When the Andrea Gail was overhauled in 1986, Bob Brown simply pulled her out of the water and started welding; no stability tests were performed, no marine architect was consulted. In the trade this is known as "eyeball engineering," and it includes the Andrea Gail in an overwhelming majority of the commercial fleet that has been altered without plans. The work was done at St. Augustine Trawlers in St. Augustine, Florida; in all, eight tons of machinery and structural changes were added to the boat, including the fuel and water drums on her whaleback deck.
After the work was finished, marine surveyor James Simonitsch—whose brother, Mark, would propose shutting down Georges Bank the following year—flew to Florida to reinspect the Andrea Gail. Two years earlier he'd appraised both the Hannah Boden and Andrea Gail for the settlement of Bob Browns divorce, and the Andrea Gail had been valued at $400,000. Simonitsch surveyed her again in January, 1987, and wrote a letter to Bob Brown with some minor suggestions: Loosen the dogs on one of the watertight doors and provide flotation collars and lights for the survival suits. Otherwise the vessel seemed shipshape. "The modifications and additional furnishings will increase the vessel's ability to make longer trips and return with a high-quality product," Simonitsch concluded. The question of stability never came up.
In 1990, St. Augustine Shipyards was sold by the Internal Revenue Service for nonpayment of taxes. In October of that year Simonitsch visited the Andrea Gail in Gloucester and made a few more suggestions: professionally service the six-man life raft, replace a dead battery in the Class B EPIRB, and install a flare kit in the wheelhouse. Again, there was no mention of stability tests, but the vessel was well within the law. Bob Brown also neglected to refile documentation for the Andrea Gail after altering her hull, although neither discrepancy was Simonitsch's problem. He was paid to look at a boat and evaluate what he saw. In November, 1990, the principal surveyor for Marine Safety Consultants, Inc., the company that employed Simonitsch, inspected the Andrea Gail one last time. "The vessel is well suited for its purpose," he wrote. "Submitted without prejudice, David C. Dubois."
If Billy Tyne were inclined to worry, though, there were a number of things about the Andrea Gail that might have given him pause. First of all, according to Tommy Barrie of the Allison, she had a boxy construction and a forward wheelhouse that took the seas hard. She was a rugged boat that didn't concede much to the elements. And then there were the St. Augustine alterations. The extended whaleback deck was burdened with the weight of an icemaker and three dozen fifty-five-gallon drums, so her center of gravity had been raised and she would recover from rolls a little more slowly. Only a couple of other boats in the fleet—the Eagle Eye, the Sea Hawk—store fuel oil on their upper decks. The portside bulwark on the Andrea Gail could be a problem, too. It had been raised and extended to protect the fishing gear, but it also tended to hold water on deck. A few years earlier, she'd taken a big sea over the stern and was pushed so far over that her rudder came partway out of the water. Bob Brown was on board, and he sprinted up to the wheelhouse and put the helm around; at the same moment the boat rode up the face of another big sea. Slowly, the Andrea Gail righted herself and cleared her decks; everything was fine except that the bulwark had been flattened like a tin can.
One could argue that if a wave takes a piece of a boat out, maybe it shouldn't be there. Or one could argue that that's just what waves do—tear down what men put up. Either way, the incident was unsettling. Brown blamed it on the inexperience of the man at the helm and said that it was his own quick action that saved the boat. The crew didn't see it that way. They saw a boat pinned on her port side by a mass of water and then righted by freak wave action. In other words, they saw bad luck briefly followed by good. The bulwark was replaced as soon as they got in, and nobody mentioned it again.