Of the men on the boat, Bugsy, Murph, and Billy have the most time at sea—thirty-four years, all told, much of it together. At home Billy has a photo of the three of them at sea with a gigantic swordfish. He has hip boots on, rolled down to his shins, and he's sitting on a hatchcover pulling open the fish's mouth with a steel hook. He's staring straight into the camera. Bugsy's just behind Billy, head cocked to one side, looking as gaunt and ethereal as Christ on the Shroud of Turin. Murph's in back, squinting into the sea glare and noticeably huge even beneath a bulky pair of Farmer John waders.
All these men have seen their share of close calls at sea, but Murph's record is the worst. He's six-foot-two, 250 pounds, covered in tattoos and, apparently, extremely hard to kill. Once a mako shark clamped its jaws around his arm on deck and his friends had to beat it to death. The Coast Guard helicoptered him out. Another time he was laying out the longline when an errant hook went into his palm, out the other side and into a finger. No one saw it happen, and he was dragged off the back of the boat and down into the sea. All he could do was watch the hull of his boat get smaller and smaller above him and hope someone noticed he was gone. Luckily another crew member turned around a few seconds later, understood what was happening, and hauled him in like a swordfish. I thought I was gone, Mom, he told his mother later. I thought I was dead.
The worst accident occurred on a sticky, windless night off Cape Canaveral. Murph tried sleeping up on deck but it was too hot, so he went below to see if it was any better down there. The air-conditioning was broken, though, so he went back up on deck. He was half asleep when a tremendous shriek of metal brought him to his feet. The boat lurched to one side and water started pouring into the hold. A sleek dark shape loomed in the water off their bow. After the bilge pumps kicked in and the boat stabilized, they turned their searchlights on it: they'd been run down by the conning tower of a British nuclear submarine. It had ripped a hole in the hull and crushed Murph's bunk like a beer can.
With all this catastrophe in his life Murph had two choices—decide either that he was blessed or that his death was only a matter of time. He decided it was only a matter of time. When he met his wife, Debra, he told her flat-out he wasn't going to live past thirty; she married him anyway. They had a baby, Dale Junior, but the marriage broke up because Dale Senior was always at sea. And a few weeks before signing onto the Andrea Gail, Murph had stopped by his parents' house in Bradenton for a somewhat unsettling goodbye. His mother reminded him that he needed to keep up on his life insurance policy—which included burial coverage—and he just shrugged.
Mom, I wish you'd quit worryin' about burying me, he said. I'm going to die at sea.
His mother was taken aback, but they talked a bit longer, and at one point he asked whether she still had his high school trophies. Of course I do, she said.
Well, make sure you keep them for my son, he said, and kissed her goodbye.
"It took my breath away," says his mother. "And then he was gone—I mean one minute he was there, the next he was out the door. I didn't even have time to think. He was a rough, tough man. He wasn't exactly a house person."
Murph left for Boston in late June by train. (He was scared of flying.) He brought with him The Joy of Cooking, which his mother had given him, because he loved to cook on board the boats. He had taken his sea blanket to Debra's to wash but forgot to retrieve it, and so Debra folded it and put it up for his return. He'd told her he'd be home by November 2nd to take her out to dinner on her birthday. You'd better be, she said. After the first trip he called her and said he'd made over six thousand dollars and that he was going to send a package down for Dale Junior. He didn't call his parents because Debra said she'd call for him. He talked to his son for a while and then said goodbye to Debra and hung up the phone.
That was September 23rd. The Andrea Gail was due to leave within hours.
BY ten o'clock average windspeed is forty knots out of the north-northeast, spiking to twice that and generating a huge sea. The Andrea Gail is a square-transom boat, meaning the stern is not tapered or rounded, and she tends to ride up the face of a following sea rather than slice through it. Every time a large sea rises to her stern, the Andrea Gail slews to one side and Billy must fight the wheel to keep from broaching. Broaching is when the boat turns broadside to the seas and rolls over. Fully loaded steel boats don't recover from broachings; they downflood and sink.