About the Author
Linda
Greenlaw is a college-educated fishing boat captain. She defied her mother's
exhortations to go to law school and took up fishing the North Atlantic
instead.
Study Hard
She started working as a cook and deckhand on a swordboat after her
freshman year at Colby College in Maine, partly to pay for her education,
and partly to recapture the pleasure she had as a tomboy kid, fishing with
her Dad.
A scant six years later, she was made captain of the Hannah Boden, sister ship to the Andrea Gail. The Andrea Gail is the boat that went down in the storm depicted in Sebastian Junger's true-story book "The Perfect Storm."
In the winters she studied everything about sword fishing and boat engineering, and in the summers she made record catches. One person said that "the price of swordfish went down every time the Hannah Boden landed" because her catch was always so good.
Work Hard
Perhaps the most amazing thing about Greenlaw, aside, of course,
from the extraordinary fact that she is the only female fishing boat captain
in the North Atantic, is her sheer grit and persistence.
She is, according to Sebastian Junger "one of the best swordboat captains, period, on the East Coast." When asked how a woman can be so successful in such a male-only profession, she gives two answers:
- "Some men say they like to work on my boats because they are nicer to each other with a woman around."
- "No self-respecting fisherman would let himself be outworked by a woman."
It's not just her amazing ability to keep...on...working, however, that makes her such a good manager. She also worries. She plans. She takes responsibility. Even when her deckhand is her father, she's in charge. Gently, respectfully, but in charge, ready to make the hard decisions and solve the problems.
Get Lucky
Making a great fishing haul takes planning, understanding and hard work, but
it also takes either intuition or luck, whatever it is you call the ability
to be where the action is.
In interviews, Greenlaw is awed by the turn her life has taken. When asked if living through the perfect storm was a life-changing event, she says it wasn't, but that a few lines in Sebastian Junger's book, The Perfect Storm, certainly were.
After the success of Junger's book, and its depiction of Greenlaw, publishers started calling her, interested in pursuing "the female boat captain thing." At first, she said no, not wanting to give up a season of fishing for a season of writing. But when she kept getting the calls, and the offers kept getting more serious, she finally said yes.
Luck Favors the Prepared
Greenlaw approched writing with the same discipline she used when
fishing. Instead of waking up wondering how many fish she would catch that
day, she would wake up wondering how many pages she would write. She wrote
every day, and the result was The Hungry Ocean, a book on swordfishing
that was on the best-seller lists for months. This was followed a couple
of years later by The Lobster Chronicles, which also spent its
months on the best-seller lists.
Greenlaw no longer has to worry if she'll be able to make a living on the island. She still fishes for lobsters in lobster season, and she now writes in the off-season. Her next book, All Fishermen are Liars, is due for publication by Hyperion Press in July, 2004.
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