VANITY FAIR NOMINATES Linda Greenlaw

Hall of Fame

ECAUSE after graduating from Colby College she mastered one of the most difficult and dangerous jobs in the world: offshore fishing in the North Atlantic, BECAUSE she was the first woman captain in the swordfishing fleet and one of the best captains, period, in the entire industry, BECAUSE she commands absolute respect from her crew even though "they're not exactly Boy Scouts," as she puts it. BECAUSE she remains goodnatured about the inevitable gibes that come in over the radio. ("Tick . . . tick . . . tick," a captain on another boat kept saying for hours on end. "What's that?" someone finally radioed back. "Linda's biological clock," the captain replied.) BECAUSE she has skippered a boat through two of the worst storms of the century: the Halloween Gale of 1991 and the March Gale of 1993. "When it first starts to blow, you get a whistling sound in the rigging," she says, "and then a moaning sound, and finally it sounds like a church organ, but a church organ played by a child." BECAUSE she was one of the last people to talk by radio to the six-man crew of the Andrea Gail, which went down in hurricane-force winds and monstrous waves off Nova Scotia in 1991. BECAUSE, since taking up lobster fishing, she has been embraced by the lobstermen, who have been known to threaten and harass newcomers to the business. BECAUSE 15 years of offshore fishing with some of the roughest characters anywhere has not dulled her enthusiasm for life—or for the sea.

SEBASTIAN JUNGER