Sometimes it is good to remember that when you live on an Island, intimacy with the water doesn’t end when you step off the ferry.

Alley McConnell of the Martha's Vineyard Shellfish Group affectionately calls the shellfish hatchery, with its small, stacked, simply constructed, white-painted rooms and south-facing windows "a water garden tree-house."

Across from the Chilmark fire station on North Road in a temporary shed on a rainy afternoon last week, Andy Lyons worked on Harry Beach's boat.

In a dramatic, all-hands-on-deck effort, the wooden schooner Tangier was hauled off a sandbar in Vineyard Haven harbor Tuesday morning after she went aground in gale-force winds during the weekend blizzard that lashed the Island.

Marked by a single, blinking green light, the entrance through the channel into Menemsha Harbor is narrow.

At a house on Bennett way in Edgartown, three generations of Island fishermen crossed paths Thursday afternoon. Matteus Scheffer and Grace Kenney loaded cartons of Cape Pogue Bay scallops into a gray plastic cooler.

Behind Tisbury Marketplace, in front of the schooner-shed annex of Gannon and Benjamin Marine Railway, the 33-foot power boat Fredric Paulsen was unloaded by the Martha’s Vineyard Shipyard last week.

Behind the capped landfill off Clevelandtown Road in Edgartown, alongside boats and mooring gear, Aquamarine Dockbuilders stores the floating docks that ring the bulkheads in Edgartown Harbor.

Jeff Canha is a fifth-generation Islander who has been on the water since he was born.