It was a ‘perfect’ storm- perfect, meteorologically, in that it could not be worse. It found its terrible heart 500 miles off the coast of Massachusetts, coming to fruition in 120 mile-an-hour winds and ten-storey waves. And into its path wandered the fishing boat Andrea Gail and her six-man crew.
The already legendary case of the passionate hostility of the sea and its ability to command the lives of those who draw their livelihoods from it, written with the vividness and narrative excitement of a novel
The 'perfect storm' is a once-in-a-hundred-years combination: a high pressure system from the Great Lakes, running into storm winds over an Atlantic island - Sable Island - and colliding with a weather system from the Caribbean: Hurricane Grace. This is the story of that storm, told through the accounts of individual fishing boats caught up in the maelstrom, their families waiting anxiously for news of their return, the rescue services scrambled to save them. It is the story of the old battle between the fisherman and the sea, between man and Nature, but here Nature is an awesome and capricious power that transforms the surface of the Atlantic into an impossible tumult of water walls and gaping voids, with the capacity to break an oil tanker in two, let alone the 72ft swordfishing boat Andrea Gail with her crew of eight. A typical Hurricane encompasses a million cubic miles of atmosphere and can contain enough energy to, in theory, meet the electric power needs of the UK for a decade. Except that a hurricane will not be controlled. In spare, lyrical prose The Perfect Storm describes what happened when the Andrea Gail looked into the wrathful face of the perfect storm.
