Among the goals the plan articulates are growing recreational- and cultural-based tourism.

Keeping our coastal and island towns vital, with year-round residents and economies, will be an ongoing struggle. Government must stay open-minded and responsive to new ways to aid in that struggle...

If they come aboard the Sunbeam, islanders will visit privately with the nurse in a well-equipped suite. In addition to all the screening the nurse can do, the facility allows a mainland physician to examine a patient using high-definition cameras over a high-speed Internet link.

In each issue of The Working Waterfront, we feature a vintage photo from along the coast that reminds us of how our corner of the world has changed, or not changed, as the case may be. In the November issue, we published a photo on the OpEd page (page 11) of a man standing at the corner of Main and Winter streets in Rockland, circa-1937.

City officials are confident that some key, undeveloped or under-developed parcels in that area—which forms a peninsula just east of Rockland's bustling Main Street—may change hands in the coming months. And when they do, new enterprises could be launched...

I lived for three years in Canada. Life there was a familiar, yet culturally distinct experience, and my lens for seeing what made Canada so different came from teaching cultural anthropology at York University in Toronto.

When Jesse Poole of Vinalhaven was a teenager, he was interested in computer science but he never went to college to study it—or to study anything else for that matter. “Growing up here, it was hard to get away from Vinalhaven,” Poole, now 35, said. “It seemed like too big a change, and then time just went by.”

This is a salty story, not a spicy one. There are no tales of pirates (although in recent history, they gather once a year on Green’s Island), rum-runners, or Ahab-esque sea captains. It is all about the hard work in maritime jobs, which involves physical labor and finessing the elements—specifically, weather and water.

Vinalhaven often experiences big storms. That’s not surprising. We are, after all, an island in the middle of the ocean.