Fatal Forecast

April 30, 2007
Tougias (Ten Hours Until Dawn) narrates this dramatic, pared-down account of what happened to a pair of small fishing boats caught in the path of the devastating November 1980 storm off the coast of Cape Cod. When the storm blew up, the Fair Wind and the Sea Fever—captained by Peter Brown, son of legendarily hard-nosed Bob Brown, owner of The Perfect Storm's Andrea Gail—were fishing for lobster on Georges Bank, a plateau on the Atlantic floor that provides some of the richest fishing in the area, but is also the kind of place where “boats have a way of disappearing.” Due to a malfunctioning weather buoy, the National Weather Service drastically underestimated the magnitude of the storm that engulfed the two small boats. Seventy-foot waves overturned the Fair Wind, trapping inside the whole crew save for Ernie Banks, who made it into a life raft, while the Sea Fever was barely staying afloat under the watery onslaught. Tougias smartly leavens his spare narrative with similar worst-case scenarios that resulted when other seamen miscalculated the sea's wrathful power. Most astonishing of all is Banks's three-day odyssey of being tossed about like a cork in heaving, freezing seas; as related by Tougias, Banks's calm, reasoned actions in the face of astonishing adversity are practically a how-to lesson in high seas survival skills.