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LINDA GREENLAW One of the few women involved in the commercial fishing industry, Linda Greenlaw is perhaps the only female ever to captain a swordfishing boat, working the waters east of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. One of the top-producing swordboat captains, she prefers the term “fisherman” to “fisherwoman.” “I am a woman,” she says, “I am a fisherman . . . I am not a fisherwoman, fisherlady, or fishergirl. If anything else, I am a 37-year-old tomboy. It’s a word I have never outgrown.” |
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Although she has been fishing commercially for more than 18 years, she has only recently gained notoriety for her part in The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger, in which Junger describes her as “one of the best captains, period, on the entire East Coast.” Her boat, the Hannah Boden, was the sister ship to the doomed Andrea Gail, which disappeared in the disastrous 1991 storm that would become the focus of Junger’s best selling book. The Perfect Storm was made into a much-anticipated feature film that released during the summer of 2000. Greenlaw, an author herself, penned the book, The Hungry Ocean in 1999, telling the story of a month-long swordfishing trip she embarked upon that took her more than 1,000 nautical miles out to sea. The book quickly became a smash-hit national best-seller. In their review of the book, Amazon.com wrote: “Greenlaw’s straightforward, uncluttered prose underscores the qualities that make her a good captain, regardless of gender: fairness, physical and mental endurance, obsessive attention to detail. But, ultimately, Greenlaw proves that the love of fishing—in all of its grueling, isolating, (and) suspenseful glory—is a matter of the heart and blood, not the mind. ‘I knew that the ocean had stories to tell me,’ she says, ‘all I needed to do was listen.’” Starting out as a cook and deckhand aboard a swordboat during her summer breaks from college, Linda had worked her way into the captain’s chair by 1986. Linda has skippered boats from Newfoundland to Brazil and has enjoyed a number of types of fishing, including harpooning and long-lining for sword, dragging for squid, tub-trawling for halibut, and trapping lobster and crab. Presently, she works her own boat inshore, lobstering the water surrounding her home on Isle Au Haut, a small island off the coast of Maine. Greenlaw’s new book, already a national best-seller, The Lobster Chronicles: Life on a Very Small Island, is a return to her roots, a moving story of her adventures as a lobsterman, fighting the weather, surviving the seasons, and the 47 eccentric full-time residents of the her tiny island home. Linda Greenlaw was raised and educated in Maine. She graduated from Colby College in 1983, where she majored in English. The Hungry Ocean is her first book. (Source: Keppler Associates, Inc.) |
