15 years ago New England was battered by a nor'easter known as "The Perfect Storm". Most people have heard of the movie, or the book that was written about the sinking of the swordfishing boat "The Andrea Gail". The Andrea Gail was based out of Gloucester, MA... the area where I grew up. I actually was raised in Rockport, a small town just down the road from Gloucester.... BIG difference growing up there, but now to me they are both quaint New England towns. Gloucester is a fishing village, Rockport a tourist town.

The storm was a combination of a hurricane and a cold upper storm system. The storm formed over the Atlantic and moved backward toward the southwest while intensifying. The slow movement of the storm caused a long fetch of strong northeast winds from Nova Scotia to the New England Coast. This long fetch over the course of several days caused enourmous waves to crash into the coast. Since the storm formed out to sea, and moved back into the land it caught many people off guard. Most nor'easters move up the coast with rain or snow, along with the strong winds and high surf. You can see them coming. This one should have been safely out to sea... but then the winds started to increase, and the large waves arrived... before the rain.

I was at college at this time... a senior at Penn State. Of course the storm was the talk of the meteorology building, and was everyone's topic of conversation. The one thing I really remember was seeing observations from Thacher's Island, off the coast of Rockport. Thacher's Island is not an official weather reporting station, but it is run by the Coast Guard, and during this one historic storm, they were reporting wind and sea observations. I have never seen a weather report from the island since.

My college girlfriend (now my wife, Susan), was in school in New Hampshire. Her parents owned an oceanfront home in Gloucester which just barely survived the storm. The waves destroyed the road leading to their house. The ocean also reclaimed their front yard and driveway. Susan went back home to visit her family and tour the damage, but I was stuck in Pennsylvania.

At the time, this storm was known as the Halloween storm, but with the book and movie, has since become known as "The Perfect Storm". The loss of life aboard the Andrea Gail makes this a tragic storm, but it is something that Gloucester has dealt with before. The Fisherman's Memorial honors "They that go down to the sea in ships", and the monument mentions some of my ancestors. Yesterday the Weather Channel was broadcasting from Gloucester, along the Back Shore, and from The Crow's Nest, a bar made famous by the book and movie. Before 1991, I never went into the Crow's Nest. It was a tough, fisherman's bar with a bad reputation. Since the movie, while fishermen still frequent the place, it is also somewhat of a tourist destination.

-Frank