Linda Greenlaw recalls the day she forgot to pack her Chap Stick. It could happen to any woman. But Greenlaw's lips are "very sensitive to sun, wind, and salt". And Greenlaw was going fishing. In hurricane season. One thousand, five hundred miles offshore. For 30 days. The owner of the boat, Bob Brown, refused to let Greenlaw, the captain of his ship, make a last-minute dash to a pharmacy. "Here, take mine," he said. Greenlaw pocketed the proffered ancient, crusty tube and cast off for the Grand Banks. From the starboard rail, one of her crew wondered aloud, "What would he have done if she said she needed Tampax?"
The anecdote says much about a tough world and a tough skipper who happens to be female. "I am a woman," 39-year-old Greenlaw declares, "I am a fisherman . . . I am not a fisherwoman, fisherlady, or fishergirl." According to Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm, she is also "one of the best sea captains, period, on the East Coast". She is probably the world's only female swordboat captain.
"I have been fishing commercially for 17 years," Greenlaw observes, "and up until the summer of 1997, nobody cared. A couple of lines in The Perfect Storm changed my life more than any fish or any hurricane."
Now famous as the skipper of the Hannah Boden, sister ship to the doomed Andrea Gail, Greenlaw survived "the perfect storm" of October 1991 and lived to see herself played on screen by Mary Ellen Mastrantonio (whose hair, she notices, is far more manageable than her own).
Greenlaw's first book, The Hungry Ocean, currently nibbles at the number one spot on the New York Times bestseller list and she is working on a second account of the swordfishing life. The book tour has been fun, the success is nice, but she hates writing. She would rather be at sea. "I miss catching fish," she confesses, "I miss that every day."
Watching The Perfect Storm was an overwhelming reminder of every mariner's nightmare. "I never expected the special effects to be that good," she admits. Watching the film "wore me out. I felt as if I had just gone through it all over again." The real thing, of course, lasted a lot longer than Wolfgang Petersen's film.
That October night in 1991, Greenlaw was 1,500 miles out from Gloucester, Massachusetts when "the storm of the century" reached full strength. "I was on my way home," she recalls. "But to head in would have meant going through the worst weather imaginable. So we tied everything down and rode it out."
It was not her first hurricane. When lesser mortals begin raving hysterically, Greenlaw is the sort of captain who draws up emergency-task lists. A typical instruction reads: "Get away from the Gulf Stream."
Six hundred miles west of the Hannah Boden, the Andrea Gail was about to go down. "That was the scariest part," Greenlaw stresses, her brisk voice shaking a little even now. "Hearing radio messages from men I had known for years, men who had fished all their lives, shouting that they were frightened for their lives. They kept telling me this was the worst weather they had ever seen. And it was headed my way."
A few days after the storm, off Sable Island, Greenlaw spotted a white fuel-drum from the Andrea Gail bobbing in the water. Nothing else. "She must have gone down far quicker than she did in the movie," Greenlaw says. "They must have been taken by surprise. In the movie they decide to ride through it. But that wasn't how it happened. The storm formed over them when they were already heading home."
Home for much of Linda Greenlaw's working life has been a 100-foot swordboat - often working for "the most hated man from Puerto Rico to Newfoundland," the late, reputedly ruthless Bob Brown - with six often disgruntled men who are supposed to obey a woman who measures just 5 foot three inches and weighs about 130 pounds. If she were a swordfish, they might throw her back. But Greenlaw is a relentless fisherman. In one voyage she can land 56,000 lbs of fish that may fetch a seasonal high of £4 a pound, making each crewman's share - perhaps £12,000 for 30 days' work, double that for the captain - well worth the hardship.
Throwing her weight around to get such results has rarely been necessary. "No self-respecting fisherman will allow himself to be outworked by a woman," she explains, "And I am a very hard worker. It's my only real asset. After that, if you're optimistic and focused the crew will automatically follow your lead." No alcohol, drugs or firearms are allowed on board. "You couldn't take enough booze for most fishermen," Greenlaw observes. "Two beers a day wouldn't work. So it's better to say: `No booze. Make up for it when you're ashore.' "
The rules are not foolproof. One night, she woke to find her boat on a collision course with an ocean-going barge. The sleeping crewman who was supposed to be on watch got a backhanded slap in the face from Greenlaw and a volley of abuse that lasted well into the following day. He was also fired. One voyage ended prematurely when Greenlaw discovered three of her crew were practising drug addicts. She steamed straight home and deposited them on the dock. Then there was the halibut-fishing disaster, when cigarettes ran out, food ran low, tempers ran high and the catch was so bad that the crew christened Greenlaw "Moby Dickless". She is more affectionately known as "Ma" or "the girl".
"It's a tough call," she observes of selecting a crew. "The best workers are the ones with the best attitude." Like James Galvin, from Co Cork, for instance, now a taxi driver in Ireland, who fished with Greenlaw and whom she considers "one of the best men you can have aboard".
From the beginning, Greenlaw learned there was nothing mysterious about the hierarchy on board a fishing vessel. As Alden Leeman, a revered mentor, explained to her when she was a young, impatient crewman: "The main difference between captain and crew is, the crew always wants to go home and the captain is the one asshole who wants to stay."
The Hungry Ocean, an account of a 30-day swordfishing voyage aboard the Hannah Boden, reveals not only Greenlaw's determination to stay out in foul weather until the hold is full but also her understanding of her prey, her crew, her stretch of ocean and her technology. "The most successful fisherman of my generation are pseudo-scientists, fishing gear engineers, and electronics wizards," she writes, describing in detail how swordfish are caught in the computer age.
The actual work, of course, is still backbreaking, the preparation sheer drudgery and disappointment inevitable. ("We didn't catch many," one of Greenlaw's crew jokes on a bleak night, "but they sure were small.")
Then there is the cold, the exhaustion and, of course, the weather. The worst storm Linda Greenlaw ever experienced was in 1993. The wind had blown ferociously for 24 hours and the Hannah Boden was close to shore . . . "We couldn't see anything. It was totally dark. The roaring and groaning were horrible," Greenlaw recalls. "Two tankers were jogging alongside us, trying to get to New York, and even they were in trouble so we kept in radio contact." Greenlaw joked with them that when the wind got to over 100 knots she didn't want to hear about it. An hour later, she overheard one tanker captain telling the other " . . . But she said she didn't want to know . . . "
It took the death of a shipmate to make Greenlaw briefly consider quitting the sea. A new crew-member and a hard drinker ashore, he died quietly in his bunk, possibly of liver failure, and was stored in the bait freezer for the seven-day journey back to port. Greenlaw took a month off.
The death of the men on the Andrea Gail was different. She did not have to handle their bodies, but each time she sails past Sable Island she is chilled by their ghostly presence. In the movie version of The Perfect Storm, Linda Greenlaw delivers a moving tribute to her drowned friends at their funeral. The real captain, characteristically, sets the record straight. "The memorial service was held quite a while after the sinking," she remarks. "By that time I was back out fishing."
Now a lobsterman in her native Maine, Greenlaw talks about settling down (her sister calls The Hungry Ocean "a 260-page personals ad") but lately her stomach has been growling. "This is the first symptom of sea fever," she writes, "a passion for bluer waters and bigger fish."
The Hungry Ocean by Linda Greenlaw is published by Hodder & Stoughton, price £14.99 in UK hardback; £6.99 paperback). The film The Perfect Storm is on general release