Shiver me timbers! It’s a pirate wedding!

Herring Nights is a gripping tale, full of hard-nosed, hard-working fishermen, reveling in a life that kept them at sea, and (sometimes) paid the bills.

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.”

A delegation of 17 students from Bar Harbor's College of the Atlantic is in Paris this month to participate in the latest United Nations climate summit, a two-week session expected to yield an international agreement on carbon-emission reductions...