The Hungry Ocean: A Swordboat Captain’s Journey

Amazon.com Price: $10.65 (as of 10/10/2019 21:36 PST- Details)

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER–NOW AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK!

Known to millions of readers of The Perfect Storm as the captain of the Hannah Boden, sister ship to the Andrea Gail, Linda Greenlaw is often referred to as one of the vital best sea captains on the East Coast. Here she offers an adventure-soaked tale of her own, complete with danger, humor, and characters so colorful they seem to have been ripped from the pages of Moby Dick.

“A beautiful book . . . a story of triumph, of a woman not only making it but succeeding at the highest level in one of the male-dominated and most dangerous professions.” — Douglas Whynott, The New York Times Book Review

“An authentic, insightful account of the intensity of captaining a crew of strong men in an ocean which does what it wants.” — Daniel Hays, co-creator of My Old Man and the Sea

“A crystal-clear account of fishing the Grand Banks in a modern swordfish boat. Greenlaw is an excellent captainand an excellent author.” — John Casey, creator of Spartina
The term fisherwoman does not exactly roll trippingly off the tongue, and Linda Greenlaw, the world’s only female swordfish boat captain, isn’t flattered when people insist on calling her one. “I am a woman. I am a fisherman… It’s not that i am a fisherwoman, fisherlady, or fishergirl. If anything else, I am a thirty-seven-year-old tomboy. It’s a word I have never outgrown.” Greenlaw also happens to be one of the successful fishermen in the Grand Banks commercial fleet, though until the publication of Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm, “nobody cared.” Greenlaw’s boat, the Hannah Boden, was the sister ship to the doomed Andrea Gail, which disappeared in the mother of all storms in 1991 and became the point of interest of Junger’s book. The Hungry Ocean, Greenlaw’s account of a monthlong swordfishing go back and forth over 1,000 nautical miles out to sea, tells the story of what happens when things go right–proving, in the process, that every successful voyage is a study in narrowly averted disaster.

There is the weather, the constant danger of mechanical failure, the perils of controlling five sleep-, women-, and booze-deprived young fishermen in close quarters, not to mention the threat of a bad fishing run: “If we don’t catch fish, we don’t get paid, period. In short, there is not any labor union.” 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, in the long run, Greenlaw proves that the love of fishing–in all of its grueling, isolating, suspenseful glory–is a matter of the heart and blood, not the mind. “I knew that the ocean had stories to tell me, all I needed to do was listen.” –Svenja Soldovieri

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