Sable Island is a twenty-mile sandbar that extends another forty or fifty miles east-west below water. From a distance, the surf that breaks on the shoals looks like a white sand cliff. Mariners have headed for it in storms, thinking they might save themselves by driving their boat onto the beach, only to be pounded to pieces by twenty-foot waves on the outer bar. Sable Island historian George Patterson writes, in 1894: "From the east end a bar stretches northeasterly for seventeen miles, of which the first four are dry in fine weather, the next nine covered with heavy breakers and the last four with a heavy cross-sea. The island and its bar present a continuous line of upwards of fifty miles of terrific breakers. The currents around the island are terribly conflicting and uncertain, sometimes passing around the whole circuit of the compass in twenty-four hours. An empty cask will be carried round and round the island, making the circuit several times, and the same is the case with bodies from wrecks."
The island prowls restlessly around the Scotian Shelf, losing sand from one end, building it up on the other, endlessly, throughout the centuries. Since 1873 it has melted away beneath the foundations of six lighthouses. Herds of wild horses live on the island, the descendants of tough Breton mountain horses left there by the French. Nothing but mar-ran grass holds the dunes in place, and cranberries, blueberries, and wild roses grow in the inland bogs. The Gulf Stream and the glacial Labrador Current converge at Sable, frequently smothering the island in fog. Five thousand men are said to have drowned in its shallows, earning it the name "The Graveyard of the Atlantic," and at least that many have been pulled to safety by lifesaving crews that have been maintained there since 1801. "We have had a tolerable winter, and no wrecks, except the hull of the schooner Juno, of Plymouth," one island-keeper recorded in 1820. "She came ashore without masts, sails or rigging of any description, and no person on board except one dead man in the hold."
In bad weather, horsemen circled the island looking for ships in distress. If any were spotted, the horsemen rushed back for the surf boat and rowed out through the breakers to save anyone who was still alive. Sometimes they were able to fire rockets with a line attached and rig up a breeches buoy. After the storm died down they'd salvage the cargo and saw the ship timber up for firewood or construction material. People pulled from sinking ships often spent the entire winter on the island. Sometimes two or three hundred people would be camped out in the dunes, waiting for a relief ship to arrive in the spring.
Today there are two lighthouses, a Coast Guard station, a meteorological station, and several dozen oil and natural gas wells. There's a sixty-foot shoal thirty miles to the northwest and a forty-five-foot shoal twenty miles to the east. They mark the western and eastern ends of the sandbar, respectively. Billy isn't right on top of the bars yet, but he's getting close. In the old days it was known that most shipwrecks on Sable occurred because of errors in navigation; the westerly current was so strong that it could throw boats off by sixty to a hundred miles. If Billy has lost his electronics—his GPS, radar, and loran— he's effectively back in the old days. He'd have a chart of the Grand Banks on the chart table and would be estimating his position based on compass heading, forward speed, and wind conditions. This is called dead reckoning. Maybe the currents and the storm winds push Billy farther west than he realizes, and he gets into the shallows around Sable. Maybe he has turned downsea on purpose to keep water out of the wheelhouse, or to save fuel. Or maybe their steering's gone and, like the Eishin Maru, they're just careening westward on the weather.
Whatever it is, one thing is known for sure. Around midnight on October 28th—when the storm is at its height off Sable Island—something catastrophic happens aboard the Andrea Gail.
THE ZERO-MOMENT POINT
Behold a pale horse, and his name who sat
on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.
—REVELATION 6:8
IN the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. Government decided to detonate a series of nuclear devices in the Pacific Ocean. The thinking was that deep water would absorb the shock wave and minimize the effect on the environment, while still allowing scientists to gauge the strength of the explosions. But an oceanographer named William Van Dorn, associated with the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, California, warned them that a nuclear explosion in the wrong place "could convert the entire continental shelf into a surf zone."