Fatal Forecast

August 1, 2024

Gr 5 Up-On a Friday in November 1980, two commercial fishing boats were working around Georges Bank, a rich shoal about 100 miles off Cape Cod. In part due to two damaged weather buoys, none of the fishermen expected the wild storm that whipped up overnight, with 70-foot waves and winds gusting over 80 miles per hour. One wave caused the Fair Wind, a 50-foot lobster boat, to pitchpole, trapping crewman Eddie Hazard inside the flooded pilot house. Hazard was able to swim clear of the doomed boat and get into a covered raft, only to spend the next 50 hours battling the storm alone while facing frostbite and hypothermia. In this young reader edition of his 2007 book, Tougias moves the perspective around several of the surviving captains and crew, including a Coast Guard search-and-rescue team out of Boston with their 210-foot cutter. The author has made a cottage industry of modern shipwreck and rescue tales and is superb at framing tense drama and building suspense with mounting nautical details. For some readers, it will be a thrill ride, others may find it too much. There is no source list, but Tougias includes a lengthy author's note, detailing how he came to contact crew members of the various crafts and spent several days interviewing Hazard. In addition, many details are drawn from a lawsuit against the weather service. VERDICT Middle and early high school readers who love a gripping adventure or survival story will tear through this one. Highly recommended.-Bob Hassett

Copyright 2024 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2024
Three small lobster boats unknowingly head into a massive storm in Georges Bank, off Cape Cod, in this nautical survival story that is a young readers' adaptation of Tougias' 2007 adult work of the same name. Thanks to governmental delay in replacing a defective weather-forecasting buoy, the crews of theFair Wind, Sea Fever, andSea Star set out in November 1980, unaware that they were heading straight into 87-knot winds and waves as tall as 10-story buildings. Highlighted by the nearly 50-hour ordeal of Ernie Hazard, the sole survivor of theFair Wind, on a leaky, wave-tossed life raft, the ensuing events were certainly harrowing. But despite the removal of some (but not enough) repetitive and extraneous detail from the original edition, Tougias' narrative remains a slog, alternating prolonged, similar-sounding passages featuring tough men struggling to endure pounding seas with flights of overwritten melodrama and insufficient efforts to individualize the people involved. Aside from a paragraph explaining the specially designed Givens raft, the author likewise neglects to provide specific descriptions of either the working boats or the vessels involved in the eventual rescue, details that would have helped readers better visualize events. While the material is promising, the presentation unfortunately fails to make the conditions seem real or the participants come alive for audiences. Tragic but at once both sketchy and too long. (list of characters and vessels, appendix, author's note)(Nonfiction. 10-14)

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Starred review from September 1, 2024
Grades 4-8 *Starred Review* Adding a second title to the True Survival series (following Abandon Ship!, 2023), Tougias adapts another of his adult books for middle-schoolers. This salty tale describes the harrowing three-day ordeal of two crews of lobster fishermen caught in a dangerous storm off the coast of Cape Cod in November 1980--a situation that occurred because the weather forecasting buoys weren't working properly. Tougias sets the scene and introduces readers to the crews from the Fair Wind and Sea Fever (a helpful list of characters and their vessels prefaces the main text) before describing their fate in riveting detail after the storm struck. Much of the story focuses on Fair Wind mariner Ernie Hazard, 33, who rode out huge waves in a raft for over 48 hours after a nearly 100-foot-tall wall of water capsized his boat. Tougias plunges readers into the action, rendering Hazard's experiences and the valiant rescue efforts of the Coast Guard and two other boat crews with pulse-pounding panache. While most survived, an appendix notes how several families of the deceased men briefly won a lawsuit against the National Weather Service until the judgment was reversed on appeal. Readers will be rooting for all these courageous men in this thrilling, edge-of-your-seat survival tale.

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