John Spillane prefers to believe that Smith was knocked out on impact. He was weighed down by a lot of gear, and he must have lost position during his fall and hit the water flat. Spillane's only memory of the fall is exactly that: starting to flail and thinking, "My God, what a long way down." Those words, or something very like them, are probably the last thoughts that went through Rick Smith's mind.
WHILE aircraft are crisscrossing the waters off the coast of Maryland, an even larger search continues for the Andrea Gail. Fifteen aircraft, including a Navy P-3 transferred from the Smith search, are flying grids southwest of Sable Island, where a life raft would most likely have drifted. A rumor ripples through Gloucester that Billy Tyne called someone on a satellite phone the night of the 29th, but Bob Brown chases the rumor down and tells the Coast Guard it's bogus. Half the boats in the sword fleet—the Laurie Dawn 8, Mr. Simon, Mary T, and Eishin Maru—sustain considerable damage and cut their trips short. The eastern half of the fleet misses the full fury of the storm ("Oh, we only had about seventy-knot winds," Linda Greenlaw recalls), but such extreme weather generally ruins the fishing for days, and most of the eastern boats head in as well.
Nothing is seen or heard of the Andrea Gail until November 1st when Albert Johnston, steaming for home, plows straight through a cluster of blue fuel barrels. They're a hundred miles southwest of Sable, and they all have AG stencilled on the side. "The barrels went down either side of the hull, I didn't even have to change course," says Johnston. "It was spooky. You know, just a few fuel barrels, that's all that was left."
An hour later Johnston passes another cluster, then a third, and calls their position in to the Coast Guard. The barrels don't, by themselves, mean the Andrea Gail went down—they could have just washed off the deck—but they're not a good sign. The Canadian and American Coast Guards keep widening the search area without finding anything; finally, on November 4th, things start to turn up. A Coast Guardsman on a routine beach patrol around Sable Island finds a propane tank and radio beacon with Andrea Gail painted on them. The beacon is for locating fishing gear and has been switched on, which may have been a desperate attempt to surround the stricken boat with as many electronically active objects as possible. Normally they're stowed in the "off" position.
And then, on the afternoon of November 5th, an EPIRB washes up on Sable Island. It's an orange 406-megahertz model, built by an American company named Koden, and the ring switch has been turned off. That means that it can't signal even if it hits the water. The serial number is 986. It's from the Andrea Gail.
Like the bottled note thrown overboard from the schooner Falcon a century ago, the odds of something as small as an EPIRB winding up in human hands are absurdly small. And the odds of Billy Tyne disarming his EPIRB—there's no reason to, it wouldn't even save batteries—are even smaller. Bob Brown, Linda Greenlaw, Charlie Reed, no one who knows Billy can explain it. The fourteen-page incident log kept by the Canadian Coast Guard records the discovery of the propane tank and the radio beacon, but not of the EPIRB. The entire day, in fact, that the EPIRB is found—November 5th, 1991—is missing from the log. Rumors start creeping around Gloucester that the Coast Guard did pick up an EPIRB signal when the Andrea Gail was in trouble, but conditions were too severe to go out. And when, against all odds, the EPIRB washes up on Sable Island, the Coast Guard switches it off to cover themselves.
Whether the rumors are fair or not, they're in some ways beside the point. Conditions severe enough to frighten the Coast Guard are severe enough to prevent a rescue, and by the time the EPIRB started signalling—if it ever did—the crew of the Andrea Gail were probably doomed anyway. Judging by the rescue attempts off Long Island, even a helicopter hovering directly over the Andrea Gail crew would have been powerless to help them. Regardless, the EPIRB is duly transported back to the United States for inspection by the Federal Communications Commission.
On November 6th, a Canadian pilot spots an uninflated life raft just off the Nova Scotia coast, but there's no one inside it, and he loses sight of it before it can be recovered. Two days later the Hannah Boden, steaming home after three weeks at sea, spots another cluster of fuel barrels marked AG on the side, but there's still no sign of the boat. Finally, a half hour before midnight on November 8th, the search for the Andrea Gail is permanently suspended. She's been missing for almost two weeks, and planes have searched 116,000 square miles of ocean without finding any survivors. All they turned up was a little deck gear.