The Andrea Gail — Swallowed by a once-in-a-century storm, never found

The Andrea Gail, a 72-foot commercial swordfishing boat out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, was lost with her entire crew of six on or about 28 October 1991, somewhere east of Sable Island in the North Atlantic, in the storm later popularized as “the Perfect Storm.” No bodies were recovered and the vessel was never found. Her captain was Frank W. “Billy” Tyne Jr., 37; with him died David Sullivan, 29, and Robert “Bobby” Shatford, 30, both of Gloucester, Dale Murphy and Michael Moran of Bradenton Beach, Florida, and Alfred Pierre of New York City.

The boat sailed from Gloucester on 20 September 1991 for the swordfishing grounds of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, ranging out toward the Flemish Cap, roughly a thousand miles from home. By late October, with a full hold and failing ice, Tyne turned for port directly into the path of a meteorological convergence of rare violence: an extratropical low east of Nova Scotia that, blocked from its usual northeastward track, retrograded back toward the coast and absorbed the dying Hurricane Grace. Buoys in the region recorded seas of sixty feet and more, with one reading of 100.7 feet on the Scotian Shelf, the highest ever measured there. The Andrea Gail was steaming through the worst of it when she went silent.

The boat is remembered through Sebastian Junger’s 1997 book The Perfect Storm and the 2000 film drawn from it, which fixed her name and her crew in popular memory. But the documented core is stark and finite: a sound, well-found vessel and six experienced men, caught in open water with no margin of sea-room, sent down by a storm so anomalous that forecasters estimated its like at once in fifty to a hundred years. What exactly broke the Andrea Gail — a rogue wave, a knockdown she could not recover from, a swamping — cannot be known, because nothing came back but a scatter of debris.