Bob Brown's reputation in Gloucester is a complex one. On the one hand he's a phenomenally successful businessman who started with nothing and still works as hard as any crew member on any of his boats. On the other hand, it's hard to find a fisherman in town who has anything good to say about him. Fishing's a marginal business, though, and people don't succeed in it by being well liked, they succeed by being tough. Some—such as Gloucester fisherman "Hard" Bob Millard— are tough on themselves, and some are tough on their employees. Brown is tough on both. When he was a young man, people called him Crazy Brown because he took such horrific risks, tub-trawling for cod and haddock in an open wooden boat all winter long. He had no radio, loran, or fathometer and worked alone because no one would go with him. He remembers winter days when he had to slide a skiff out across the harbor ice just to get to his mooring. "I had a family to feed and I was intent upon doing that," he says.
Only once in his life did he work for someone else, a six-month stint with a company that was exploring the lobster population on the continental shelf. That was in 1966; three years later he was working two hundred miles offshore in a forty-foot wooden boat. "Never so much as cracked a pane of glass," he says. "Bigger doesn't always mean better." Eventually he was running four or five sword boats out of Gloucester and pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. One winter he and his son started accumulating ice on deck on their way back from Georges Bank. "If you're making ice on Georges you know you're going to be in real trouble closer to land," he says. "We went back out and that night it blew a hundred from the northwest and snowed. The wind gauge only goes to a hundred and it was pegged for three days straight—pegged like it was broken. We were in a steel boat and it didn't seem so bad, we were comfortable enough. Steel is tough compared to wood, don't let anyone tell you different. Anyone tells you different, they're a romanticist. Steel goes down faster, though. It goes down . . . well, like a load of steel."
The bad feeling between Bob Brown and the town of Gloucester hit bottom in 1980, when Brown lost a man off a boat named the Sea Fever. The Sea Fever was a fifty-foot wooden boat with a crew of three that was hauling lobster traps off Georges Bank. It was late November and the Weather Service predicted several days of moderate winds, but they were catastrophically wrong. One of the worst storms on record had just drawn a deep breath off the Carolinas. It screamed northward all night and slammed into Georges Bank around dawn, dredging up seventy-foot waves in the weird shallows of the continental shelf. To make matters worse, a crucial offshore data buoy had been malfunctioning for the past two and a half months, and the Weather Service had no idea what was going on out there. The men on the Sea Fever and on another boat, the fifty-five-foot Fair Wind, woke up to find themselves in a fight for their lives.
The Fair Wind got the worse end of the deal. She flipped end over end in an enormous wave and her four crew were trapped in the flooded pilothouse. One of them, a shaggy thirty-three-year-old machinist named Ernie Hazard, managed to gulp some air and pull himself through a window. He burst to the surface and swam to a self-inflating life raft that had popped up, tethered, alongside the boat. The Fair Wind continued to founder, hull-up, for another hour, but the rest of the crew never made it out, so Hazard finally cut the tether and set himself adrift. For two days he scudded through the storm, capsizing over and over, until a Navy P-3 plane spotted him and dropped an orange smoke marker. He was picked up by a Coast Guard cutter and then rushed by helicopter to a hospital on Cape Cod. He had survived two days in his underwear on the North Atlantic. Later, when asked how long it took him to warm up after his ordeal, he said, without a hint of irony, "Oh, three or four months."
The Sea Fever fared a little better, but not much. She took a huge sea and lost all her windows; the half-inch safety glass burst as if it had been hit by a wrecking ball. The captain, who happened to be Bob Brown's son, turned downsea to avoid any more flooding, but the wave put them on their beam ends and swept one of the crew out of the wheelhouse and over the side. The man's name was Gary Brown (no relation); while one of the remaining crew scrambled below deck to restart the engine, the other threw a lifesaver overboard to save Brown. It dropped right in front of him but he made no attempt to grab it. Brown just drifted away, a dazed look in his eyes.
The other two men called a mayday, and an hour later a Coast Guard helicopter was pounding overhead in the wild dark. By then the two men on board the Sea Fever had righted her and pumped her out. Do you wish to remain with your vessel, or do you wish to be taken off by hoists? the helicopter pilot asked over the radio. We'll stay with the boat, they radioed back. The pilot lowered a bilge pump and then veered back towards shore because he was running out of fuel. On the way back he turned on his "Night Sun" searchlight to look for Gary Brown, but all he could see were the foam-streaked waves. Brown had long since gone under.