The foghorn in the Isle au Haut home of Martha and James Greenlaw has a story.     Its provenance includes 13 fishermen stranded on the island, six miles off the Maine coast, when their boat ran aground offshore one night in 1903. After swimming through the frigid water, they dragged themselves onto the ledges of a pitch black shoreline, then tramped two miles through forest and across rocky outcroppings until they came to a small homestead near Robinson Point, a finger of granite that provides footing for a lighthouse. Soaked and shiver-ing, they knocked on the door.      The woman who answered their knock, Lillian Robinson, was Linda Greenlaw '83's great-grandmother. For the next 10 days she fed and nursed back to health the 13 fishermen, some of whom were suffering from pneumonia. With no money to repay the family that had saved their lives, the men retraced their steps along the shoreline, retrieved the box model foghorn that had washed ashore with them and presented it to the Robinsons as a gesture of thanks.     Succeeding generations of family members have prized the foghorn as a symbol of their sea heritage. It has survived nearly a century of children's play, salt air and cold storage. It still works.     Perhaps the foghorn's durability is a sign that Providence has seen fit to reward the Robinsons' deeds by granting their descendants protection from the sea. Linda Greenlaw, for one, has needed it.
Isle au Haut is a 45-minute boat ride from the nearest mainland town. Its only village, a haphazard collection of modest houses and a couple of small retail stores, is situated on the lip of a harbor where, between April and October, lobster boats bob in the gentle swell and offer a picturesque foreground for tourists' photographs. But tourists coming here don't find espresso bars or cute cafes with patio dining. This is a working island, as unpretentious as it is beautiful.     Greenlaw's family has been on Isle au Haut since before the Revolutionary War, taking their living for more than 20 generations from the fertile waters that surround it. Linda is the first member of the family whose fishing has made her famous.     She had achieved a certain celebrity in fishing circles even before Sebastian Junger's best-selling book, The Perfect Storm, in which he depicts the terrifying ordeal of fishing boat crews caught in the largest Atlantic storm of the 20th century--the Halloween Gale of 1991. As the captain of a swordfishing boat that survived, Greenlaw is prominently mentioned. She was one of the last people to talk with Billy Tyne, the captain of the doomed Andrea Gail.     Since The Perfect Storm Greenlaw has been featured in two television documentaries and courted by publishers and Hollywood producers interested in telling her story. Overwhelmed by the offers, she hired an agent last fall.     "It's been fun," she said. "I guess this is my fifteen minutes [of fame]."     Junger's book and the subsequent media exposure it generated haven't changed Greenlaw's relationship with the folks on Isle au Haut, who aren't the fawning sort, although Linda's mother, Martha Greenlaw, confides that, privately, Linda is revered. The 70 souls who ride out the island's inhospitable winters are warmed by Greenlaw's cheerful, infectious spirit that seems to occupy more space than her petite body accounts for. Neighbors beam with delight when she stops to chat, which she virtually always does upon meeting another islander.     One of the island's daily rhythms involves the arrival of the mailboat from Stonington, which on one day last September deposited, in addition to boxes of groceries, a handful of daytrippers. An English foursome from Leeds, island maps carried conspicuously in hand, were followed off by a middle-aged Ohio couple and two elderly women. Greenlaw, leaning on the rail of the pier watching the tourists disembark, hollered playfully to the boat captain, who was unloading cargo. "Anything for me?"     The man looked up and smiled as he placed a crate of Budweiser on the dock. "This yours?" he said, nodding toward the beer.     Greenlaw smiled, eased herself off the rail, waved and walked back up the pier to her well-worn Ford pickup. "I love this place," she said. "I want everybody who comes here to love it, too."     At the general store where she stops to get a soda, a man leaning against a truck calls out, facetiously, "Hey, can I get your autograph?" Greenlaw smiles and acknowledges him with a wave. He has just seen the article about Greenlaw, written by Junger, in the October issue of Vanity Fair. She is pictured in her lobster boat, wearing a slicker and work gloves, framed by bruise-colored clouds. "They tried to make it all stormy looking even though it was a nice day," she said of the photography crew. "They were disappointed the weather was so good."     Actually, autograph requests have become routine. When she showed up for a book signing by Junger in South Portland, the author introduced her to the crowd surrounding his table. Suddenly she became the object of the autograph seekers. She says she signs on "her spot" on the map in the preface of The Perfect Storm--45 degrees latitude and 45 degrees longitude: the fertile fishing grounds southeast of Newfoundland known as the Grand Banks, 1,500 miles from the U.S. mainland. That was the approximate position of her boat, the 100-foot Hannah Boden, when the storm of the century hit seven years ago. She and her crew were just far enough east to miss the apex of the storm's fury, says Greenlaw. "We were lucky."      grew up learning about boats from her father, James, and practiced her nautical skills during summers at the family's home on Isle au Haut. Occasionally her dad would allow her to operate the family's 38-foot boat. And sometimes, according to Martha, Linda sneaked a joy ride. "One summer when she was thirteen or fourteen she took the boat, without us knowing, and went up and down the island thoroughfare with her little brother and sister on board. She didn't go past the lighthouse because she knew we would see her. We didn't find out until years later," Martha said.
An exceptional student and an accomplished athlete at Topsham High School, Greenlaw continued the long line of family members attending Colby, following her father, James '57; uncles, Charles Greenlaw '50 and George Greenlaw '55; her grandfather Aubrey Greenlaw '20 and a great aunt, Alma Glidden '30. She expected to go to law school after Colby. "Nobody, myself included, thought for one second that I would make my living fishing," she said.     During the summer between Greenlaw's freshman and sophomore years at Colby, a high school friend invited Linda to work on her father's swordfishing boat, the Walter Leeman. The friend got seasick and had to be airlifted home; Greenlaw stayed and found her calling. She went back the next summer and the summer after that, using the money she made to help pay her way through Colby. By the time she graduated, she was, so to speak, hooked.     "I thought, `Well, I'll fish for a year and then go on to graduate school,'"she said. "When the year was over, I never gave graduate school another thought. I realized that I loved fishing and that I was good at it."     Martha Greenlaw admits she was disappointed with her daughter's decision to forego the law for a life at sea. She was even a little embarrassed, she says, when friends asked what Linda was doing and she had to reply, "fishing." "I mean, here's this talented girl who could do anything she wants and she's fishing?" Martha said. "People would look at me funny. But we accepted it. It's what she wanted to do."      When Alden Leeman, the owner of the Walter Leeman, bought a second boat, the Gloria Dawn, he made Greenlaw captain. Still in her 20s, Greenlaw began establishing her reputation as an expert fisherman. The industry is quite small and "everybody knows everybody," Greenlaw said, so word gets around. Bob Brown, regarded by many as the premier swordfishing captain in the U.S. fleet in his prime, hired Greenlaw to operate his boat the Hannah Boden in 1989. The boat had state-of-the-art equipment and attracted top crewmen, Greenlaw says. They caught a lot of fish.     Junger, describing Greenlaw in The Perfect Storm, wrote, "Not only is Greenlaw one of the only women in the business, she's one of the best captains, period, on the entire East Coast. Year after year, trip after trip, she makes more money than almost anyone else. When the Hannah Boden unloads her catch in Gloucester, swordfish prices plummet halfway across the world."