Greenlaw attributes that success to the superior equipment and crew on the Hannah Boden. "I had the best of everything," she said. "Guys really wanted to work on our boat so we always got the best crews."     She saw little of her beloved Isle au Haut during the 16 years she worked as a commercial fisherman. A typical fishing trip lasted a month, after which the boat would dock for two to three days, reprovision, repair equipment and head out to sea again.     Five days of steady steaming were required to reach the GrandBanks. Upon arriving there, the crew would set out a 40-mile line with 1,000 hooks, Greenlaw says, and from that point until a decision was made to head home, "you were fishing all the time."     For 10 to 20 days, the routine consisted of "work, work, work, work, work, eat, sleep," Greenlaw said. The crew typically slept three hours or less. They stayed in their bunks until called to the deck, passing up breakfast for a few extra minutes of rest. "Sleep time was so precious they wanted to use every minute of it," Greenlaw said. "They would throw on their boots and oil gear and be on deck, half awake but ready to work in five minutes. By seven a.m. everybody was starving so somebody would run in and throw a frozen pizza in the oven and that would be breakfast. One summer for four months I ate frozen pizza for breakfast every day."     The Grand Banks breeds bad weather, especially in the fall, and the Hannah Boden often was fishing under difficult conditions, Greenlaw says. "We always had our gear in the water unless it was blowing fifty or sixty [knots]," she said. "Guys from Florida would come up and it would be blowing thirty or forty and they wouldn't be fishing. If you aren't fishing in those conditions you might as well go home, because it isn't going to get much better."
Fishing in heavy seas is miserable for the crew who must wrestle and gut 100-pound fish on a slippery deck, Greenlaw says. But with $40,000 in expenses to cover on every trip, "you need to be catching fish."     Martha Greenlaw knew how bad the weather could be, and worried constantly. "I was always frightened when Linda went out [to the Grand Banks] after August," she said. "I was scared to death," she said, during the nor'easter of 1991, depicted in Junger's book. Linda's boat was far out to sea, out of radio contact, and people were beginning to fear the worst. The seas were so large, Junger wrote, that a 542-foot cargo vessel--more than five times as large as the Hannah Boden--was "forced to abandon course and simply steer to survive."     Greenlaw says the worst effects of the storm didn't reach her boat, for which she is thankful. "We were fortunate to be east of where the worst of the storm hit, so for us it was more of a hassle than a life-and-death kind of thing," she said. "We weren't biting our fingernails and praying to God to save us."     For two days and two nights, Greenlaw stayed on the radio with captains of boats in the teeth of the gale. Their reports were unsettling. Bolted down equipment weighing thousands of pounds was ripped off of decks by 100-foot waves. "It was pretty scary listening to guys on those other boats," she said.     All radio contact with the Andrea Gail was lost at the height of the storm and Greenlaw says she feared something terrible had happened. She was right. The Andrea Gail went down with hardly a trace. Greenlaw's crew had one last, eerie reminder of their friends when, after the storm subsided, they sailed past oil drums with the letters AG on the side. To this day, nobody knows when or where the Andrea Gail sank.     The worst part of the experience, she says, was returning to Gloucester, Mass., and facing the family members of the men from the Andrea Gail. "People would ask, `What did he say when you last talked to him?' or `Do you think they're in a life raft?' It was awful," she said.     Two years later, her boat was caught in a storm nearly as fierce, but this time they weren't spared the worst of it. Greenlaw recalls waves six stories high; so massive that they obliterated the Hannah Boden from radar screens.     Greenlaw downplays the seriousness of her severe weather experiences. James Greenlaw says this may be an extension of the mental toughness she has developed to deal with the dangers of her job. "She's a professional, and dealing with the weather is part of what she does," he said. "I imagine if you or I had been on that boat in that storm we would talk about it much differently."     She is the antithesis of a self-promoter, modest about her achievements and insistent that her gender not be used as the fulcrum for telling her story. "I'm not a feminist in any way, shape or form," she said. "I didn't have to overcome a lot of barriers because I was a woman." Like it or not, though, her excellence in a field dominated by men has placed her in the pantheon of pioneers whose lives symbolize women's progress.     Greenlaw always has followed a path of her own making. When she was 4 years old, recalls her mother, Linda joined in boys' games when the girls in her neighborhood wanted to play with dolls. "She wanted to be Daniel Boone," Martha Greenlaw said.     Greenlaw says her gender was never an issue with other fishermen, although it did provide grist for good-natured teasing occasionally. "I remember one trip when we were doing very well. We caught about a hundred fish in one day, which is like a quarter of the entire trip. That night on the radio when everybody was comparing notes, I said that we had caught a hundred fish. Most of the other boats had caught 20 or 25. One of the captains came on and said, `Go home and bake a cake.'"     Male boat captains often are surprised when they meet the 5' 3" Greenlaw that she is so small. She recalls that a fellow Grand Banks fisherman to whom she had talked on the radio many times called her "a little girl with a big boat" when they finally met in person. "He was expecting me to be this two hundred-pound Amazon, I guess," she said. "I don't know why because there is no stereotypical sized man who fishes, they come in all shapes and sizes. But I get that a lot; people often say, `I thought you'd be bigger.'" Two years ago, after spending more than 15 summers at sea, Greenlaw decided to buy her own lobster boat and go into business for herself. She owns 300 traps in the waters near Isle au Haut, which she fishes in a 35-foot boat, the Mattie Belle. She says the boat "felt like a tinker toy" compared to the Hannah Boden.     In mid-summer she rises as early as 3:30 a.m. to get bait from the local co-op and is pulling in traps with the first streaks of light. She says it's easy work compared to offshore fishing. "Actually, lobstering is more like farming than fishing," she said. "You've got your own little piece of land and your own little crop. It's not like swordfishing where you're putting a hook in the water and trying to catch something on it."
She farms her plot from spring until late October or early November, pulls out her boat and heads south to captain a commercial boat out of Portland or Gloucester or ports farther south. For three years she ran a boat in the Caribbean and admits that winters there and summers in Isle au Haut are about as good as it gets. This winter, though, she is not fishing at all. She is writing her life story.      Simon and Schuster touched off a bidding war last fall when they approached her about publishing an autobiography. She eventually signed with Hyperion Books and hopes to have a manuscript finished this spring.     Neither her decision to write nor her withdrawal to the more composed, traditional life of lobstering necessarily signal the end of Greenlaw's offshore adventures. "I wouldn't want to say that Linda's fishing days are over," Martha said. "I wouldn't be surprised if she went back someday."     But Greenlaw says the business has lost some of its allure since recent load limit regulations were implemented. It's more difficult for swordfish boat owners to make money and for captains to distinguish themselves, she says. "If everybody has the same amount of fish in their boat, how do you tell the good fishermen from the bad ones? Anybody can catch thirty thousand pounds on a trip," she said.     Besides, she likes being home, she says. It allows her to fully enjoy her family and the beauty of Isle au Haut. And she is involved in island politics now, attempting to reclaim the lighthouse from the government, which decommissioned it several years ago.     She can sit on the deck of her family home, looking west past Robinson Point where the lighthouse casts its shadow near where her boat is moored, and imagine the men and women whose connection to the sea preceded hers. The salt that was is in their blood is in hers, too, and in the foghorn resting next to her wicker chair.