I was the first one to know how bad it was really gonna be. Halifax called for twenty meter seas and when we heard that we thought, Oh boy. You don't really have time to run to land so we tried to get into the coldest water we could find. The colder the water, the denser it is and the waves don't get as big. Also, I knew we'd get a northeast-northwest wind. I wanted to make as much headway as possible 'cause the Gulf Stream was down south and that's where the warm water and fast current are.
There was an awful lot of electrical noise along the leading edge of this thing, there was so much noise you couldn't hear anything on the radio. I was up in the wheelhouse, when it's bad like that I usually stay up there. If it looks like it's settlin' down a bit and I can grab a little sleep, then I will. The crew just racks out and watches videos. Everybody acknowledged this was the worst storm they'd ever been in—you can tell by the size of the waves, the motion of the boat, the noise, the crashing. There's always a point when you realize that you're in the middle of the ocean and if anything goes wrong, that's it. You see so much bad weather that you kind of get used to it. But then you see really bad weather. And that, you never get used to.
They had ship reports of thirty meter seas. That's ninety feet. I would imagine—truthfully, in retrospect—that if the whole U.S. swordfish fleet had been caught in the center of that thing, everybody would've gone down. We only saw, I don't know, maybe fifty foot waves, max. We went into it until it started to get dark, and then we turned around and went with it. You can't see those rogue waves in the dark and you don't want to get blasted and knock your wheelhouse off. We got the RPM tuned in just right to be in synch with the waves; too fast and we'd start surfing, too slow and the waves would just blast right over the whole boat. The boat was heavy and loaded with fish, very stable. It made for an amazingly good ride.
JOHNSTON had finished his last haul late in the afternoon of the 28th: nineteen swordfish, twenty bigeye, twenty-two yellowfin, and two mako. He immediately started steaming north and by morning he was approaching the Tail of the Banks, winds out of the northeast at one hundred knots and seas twenty to thirty feet. Several hundred miles to the west, though, conditions have gone off the chart. The Beaufort Wind Scale defines a Force 12 storm as having seventy-three-mile-an-hour winds and forty-five-foot seas. Due south of Sable Island, data buoy #44137 starts notching seventy-five-foot waves on the afternoon of the 29th and stays up there for the next seventeen hours. Significant wave height—the average of the top third, also known as HSig—tops fifty feet. The first hundred-foot wave spikes the graph at eight PM, and the second one spikes it at midnight. For the next two hours, peak wave heights stay at a hundred feet and winds hit eighty miles an hour. The waves are blocking the data buoy readings, though, and the wind is probably hitting 120 or so. Eighty-mile-an-hour wind can suck fish right out of bait barrels. Hundred-foot waves are fifty percent higher than the most extreme sizes predicted by computer models. They are the largest waves ever recorded on the Scotian Shelf. They are among the very highest waves measured anywhere in the world, ever.
Scientists understand how waves work, but not exactly how huge ones work. There are rogue waves out there, in other words, that seem to exceed the forces generating them. For all practical purposes, though, heights of waves are a function of how hard the wind blows, how long it blows for, and how much sea room there is—"speed, duration, and fetch," as it's known. Force 12 winds over Lake Michigan would generate wave heights of thirty-five feet after ten hours or so, but the waves couldn't get any bigger than that because the fetch—the amount of open water—isn't great enough. The waves have reached what is called a "fully developed sea state." Every wind speed has a minimum fetch and duration to reach a fully developed sea state; waves driven by a Force 12 wind reach their full potential in three or four days. A gale blowing across a thousand miles of ocean for sixty hours would generate significant wave heights of ninety-seven feet; peak wave heights would be more than twice that. Waves that size have never been recorded, but they must be out there. It's possible that they would destroy anything in a position to measure them.