The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Man Against the Sea - Tapa dura

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.

October 1991. The 'perfect storm' was that rare event, a once-in-a-century gale of such immense power and ferocity that it was perfect – that is, it could not have been any worse. One-hundred-foot waves and winds of 120 miles an hour transformed the ocean into a lethal maelstrom, the kind of nightmare sailors only witness once in a lifetime. Aboard the Andrea Gail, a sword-fishing boat a month out from Gloucester, skipper Billy Tyne and his crew find themselves heading unwittingly towards its frenzied centre.