The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea by Sebastian Junger Page B

tons of ice a day, but the compressor is malfunctioning and cannot even handle half that. Day by day, in other words, the quality of the fish is starting to drop; a loss of just fifty cents a pound would mean $20,000 off the value of the catch. That could only be offset by catching more fish, which in turn means staying out even longer. It's a classic cost-benefit dilemma that fishermen have agonized over for centuries.
    And then there's the crew. They get ugly at about the same rate as badly iced fish. By the end of a long trip they may be picking fights with one another, hoarding food, ostracizing the new members—acting, in short, like men in prison, which in some ways they are. There are stories of sword boats coming into port with crew members manacled to their bunks or tied to the headstay with monofilament line. It's a kind of Darwinism that keeps the boats stocked with rough, belligerent men who have already established themselves in the hierarchy. Billy would never permit that sort of viciousness on his boat—the crew are all friends, more or less, and he intends to keep it that way—but he knows you can lock six men together for only so long before someone gets crazy. They've been at sea three weeks and are looking at a minimum of two more. If they're going to salvage anything from the trip, they've got to catch some fish in a hurry.
    Billy keeps talking with the other captains, studying surface temperature charts, analyzing the water column with his Doppler. He's looking for that temperature discontinuity, that concentration of plankton, mackerel, and squid. In five good sets they could turn this trip around. He knows it. Ice or no ice, he's not going back in until they do.
    BILLY TYNE has the only private room on the Andrea Gail, which is standard for the captain. On some boats the captain's quarters are upstairs behind the bridge, but Billy's is in a small room next to the head; it's about the size of a private sleeper on an Amtrak train. There's a seabag full of dirty clothes and a few photos taped to the wall. The photos are of his two daughters, Erica and Billie Jo. Seven years ago, when Billie Jo was born, Billy stayed home to take care of her while his wife worked. Billie Jo got used to having a father around and took it hard when he went back on the boat. Erica was born four years later and has never known anything different; as far as she's concerned, fathers are men who go away for weeks at a time and come home smelling of fish.
    The rest of the crew are wedged into a dark little room across from the galley. The bunks are stacked along the inner wall and the starboard hull, and the floor is covered with the detritus that accumulates around young men—clothes, cassette tapes, beer cans, cigarettes, magazines. Along with the magazines are dozens of books, including a few ragged paperbacks by Dick Francis. Francis writes about horse racing, which seems to appeal to swordfishermen because it's another way to win or lose huge amounts of money. The books get passed around the fleet "at about four hundred miles an hour," as one swordfisherman put it, and they've probably been to the Grand Banks more times than the men themselves. Most fishermen tape photos of their girlfriends to the wall, alongside pages ripped from Penthouse and Playboy, and the crew of the Andrea Gail are undoubtedly no different.
    The galley is the largest room on the boat, other than the fish hold. At first glance it could almost be a kitchen in a house trailer: wood veneer, fluorescent panel lights, cheap wood cabinets. There's a four-burner gas stove, an industrial stainless steel refrigerator, and a Formica table angled into the forward wall. A bench runs along the length of the port side, and there's a single porthole above the bench. It's too small for a man to wiggle out of. A door at the aft end of the galley exits into a small holding area and a companionway that goes down into the engine room. The companionway is protected by a