Headscratchers / The Perfect Storm

• The helicopter crew after ditching their craft and trying to meet up. At one point they tell each other to split up to find a missing crew member. On the surface of an ocean featuring at least 30 foot waves. They're MUCH better off sticking together.
• How come no one on the Andrea Gail ever puts on a lifejacket?
  • That's a really good question, but at the end it wouldn't have helped them. In such extreme conditions - hurricane force winds, 70 to 100 foot seas - there was no hope of survival once the boat went down. There's a reason most of the crew deliberately chose to go down with it.
  • We don't know whether they chose to go down with the ship in real life, and in the movie, everyone save Bobby and Billy had no choice in the matter. Lifejackets almost certainly wouldn't have saved them out in the storm, but they would have given them a marginal sliver of possibility of someone surviving.
    • It's quite likely they would freeze to death in the North Atlantic before anyone could possibly find them in such a storm. In that situation, what's the point?
    • Because "Almost certainly going to die, but might not by some miracle" is a better chance than "Absolutely beyond a shadow of a doubt going to die and then sink."
• The broken ice machine was the justification for needing to go through the storm. It’s outright stated that their catch will spoil if they don’t get back soon. However we also see the hold filled to the brim with ice. Then they seal it up. That much ice in a sealed container would take weeks if not months to melt. Think of a pile of snow created by a plow in a parking lot and how it’ll still be there for weeks after the rest of the snow has melted. (And that’s exposed to sunlight and snow melts faster than ice). Surely they could’ve just navigated away from the storm for a couple of days and then headed back without any issues. Worse comes to worse they could’ve just gone to nearby Newfoundland where they could’ve easily gotten the ice machine fixed.