The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea. Sebastian Junger
over the deck, passes through an overhead block, and then bends straight back toward the stern. A steel ring guides it over the rail and into the water. That’s where the baiters stand. There’s a bait table on top of the stern rail—basically a wooden well with squid and mackerel in it—and a leader cart on either side. The leader carts are small drums spooled with hundreds of lengths of seven-fathom line, called gangions. Each gan gion has a #10 hook at one end and a stainless steel snap on the other.
The baiter reaches behind him and takes a gangion from his back-up man, who’s peeling them off the leader cart one at a time. The baiter impales a squid or mackerel onto the hook, snaps the gangion onto the mainline, and throws the whole thing over the side. The hook is easily big enough to pass through a man’s hand, and if it catches some part of the baiter’s body or clothing, he goes over the side with it. For this reason, baiters have complete control over the hook; no one handles the gangion while they’re on it. There’s also a knife holstered to the baiting table. A baiter might, conceivably, grab it fast enough to sever the line before going over.
Since swordfish feed at night, each hook is also fixed with a Cylume lightstick that illuminates the bait. Cylumes are cigar-sized plastic tubes with phosphorescent chemicals inside them that activate when the tube is snapped in half. They cost a dollar apiece, and a sword boat might go through five thousand in a trip. The hooks and lightsticks are spaced about thirty feet apart, but the exact interval is determined by the speed of the boat. If the captain wants to fish the hooks closer together, he slows down; if he wants to spread them apart, he speeds up. The typical speed for setting-out on the Grand Banks is six or seven knots. At that speed it takes about four hours to set out thirty miles of line.
Every three hooks the baiter snaps on a ball drop, which floats on the surface and keeps the longline from sinking to the bottom. A typical arrangement is to hang your line at five fathoms and dangle your hooks to twelve—that’s about 70 feet down. Depending on currents and the temperature breaks, that’s where swordfish like to feed. Every four miles, instead of a ball drop, the baiter clips on a highflyer. The highflyer is a float and aluminum pole with a radar-reflecting square on top. It bobs along on the surface of the ocean and shows up very clearly on the radar screen. Finally, every eight miles, a radio transmitter is attached. It has a big whip antenna that broadcasts a low-frequency signal back to the boat. This allows the captain to track the gear down if it parts off mid-string.
A fully-baited longline represents a significant amount of money, and captains have been known to risk the lives of their crew to get them back. Forty miles of monofilament line goes for $1,800. Each of the radio beacon buoys costs $1,800, and there are six of them on a longline. The polyballs cost six dollars apiece and are set every three hooks for one thousand hooks. The hooks are a dollar, the lightsticks are a dollar, the squid is a dollar, and the gangions are two dollars. Every night, in other words, a sword boat drops $20,000 worth of gear into the North Atlantic. One of the biggest disputes on a sword boat is whether to set out or not. Crews have hauled in a full gale because their captain misjudged the weather.
The baiting usually gets finished up late in the evening,and the Andrea Gail crew hangs their rain gear in the tool room and tramps into the kitchen. They eat dinner quickly, and when they’re done, Billy climbs up the companionway to take over the helm from Murph. He checks his loran bearings, which fix him on the chart, and the video plotter, which fixes him in relation to the mainline. The radar is always on and has a range of fifteen miles or so; the highflyers on the mainline register as small squares on the screen. The VHF is tuned to channel 16, and the single sideband is tuned to 2182 megahertz. They are both emergency channels, and if two boats need to communicate, they contact each other and switch to a separate working channel.
At 11PM the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) broadcasts a weather forecast, and the captains generally check in with each other afterward to discuss its finer points. By then most of the crew has already turned in—they’re into a stretch of twenty 20-hour work days, and sleep becomes as coveted as cigarettes. The bunks are bolted against the tapered sides of the bow, and the men fall asleep listening to the diesel engine and the smack of waves against the hull. Underwater, the prop whine and the cavitation of hundreds of thousands of air bubbles radiate outward into the ocean. The sound wraps around the foreshores of Newfoundland, refracts off the temperature discontinuity of the Gulf Stream, and dissipates into the crushing black depths beyond the continental shelf. Low frequency vibrations propagate almost forever underwater, and the throb of the Andrea Gail’s machinery must reach just about every life form on the Banks.
DaWN at sea, a grey void emerging out of a vaster black one. “The earth was without form and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” Whoever wrote that knew the sea—knew the pale emergence of the world every morning, a world that contained absolutely nothing, not one thing.
A long blast on the airhorn.
The men stagger out of their bunks and pour themselves coffee under the fluorescent lights of the galley, squinting through swollen lids and bad moods. They can just start to make out shapes on deck when they go out. It’s cold and raw, and under their slickers they have sweat shirts and flannel shirts and thermal tops. Dawn’s not for another hour, but they start work as soon as they can see anything. At 43 degrees north, a week after the equinox, that’s 5:30 in the morning.
The boat is at the start of the mainline, about one hundred miles outside Canada’s territorial limit. You generally set into the Gulf Stream and haul into the Gulf Stream, so the previous afternoon they’d set the gear while steaming west into the warm four-knot current. Then they’d turned around and headed east again, back to the start of the mainline. That gives the entire string the same amount of time in the water, and also keeps the boat from losing too much ground to the eastward currents. Billy has hunted down the beginning of the mainline with the radio beacon signals and now sits, bow toward America, ready to haul.
Haulback is less dangerous than setting-out because the hooks are coming in-board rather than going out-board, but the mainline still gets pulled at considerable velocity out of the water. The hooks can whiplash over the rail and snag people in all kinds of horrible ways; one crewman took a hook in the face that entered under his cheekbone and came out his eye socket. To make matters worse, the boat is rarely a stable platform, and rarely dry. Keeping one’s feet while eighteen inches of deck slop pour out the scuppers can require the balance of an ironworker in a sleet storm.
Nevertheless, you’re hauling up your lottery ticket, and even the most jaded deckhand wants to know what he’s hit. The line has been unhooked from the stern guide-ring and now comes onboard through a cut-out in the starboard rail and into the overhead block. The captain steers the boat from an auxiliary helm on deck and runs up to the wheelhouse from time to time to check the radar for other boats in their path. The man at the line is called the hauler, and it’s his job to unclip the gangions and hand them back to the coder, who pulls the bait off and wraps them around the leader cart. Being a hauler is a high-stress job; one hauler described having to pry his fingers off the hydraulic lever at the end of the day because he was so tense. Haulers are paid extra for the trip and are chosen because they can unclip a gangion every few seconds for four hours straight.
A hooked swordfish puts a tell-tale heaviness in the line, and when the hauler feels that, he eases off on the hydraulic lever to keep the hook from tearing out. As soon as the fish is within reach, two men swing gaff hooks into his side and drag him on board. If the fish is alive, one of the gaffers might harpoon him and haul him up on a stouter line to make sure he doesn’t get away. Then the fish just lays there eyes bulging, mouth working open and shut. If it’s a good haul there are sometimes three or four half-dead swordfish sloshing back and forth in the deck wash, bumping into the men as they work. A puncture wound by a swordfish bill means a severe and nearly instantaneous infection. As the fish are brought on board their heads and tails are sawn off, and they’re gutted and put on ice in the hold.
Mako shark eat pretty much what swordfish do, so occasionally longliners haul mako up as well. They’re dangerous, though: A mako once bit Murph so badly that he had to be helicoptered back to shore. (Touching even a severed mako head can trigger it to bite.) The rule for mako is that they’re not considered safe until they’re on ice in the hold. For that reason some