Ms. Greenlaw, who as captain of the Hannah Boden featured prominently in Sebastian Junger's book The Perfect Storm, found that writing The Hungry Ocean after many years at sea wrought the single biggest change in her life thus far.

She explained, ``In the 12 months that I spent writing, I went to bed every night wondering not how many fish the next day might bring, as I had for the past 17 years, but instead, how many pages I would complete. My days were spent sitting at the computer rather than standing at the wheel of a boat. It was a difficult adjustment, but I worked hard and am happy with the results.''

In The Hungry Ocean, Greenlaw not only chronicles an exciting and dangerous voyage to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland aboard her commercial fishing boat, the Hannah Boden, but also describes many of the interesting, colorful characters she has worked with during her years as a fisherman.

For Greenlaw, catching fish is a passion. It was her love of the outdoors combined with the availability of boats in her childhood years that led her to take up fishing for a living, in spite of the fact that commercial fishing tops the list of dangerous occupations.

In the early '80s, while a student at Colby College, she spent her summers as a cook and deckhand aboard a swordboat. She graduated from Colby in 1983, and by 1986 the English major had become a boat captain.

Greenlaw has skippered boats from Newfoundland to Brazil. In addition to swordfishing in the Grand Banks region during the May-through-October season, her experience includes swordfishing around the Caribbean, bottom fishing with hooks and net in the Gulf of Maine and on Georges Bank, dragging for squid along the mid-Atlantic coast, fishing traps for lobster and crab in the canyons from the Canadian line to off Cape Hatteras, and tub-trawling for halibut on the tail of the Grand Banks. She now works her own boat inshore, lobstering the waters surrounding her home on Isle Au Haut.

Junger calls The Hungry Ocean ``the best book, period, I've ever read on fishing.'' He says, ``Not only does Linda Greenlaw have an extraordinary story to tell, but she's a first rate writer. She has captured offshore fishing life in a brutally honest, funny way. Anyone who loves the sea will love this book.''