THE storm is centered around Sable Island, but its far western edges are already brushing the New England coast. The Satori—now too far offshore to abort the trip—starts to feel the storm as early as Sunday morning. Another wall of fog moves in from Georges Bank and the barometer starts a slow downward slide that can only mean something very big is on the way. The Satori is at the top of the Great South Channel, off Cape Cod, and working her way through an increasingly restless and uneasy sea. Stimpson mentions the weather forecasts again, but Leonard insists there's no reason to worry. By Sunday morning the swells start to mound up in ominous, chaotic ways, and that afternoon, when Stimpson tunes in to the NOAA weather broadcast, she feels the first stabs of fear: NORTHEAST WIND 30 TO 40 KNOTS, AVERAGE SEAS EIGHT TO FIFTEEN FEET, VISIBILITY UNDER TWO MILES IN RAIN.
By nightfall the wind swings out of the northeast, as predicted, and starts to climb steadily up the Beaufort scale. It's clear that both the Satori and the boat she left Portsmouth with are in for a bad night. The two crews talk every hour or so over the VHF, but by midnight on Sunday, the air is so highly charged that the radios are useless. Around eleven o'clock Stimpson takes one last call from the other boat— We're having a rough time and have lost gear on deck—and they're not heard from again. The Satori heads alone into the night, straining crazily up the swells and struggling to maintain steerageway.
Monday dawns a full gale, the seas building to twenty feet and the wind shearing ominously through the rigging. The sea takes on a grey, marbled look, like bad meat. Stimpson tells Leonard that she really thinks it's going to be a bad one, but he insists it'll blow itself out in twenty-four hours. I don't think so, Ray, Stimpson tells him, I've got a bad feeling. She and Leonard and Bylander eat chili cooked by Stimpson's mother and spend as much time as possible below deck, out of the weather. The navigation table is across from the galley on the starboard side, and Bylander sets herself up as the communications person, monitoring the radar and weather forecasts and tracking their position by GPS. A dash into shore would be risky now, across shipping lanes and dangerous shoal waters, so they reef down the sails and keep to open sea.
Monday night the storm crosses offshore and the "first stage wind surge" passes over the Satori. NOAA weather radio reports that conditions will ease off briefly and then deteriorate again as the storm swings back toward the coast. By then, though, the Satori might be far enough south to escape its full wrath. They wallow on through Monday night, the barometer rising slightly and the wind easing off to the northeast; but then late that night, like a bad fever, it comes on again. The wind climbs to fifty knots and the seas rise up in huge dark mountains behind the boat. The crew take turns at the helm, clipped into a safety line, and occasionally take a breaking sea over the cockpit. The barometer crawls downward all night, and by dawn the conditions are worse than anything Stimpson has ever seen in her life. For the first time, she starts thinking seriously about dying at sea.
Meanwhile, five hundred miles to the east, the sword fleet is getting slammed. On Albert Johnston's boat, the crew is so terrified that they just watch videos. Johnston stays at the helm and drinks a lot of coffee; like most captains, he's loath to relinquish the helm unless the weather calms down a bit. On the Andrea Gail, Billy probably takes the helm while the rest of the crew go below and try to forget about it. Some guys get stoned, which keeps them calm, and some sleep, or try to. Others just lie on their bunks and think about their families, or their girlfriends, or how much they wish this wasn't happening.
"I picture it like this," says Charlie Reed, trying to imagine the last evening aboard the Andrea Gail. "The guys are down below readin' books, and every now and then the boat takes a big sea on the side. They run up to the wheelhouse and ask, 'Hey, what's goin' on, Cap?' and Billy says something like, 'Well, we're gettin' there, boys, we're gettin' there.' If Billy's goin' downsea it has to be an awful frightening ride. Sometimes you come off the top of one of those waves and it just kinda leaves out from under you. The boat just drops. It's better to take the seas head-on—at least that way you can see what's comin' at you. That's about all you can do."