So far, though, Billy’s second trip on the Andrea Gail is off to a bad start. The boys have been drinking hard all week and everyone’s in a foul mood. No one wants to go back out. For the past several days almost every attempt to work on the boat has degenerated either into a fight or an occasion to walk across the street to the bar. Now it’s September 20th, late in the season to be heading out, and Tyne can barely round up a full crew. Alfred Pierre—an immense, kind Jamaican from New York City—is holed up with his girlfriend in one of the upstairs rooms at the Nest. One minute he says he’s going, the next minute he’s not—it’s been like that all day long. Bobby’s somewhere across town with a black eye and a hangover. Bugsy’s in an ugly mood because he hasn’t met a woman. Murph is complaining about money and misses his kid, and—the last straw—a new crew member walked off this morning without any explanation at all.
The guy’s name was Adam Randall, and he was supposed to replace Doug Kosco, who’d crewed on the previous trip. Randall had driven up from East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, with his father-in-law that morning to take the job; he pulled into the dirt parking lot behind Rose’s and got out to look the boat over. Randall was a lithe, intensely handsome thirty-year-old man with a shag of blond rock-star hair and cold blue eyes. He was a welder, an engineer, a scuba diver, and had fished his whole life. He knew an unsafe boat when he saw one—he called them “slabs”—and the Andrea Gail was anything but. She looked like she could take an aircraft carrier broadside. Moreover, he knew most of her crew, and his girlfriend had practically told him not to bother coming home if he didn’t take the job. He hadn’t worked in three months. He walked back across the lot, told his father-in-law that he had a funny feeling, and the two of them drove off together to a bar.
People often get premonitions when they do jobs that could get them killed, and in commercial fishing—still one of the most dangerous pursuits in the country—people get premonitions all the time. The trick is knowing when to listen to them. In 1871, a cook named James Nelson shipped aboard the schooner Sachem for a fishing trip to Georges Bank. One night he was awakened by a recurring dream and ran aft to tell the captain. For God’s sake get clear of the Banks, he begged, I’ve had my dream again. I’ve been shipwrecked twice after this dream.
The captain was an old salt named Wenzell. He asked what the dream was. I see women, dressed in white, standing in the rain, Nelson replied.
There was hardly a breath of wind and Wenzell was not impressed. He told Nelson to go back to bed. A while later a little breeze sprang up. Within an hour it was blowing hard and the Sachem was hove-to under close-reefed foresail. The hull started to open up and the crew manned the pumps.
They couldn’t keep up with the leak, and Wenzell desperately signalled to a nearby Gloucester schooner, the Pescador. The Pescador put dories over the side and managed to save the Sachem’s crew. Within half an hour the Sachem rolled over, settled bow-down into the sea, and sank.
Even today, instincts are heeded and fears are listened to. Randall walked off and suddenly Tyne had another site to fill. He called around and finally got twenty-eight-year-old David Sullivan. Sully, as he’s known, was mildly famous in town for having saved his entire crew one frigid January night. His boat, the Harmony, was tied to another boat when she began to take on water out at sea. Her crew started screaming for help but couldn’t wake up the men on the other boat, so Sully jumped overboard and pulled himself across on a rope, legs dragging through the icy North Atlantic. Sullivan, in other words, was a good man to have on board.
Tyne said he’d be over to pick him up in half an hour. Sully packed a bag and made a few phone calls to tell people he’d be away for a while. Suddenly his plans for that evening were off; his life was on hold for the next month. Billy showed up around two o’clock and they drove back to Rose’s just in time to see Bobby and Bugsy going at it. Wonderful, Sully thought. He stopped to say hello to Chris and then Billy sent him off to the Cape Ann Market to get the food for the trip. Murph went with him. Bulging in Sully’s pocket was $4,000 cash.
One of the things about commercial fishing is that everything seems to be extreme. Fishermen don’t work in any normal sense of the word, they’re at sea for a month and then home celebrating for a week straight. They don’t earn the same kind of money most other people do, they come home either busted or with a quarter-million dollars’ worth of fish in their hold. And when they buy food for the month, it’s not something any normal person would recognize as shopping; it’s a retail catastrophe of Biblical proportions.
Murph and Sully drive to the Cape Ann Market out on Route 127 and begin stalking up and down the aisles throwing food into their carts by the armful. They grab fifty loaves of bread, enough to fill two carts. They take a hundred pounds of potatoes, thirty pounds of onions, twenty-five gallons of milk, eighty-dollar racks of steak. Every time they fill a cart they push it to the back of the store and get another one. The herd of carts starts to grow—ten, fifteen, twenty carts—and people stare nervously and get out of the way. Murph and Sully grab anything they want and lots of it: ice cream sandwiches, Hostess cupcakes, bacon and eggs, creamy peanut butter, porterhouse steaks, chocolate-coated cereal, spaghetti, lasagna, frozen pizza. They get top-of-the-line food and the only thing they don’t get is fish. Finally they get thirty cartons of cigarettes—enough to fill a whole cart—and round their carts up like so many stainless steel cattle. The store opens two cash registers especially for them, and it takes half an hour to ring them through. The total nearly cleans Sully out; he pays while Murph backs the truck up to a loading dock, and they heave the food on and then drive it down to Rose’s wharf. Bag by bag, they carry $4,000 worth of groceries down into the fish hold of the Andrea Gail.
The Andrea Gail has a small refrigerator in the galley and twenty tons of ice in the hold. The ice keeps the baitfish and groceries from spoiling on the way out and the swordfish from spoiling on the way home. (In a pinch it can even be used to keep a dead crew member fresh: once a desperately alcoholic old fisherman died on the Hannah Boden, and Linda Greenlaw had to put him down the hole because the Coast Guard refused to fly him out.) Commercial fishing simply wouldn’t be possible without ice. Without diesel engines, maybe; without loran, weather faxes, or hydraulic winches; but not without ice. There is simply no other way to get fresh fish to market. In the old days, Grand Banks fishermen used to run to Newfoundland to salt-dry their catch before heading home, but the coming of the railroads in the 1840s changed all that. Suddenly food could be moved faster than it would spoil, and ice companies sprang up practically overnight to accommodate the new market. They cut ice from ponds in the winter, packed it in sawdust and then sold it to schooners in the summer months. Properly packed ice lasted so long—and was so valuable—that traders could ship it to India and still make a profit.
The market for fresh fish changed fishing forever. No longer could schooner captains return home at their leisure with a hold full of salt cod; now it was all one big race. Several full schooners pulling into port at once could saturate the market and ruin the efforts of anyone following. In the 1890s, one schooner had to dump 200 tons of halibut into Gloucester harbor because she’d been beaten into port by six other vessels. Overloaded schooners built like racing sloops dashed home through fall gales with every inch of canvas showing and their decks practically awash. Bad weather sank these elegant craft by the dozen, but a lot of people made a lot of money. And in cities like Boston and New York, people were suddenly eating fresh Atlantic cod.