 for what should've been a $3,500 job.
(The machinists had reportedly run their lathes at 46 rpm rather than 400 in order to rack up overtime.) As a result, sword boat captains help each other out on the high seas whenever they can; they lend engine parts, offer technical advice, donate food or fuel. The competition between a dozen boats rushing a perishable commodity to market fortunately doesn't kill an inherent sense of concern for each other. This may seem terrifically noble, but it's not—or at least not entirely. It's also self-interested. Each captain knows he may be the next one with the frozen injector or the leaking hydraulics.
Diesel fuel on the Andrea Gail is carried in a pair of 2,000-gallon tanks along either side of the engine room, and in two 1,750-gallon tanks at the stern. There are also thirty plastic drums lashed to the whaleback with another 1,650 gallons of fuel. Each one has AG painted on them in white lettering. Two thousand gallons of fresh water are stored in two forepeak tanks, and another 500 gallons or so are stored in drums up on deck, along with the oil. There's also a "water maker" that purifies saltwater by forcing it through a membrane at 800 pounds per square inch. The membrane is so fine that it even filters out bacteria and viruses. The boat butcher—who is constantly covered in fish guts—gets to shower every day. The rest of the crew showers every two or three.