THE Andrea Gail TOOK NEARLY A WEEK TO REACH THE FISHING grounds. The six crewmen watched television, cooked and ate, slept, prepared the fishing gear, talked women, talked money, talked horse racing, talked fish, stared at the sea. Swordfishermen seldom eat swordfish when they're out. Like many ocean fish, it's often full of sea worms, four feet long and thick as pencils, and though the worms are removed prior to market, many of the men who catch swordfish consider it fit only for the landlubbing public. At sea a fisherman will eat steak, spaghetti, chicken, ice cream, anything he wants. On ice in the Andrea Gail's hold was $3,000 worth of groceries.

The boat arrived at the Grand Banks around September 26 and started fishing immediately. On the main deck was a huge spool of 600-pound-test monofilament, the mainline, which passed across a bait table and paid out off the stern. Baiters alternate at the mainline like oldtime axmen on a Douglas fir. They are expected to bait a hook with squid or mackerel every 15 seconds; at this rate it takes two men four hours to set 40 miles of line. After they are done they shower and retire to their bunks. Around four in the morning the crew gets up and starts hauling the line. A hydraulic drum on the wheelhouse deck slowly pulls it in, and the crew unclips the leaders as they come. When there's a fish at the end of a leader, deckhands catch it with steel gaffs and drag it, struggling, aboard. They saw the sword off, gut and behead the fish with a knife, and drop it into the hold.

The crew has dinner in midafternoon, baits the line again, and sets it back out. They might then have a couple of beers and go to bed.

The Andrea Gail had been out 38 days when the National Weather Service suddenly started issuing fax bulletins about a low-pressure system that was building over southern Quebec and heading out to sea: "DEVELOPING STORM 45N 73W MOVING E 24 KTS. WINDS INCREASING TO 35 KTS AND SEAS BUILDING TO 16 FT." Meanwhile, the Weather Service was keeping a close eye on the mid-Atlantic, where Hurricane Grace, which had developed in the vicinity of Bermuda two days before, was now tracking steadily northwest toward the Carolina coast.

It was Sunday, October 27, very late to be pushing one's luck on the Grand Banks. Most of the fleet was well to the east of Tyne, out on the high seas, but a 150-foot Japanese swordboat named the Eishan Maru and the 77-foot Mary T were fishing nearby. Tyne told Albert Johnston, the Mary T's captain, that he had 40,000 pounds of fish in his hold-an impressive catch-and now he was heading home.

The question was, could he make it through the Canadian storm that was rapidly coming his way? He would have to cross some very dangerous water while passing Sable Island, a remote spit 120 miles southeast of Nova Scotia, whose shoals are known to fishermen as the Graveyard of the Atlantic. That night Linda Greenlaw, the captain of Bob Brown's other longliner, the Hannah Boden, radioed in and asked Tyne if he'd received the weather chart. "Oh, yeah, I got it," Tyne replied. "Looks like it's gonna be wicked." They set some channels to relay information to Bob Brown and decided to talk the following night.

Though Billy Tyne had no way of knowing it, the heavy weather that was now brewing in the North Atlantic was an anomaly of historic proportions. Three years later, professional meteorologists still talk animatedly about the storm of '91, debating how it formed and exactly what role Hurricane Grace played in it all. Generally, hurricanes this late in the season are anemic events that quickly dissipate over land. Hurricane Grace, though, never made it to shore; a massive cold front, called an anticyclone, was blocking the entire eastern seaboard. Well off the Carolinas, Grace ran up against the cold front and literally bounced off. She veered back out to sea and, though weakened, churned northeast along the warm Gulf Stream waters.

At the same time, the low-pressure system that had developed over Quebec and moved eastward off the Canadian Maritimes was beginning to behave strangely. Normally, low-pressure systems in the region follow the jet stream offshore and peter out in the North Atlantic, the usual pattern of the well-known nor'easter storms. But this system did the opposite: On Monday, October 28, it unexpectedly stalled off the coast of Nova Scotia and began to grow rapidly, producing record high seas and gale-force winds. Then it spun around and headed back west, directly at New England, a reversal known as a retrograde.

Meteorologists still disagree on what caused the storm to grow so suddenly and then to retrograde. But the best theory offered by the National Weather Service and its Canadian equivalent, Environment Canada, is that it was caught between the counter-clockwise spin of the dying hurricane and the clockwise swirl of the anticyclone, creating a funnel effect that forced it toward the coast at speeds of up to ten knots. The farther west it tracked, the more it absorbed moisture and energy from the remnants of Hurricane Grace-and the more ferocious it became.

The technical name for the new storm was a "midlatitude cyclone." The people in its path, however, would later call it the No Name Hurricane, since it had all the force of a hurricane, but was never officially designated as one. And because the brunt of the storm would strike the eastern seaboard around October 31, it would also acquire another name: the Halloween Gale.