Except for that one expedition on deck to check the fish-hold, the crew keep to their bunks and Johnston stays bolted to the wheelhouse floor, wrestling the helm and jotting down notes in the ship log. His entries are terse, bullet descriptions of the unending chaos outside. "NE 80-100 winds came on as we passed through west side of eye," he records on the 29th. "Seas 20—30 feet. Dangerous Storm to move E 15 kts become station drift SW & merge with Grace." Johnston is one of the most meteorologically inclined captains of the sword fleet, and he's been keeping a weather eye on Hurricane Grace, which has been quietly slipping up the coast. At eight AM on the 29th, Grace collides with the cold front, as predicted, and goes reeling back out to sea. She's moving extremely fast and packing eighty-knot winds and thirty-foot seas. She's a player now, an important—if dying—element in the atmospheric machinery assembling itself south of Sable. Grace crosses the 40th parallel that afternoon, and at eight PM on October 29th, Hurricane Grace runs into the Sable Island storm.
The effect is instantaneous. Tropical air is a sort of meteorological accelerant that can blow another storm system through the roof, and within hours of encountering Hurricane Grace, the pressure gradient around the storm forms the equivalent of a cliff. Weather charts plot barometric pressure the way topographical maps plot elevation, and in both cases, the closer together the lines are, the steeper the change. Weather charts of the Grand Banks for the early hours of October 30th show isobaric lines converging in one black mass on the north side of the storm. A storm with tightly packed isobaric lines is said to have a steep pressure gradient, and the wind will rush downhill, as it were, with particular violence. In the case of the storm off Sable Island, the wind starts rushing into the low at speeds up to a hundred miles an hour. As a NOAA disaster report put it blandly a year later, "The dangerous storm previously forecast was now fact."
The only good thing about such winter gales, as far as coastal residents are concerned, is that they tend to travel west-to-east offshore. That means their forward movement is subtracted from their windspeed: A seventy-knot wind from a storm moving away at twenty knots effectively becomes a fifty-knot wind. The opposite is also true—forward movement is added to windspeed—but that almost never happens on the East Coast. The atmospheric movement is all west-to-east in the midlatitudes, and it's nearly impossible for a weather system to overcome that. Storms may wobble northeast or southeast for a while, but they never really buck the jet stream. It takes a freakish alignment of variables to permit that to happen, a third cog in the huge machinations of the sky.
Generally speaking, it takes a hurricane.
By October 30th, the Sable Island storm is firmly imbedded between the remnants of Hurricane Grace and the Canadian high. Like all large bodies, hurricanes have a hard time slowing down, and her counterclockwise circulation continues long after her internal structures have fallen apart. The Canadian high, in the meantime, is still spinning clockwise with dense, cold air. These two systems function like huge gears that catch the storm between their teeth and extrude it westward. This is called a retrograde; it's an act of meteorological defiance that might happen in a major storm only every hundred years or so. As early as October 27th, NOAA's Cray computers in Maryland were saying that the storm would retrograde back toward the coast; two days later Bob Case was in his office watching exactly that happen on GOES satellite imagery. Meteorologists see perfection in strange things, and the meshing of three completely independent weather systems to form a hundred-year event is one of them. My God, thought Case, this is the perfect storm.
As a result of this horrible alignment, the bulk of the sword fleet—way out by the Flemish Cap—is spared the brunt of the storm, while everyone closer to shore gets pummeled. The 105-foot Mr. Simon, a hundred miles west of Albert Johnston, gets her aft door blown in, her wheelhouse flooded, and her anchor fastenings torn off. The anchor starts slamming around on deck and a crewman has to go out and cut it free. The Laurie Dawn 8 loses her antennas and then takes a wave down her breather pipes that stuffs one of her engines. Farther south down the coast the situation is even worse. A bulk carrier named the Eagle finds herself in serious trouble off the Carolinas, along with a freighter named the Star Baltic, and both struggle into port badly damaged. The ninety-foot schooner Anne Khristine, built 123 years ago, sinks off the coast of Delaware and her crew has to be saved by Coast Guard helicopters. The bulk carrier Zarah, just fifty miles south of the Andrea Gail, takes ninety-foot seas over her decks that shear off the steel bolts holding her portholes down. Thirty tons of water flood the crew mess, continue into the officers' mess, explode a steel bulkhead, tear through two more walls, flood the crew's sleeping quarters, course down a companionway, and kill the ship's engine. The Zarah is 550 feet long.