No doubt about it, David Kinney gets the Vineyard. His book, The Big One, shows that. But he could not live here, he reckons, without succumbing to the obsession which the book chronicles.

Fishing, that is.

As we bumped along a sandy track through Chappaquiddick on Sunday night, he with one hand on the steering wheel, and the other holding the tips of his surf rods to stop them rattling on the windshield, he imagined his life if he lived here all the time.

“Fish. Go home, go to sleep. Do it all again tomorrow. It would be a wonder if I got anything done,” he said.

He has seen what happens to people who really get — pardon the expression — hooked. He followed a bunch of them through the whole of the Island’s fall fishing derby a couple of years back, to produce his engaging book.

As he says in the very first chapter, titled 838 hours: “Grown men have cried over the derby. They have ignored their wives for week after week, sleepwalked through work day after day, stayed up all night long, skipped out on their jobs altogether, drawn unemployment, burned through every last day of their vacation time, downed NoDoz and Red Bull and God knows what else. They have spied on their rivals and lied to their friends.”

They have even died. He recounts the case of a Boston businessman who crashed his plane while pursuing extreme fishing, spotting them from the air, then landing on the beach to cast.

Now, Mr. Kinney might not be that extreme, but he’s definitely an enthusiast. As his Web site notes, he’s fished for tarpon in Islamorada, Atlantic salmon in Ireland, rainbow trout in Montana, brown trout in Pennsylvania, and freshwater bass in his home town of Winston-Salem, N.C.

When he got engaged, his gave his wife-to-be a ring, and she gave him a fishing rod. The back of his wagon contains a pretty impressive array of lures and other paraphernalia.

But there is a fine line between being an enthusiast and being an addict; he recognizes little signs of potential excess in himself.

“You meet these people who really put in the hours, and sleep on the beach. I did a little bit of that,” he confessed at one point in the night.

And later, another admission: “Right before we had our first kid, I started fishing like crazy. It wasn’t really intentional. I think it was some subconscious reaction, like ‘this is it man.’ ”

Fatherhood was not the end of it, though. A few years later, his wife Monica, “with some apprehension” allowed him to come here for a month to write his book, The Big One: An Island, an Obsession, and the Furious Pursuit of a Great Fish.

It really is a fine book; even if you care little for fishing, it is worth reading for the characters, the rivalry, the drama and the eccentricities of this place.

But why did Mr. Kinney, a man with no real knowledge of the Vineyard, choose to do it here? There are many, many other fishing derbies.

“I knew about this tournament and I actually didn’t know about the other ones out there. It was the first amateur one that I thought of,” he said at first.

But later, it’s clear it was a little more premeditated than that.

“It would be naive to think I could have picked any tournament and it would have got the same attention,” he said.

“Because this is an interesting place. It captures people’s imagination. You know, the Clintons, the celebrity thing.

“To have a story that’s like another side of Martha’s Vineyard, I think it’s compelling to people. There’s all these different groups of people, coming together, sometimes fighting. I think it’s one of those classic, character-based stories. You have the backdrop of the Vineyard and all of these wild tournament people wrapped up in their rivalry,” he said.

No doubt there was a book there, crying to be written, but as it happened, Mr. Kinney had a bit of extra fisherman’s luck. The 2007 derby had more than its usual share of controversy.

One fisherman had caught a huge striper. As the book tells it: “The thing had a head the size of a city block, and it tipped the scales at 56.51 pounds to take the lead in the derby’s highest profile division, striped bass caught from a boat.”

It was the fifth-largest fish caught in 62 years of derby history.

Then, incredibly, another man, five-time winner Lev Wlodyka, caught one which beat it: 57.56 pounds.

The only trouble was, when the judges opened the second fish up, they found a fistful of lead weights, called yo-yos, which some fishermen use in bait.

If you are an Islander, you will know the story; if not you’ll have to read the book to find out how things are resolved. Suffice it to say Mr. Wlodyka did not cheat; nor did his fish win.

But even before the controversy, Mr. Kinney had decided Lev Wlodyka would be a big part of the story.

“There were certain people I met and knew right away would factor into the book. Lev was one. I had already been out with him a couple of times [before the controversy blew up].

“He’s competitive, a hard-charging guy. He won it five times before; he won it as a junior. That all made him a natural.

“Buddy [Vanderhoop] was another guy I knew would be interesting to follow. Steve Amaral the same,” he said. “In the end I talked to 30 to 35 people and finally came out with 17 or 18. It was a matter of casting a wide net and hoping.”

The weighted fish drama provides a perfect through-line for the book, and earlier this year, DreamWorks bought the film rights to the book.

Again, Mr. Kinney said the Vineyard setting probably helped. “One of DreamWorks’ top executives is a woman named Holly Bario, who’s a Vineyarder,” he said. “Her brother is Patrick Jenkinson, who is the guy in chapter 11 or 12.”

So sure, luck, some connections and a degree of marketing calculation played a part in Mr. Kinney’s success. But the book was also a labor of love, as became quickly clear last Sunday night.

“Driving around a road like this in the middle of the night would have seemed odd a couple of years ago,” he enthused. “Now it seems natural.

“This is so different for me. I live an hour and a half from the beach. One barrier beach basically. There’s one bayside beach.

“On the Island there are so many different bodies of water to fish in and so many ways to fish them.

“There’s a lot of variety. North shore a lot of rocks, south, the classic beaches. Good jetties to fish. And this place out here [Cape Pogue Gut, our second stop] is sort of like a river, with its strong currents.”

“And there are still a lot of places I don’t know,” he said.

So, while Mr. Kinney might say he could never live here, one gets the strong feeling he will be a return visitor.

And, for the record, he can fish. Within 10 minutes of his first cast at East Beach, he landed — and then released — a five or six pound bluefish.

Me, I caught a few bug bites and some chafing from my borrowed, too-small waders.

David Kinney signs books at 7:30 p.m. tonight as part of the Bunch of Grapes Bookstore’s grand opening on Main street, Vineyard Haven.