If Billy's still running with the weather, he's taking seas almost continually over his stern and running a real risk of having a hatchcover or watertight door tear loose. And to make matters worse, the waves have an exceptionally short period; instead of coming every fifteen seconds or so, the waves now come every eight or nine. The shorter the period, the steeper the wave faces and the closer they are to breaking; forty-five-foot breaking waves are much more destructive than rolling swells twice that size. According to buoy #44139, maximum wave heights for October 28th coincide with exceptionally low periods right around ten o'clock. It's a combination that a boat the size of the Andrea Gail couldn't take for long. Certainly by ten—if not earlier, but no later than ten—Billy Tyne must have decided to bring his boat around into the seas.
If there's a maneuver that raises the hairs on the back of a captain's neck, it's coming around in large seas. The boat is broadside to the waves—"beam-to"—for half a minute or so, which is easily long enough to get rolled over. Even aircraft carriers are at risk when they're beam-to in a big sea. If Billy attempts to come around that late in the storm, he'd make sure the decks were cleared and give her full power on the way around. The Andrea Gail would list way over and Billy would peer out of the windows to see what was bearing down on them. With luck, he'd pick a lull between the waves and they'd round up into the weather without any problem.
Billy's been through a lot of storms, though, and he's probably brought her around earlier in the evening, maybe even before talking to Barrie. Either way, it's a significant moment; it means they've stopped steaming home and are simply trying to survive. In a sense Billy's no longer at the helm, the conditions are, and all he can do is react. If danger can be seen in terms of a narrowing range of choices, Billy Tyne's choices have just ratcheted down a notch. A week ago he could have headed in early. A day ago he could have run north like Johnston. An hour ago he could have radioed to see if there were any other vessels around. Now the electrical noise has made the VHF practically useless, and the single sideband only works for long range. These aren't mistakes so much as an inability to see into the future. No one, not even the Weather Service, knows for sure what a storm's going to do.
There are distinct drawbacks to heading into the weather, though. The windows are exposed to breaking seas, the boat uses more fuel, and the bow tends to catch the wind and drag the boat to leeward. The Andrea Gail has a high bow that would force Billy to oversteer simply to stay on course. One can imagine Billy standing at the helm and gripping the wheel with the force and stance one might use to carry a cinder block. It would be a confused sea, mountains of water converging, diverging, piling up on themselves from every direction. A boat's motion can be thought of as the instantaneous integration of every force acting upon it in a given moment, and the motion of a boat in a storm is so chaotic as to be almost without pattern. Billy would just keep his bow pointed into the worst of it and hope he doesn't get blind-sided by a freak wave.
The degree of danger Billy's in can be gauged from the beating endured by the Contship Holland, two hundred or so miles to the east. The Holland is a big ship—542 feet and 10,000 tons—and capable of carrying almost seven hundred land/sea containers on her decks. She could easily take the Andrea Gail as cargo. From her daily log, October 29th-30th:
0400—Ship labors hard in very high following seas.
1200—Ship labors in very high stormy seas (hurricane gusts),
water over deck and deck cargo. Ship strains heavily, travel
reduced.
0200—Steering weather-dependent course. Ship no longer obeys
rudder. Ship strains hard and lurches heavily.
0400—Containers are missing from Bay 6.
In other words, Billy's riding out a storm that has forced a 10,000-ton containership to abandon course and simply steer to survive. The next High Seas report comes in at eleven PM, and Tommy Barrie mulls it over while waiting for Billy to call. The storm is supposed to hit just west of the Tail, around the 42 and the 55, but the Weather Service doesn't always know everything. The 42 and the 55 are only about a hundred miles southeast of Billy, so he's a much more reliable source for local conditions than the weather radio. It's possible, Barrie thinks, that the Allison could get away with fishing a little gear that night. Two sections, maybe eight miles of line. Barries the westernmost boat of the main fleet, so whatever is on the way is going to hit him first; but first of all it's going to hit Billy Tyne. Barrie waits twenty, thirty minutes, but Billy never calls. That's not as bad as it sounds—we're all big boys out there, as Barrie says, and can take care of ourselves. Maybe Billy's got his hands full, or maybe he went below to take a nap, or maybe he simply forgot.