INT 109 is one of the few charts that shows the full width and breadth of the summer swordfishing grounds, and is carried by every sword boat in the Banks. It has a scale of one to three-and-a-half-million; on a diagonal it stretches from New Jersey almost to Greenland. Land on 109 is depicted the way mariners must see it, a blank, featureless expanse with a scattering of towns along a minutely rendered coast. The lighthouses are marked by fat exclamation points and jut from every godforsaken headland between New York City and South Wolf Island, Labrador. Water depth is given in meters and shallow areas are shaded in blue. Georges Bank is clearly visible off Cape Cod, an irregular shape about the size of Long Island and rising to a depth of nine feet. To the west of Georges is the Great South Channel; beyond are the Nan-tucket Shoals and an area peppered with old ordnance: Submerged torpedo, Unexploded depth charges, Unexploded bombs.
The Two Hundred Fathom line is the chart's most prominent feature, echoing the coastline in broad strokes like a low-angle shadow. It swings north around Georges, skirts Nova Scotia a hundred miles offshore, and then runs deep up the St. Lawrence Seaway. East of the Seaway are the old fishing grounds of Burgeo and St. Pierre Banks, and then the line makes an enormous seaward loop to the southeast. The Grand Banks.
The Banks are a broad flat plateau that extend hundreds of miles southeast from Newfoundland before plunging off the continental shelf. A clump of terrors known as the Virgin Rocks lurk seventy miles east of St. Johns, but otherwise there are no true shoals to speak of. A sheet of cold water called the Labrador Current flows over the northern edge of the Banks, injecting the local food chain with plankton; and a sluggish warm-water flow called the North Atlantic Current creeps toward Europe east of the Flemish Cap. Bending around the Tail of the Banks is something called Slope Water, a cold half-knot current that feeds into the generally eastward movement of the area. Below Slope Water is the Gulf Stream, trundling across the Atlantic at speeds of up to three or four knots. Eddies sometimes detach themselves from the Gulf Stream and spin off into the North Atlantic, dragging entire ecosystems with them. These eddies are called warm core rings. When the cores fall apart, the ecosystems die.
Billy wants to run a slot between the Gulf Stream to the south and Sable Island to the north. It's a relatively straight shot that doesn't buck the warm headcurrent or come too close in to Sable. Steaming around the clock, he's looking at a one-week trip; maybe he even takes one bird out of the water to speed things up. The diesel engine has been throbbing relentlessly for a month now and, without the distraction of work, it suddenly seems hellishly loud. There's no way to escape the noise—it gets inside your skull, shakes your stomach lining, makes your ears ring. If the crew weren't so sleep-deprived it might even bother them; as it is they just wallow in their bunks and stand watch at the helm twice a day. After two-and-a-half days the Andrea Gail has covered about 450 miles, right to the edge of the continental shelf. The weather is fair and there's a good rolling swell from the northeast. At 3:15 on the afternoon of October 27th, Billy Tyne raises the Canadian Coast Guard on his single sideband to tell them he's entering Canadian waters. This is the American fishing vessel Andrea Gail, WYC 6681, he says. We're at 44.25 north, 49.05 west, bound for New England. All our fishing gear is stowed.
The Canadian Coast Guard at St. Johns gives him the go-ahead to proceed. Most of the sword fleet is a couple of hundred miles to the east, and Albert Johnston is the same distance to the south. Sable Island is no longer in the way, so Billy comes up fourteen degrees and puts Gloucester right in his gunsights. They're heading almost due west and running a Great Circle route on autopilot. Around nightfall a Canadian weather map creaks out of the satellite fax. There's a hurricane off Bermuda, a cold front coming down off the Canadian Shield, and a storm brewing over the Great Lakes. They're all heading for the Grand Banks. A few minutes after the fax, Linda Greenlaw calls.
Billy, you seen the chart? she asks.
Yeah I saw it, he says.
What do you think?
Looks like it's gonna be wicked.
They agree to talk the next day so Billy can give her a list of supplies he's going to need. He has no desire at all to talk to Bob Brown. They sign off, and then Billy hands the helm off to Murph and goes below for dinner. They're in a big steel boat with 40,000 pounds of fish in the hold, plus ice. It takes a lot to sink a boat like that. Around nine o'clock, a half-moon emerges off their port quarter. The air is calm, the sky is full of stars. Two thousand miles away, weather systems are starting to collide.
THE BARREL OF THE GUN
The men could only look at each other through the falling snow, from land to sea, from sea to land, and realize how unimportant they all were.
—SHIP ON THE ROCKS, NEWBURYPORT, MASSACHUSETTS, 1839, NO SURVIVORS.
(SIDNEY PERLEY, Historic Storms of New England, 1891)