In 1991, Crash Barry moved to Maine's most remote inhabited island to work as a sternman aboard a lobster boat. On Matinicus, twenty miles out to sea, population fifty, the ferry visited nine times a year and airplanes only landed when there was no fog, rain, snow, sleet or darkness. Tough Island is a gritty memoir and guided tour of a unique society inhabited by resourceful individuals and scoundrels.Stories of danger and drugs, sex and violence, death and sorrow, all unfold in a landscape of breathtaking beauty.

Steeped in Maine island lore, this century-spanning double mystery pits a renegade fishing community against an unhappy child-bride of the 1820s, a defiant twenty-first-century teen, and a hard-drinking botanist--Dr. Gil Hodges--who escapes to the island of Matinicus to avoid a crazed ex-lover and verify a rumored 22 species of wild orchid, only to find himself hounded by the ghost of a child some two-hundred years dead.If Gil's hoping for peace and quiet, he's clearly come to the wrong place. Generations of infighting among loose-knit lobstering clans have left them openly hostile to outsiders. When a beautiful, bed-hopping stranger sails into the harbor, old resentments re-ignite and people begin to die--murders linked, through centuries of violence, to a diary whose secrets threaten to tear the island apart.

What's it like to live on an island twenty--two miles out to sea? Where there are only three dozen winter residents? Where the local economy is lobstering? Period. Where your most reliable source of transportation off the island may be a small Cessna and the airstrip is dirt (or snow or mud)? Where, if the forecaster says the storm is headed safely out to sea, you know it's coming your way? Eva Murray moved to Matinicus in 1987 to teach in its one--room school. She married an island man and stayed to raise their family there. Over the years she's written a number of lively columns and articles for mainland publications. These are the stories of that unique community, of an interdependence that is all too rare these days but necessary for this island's survival.

Here, entirely updated, is the latest edition of the most complete, authoritative cruising guide to the northeastern coast.