In the winter of 1973 Joe Alves, production director for Jaws, began his quest to find the perfect setting for Amity Island.

From Montauk to Marblehead, Martha’s Vineyard was the place that met Mr. Alves’s criteria.

“Edgartown was so pristine with the white picket fences and white buildings,” he said. “It was a wonderful place to be terrified by a shark. Then when I got to Menemsha it was a great fishing village with all the little shacks. It was absolutely perfect.”

Vineyard filmmaker Bob Nixon can’t escape great white sharks. Fresh from months of shooting the apex predators in the Pacific for a Discovery Channel special, last Tuesday afternoon he again encountered the animal, this time 100 feet off the Menemsha jetty. While the veracity of recent great white sightings on the Vineyard has been the subject of some debate, Mr. Nixon is fairly confident he saw the real deal. On board with him at the time was Dr. Sylvia Earle, one of the world’s preeminent oceanographers.

For one artist, the term all-Island art is literal. Amid the paintings, pastels and photographs, the seaweed collages by Kathy Poehler hung on the wire fence at the Tabernacle yesterday for the 54th All-Island Art Show.

Fishermen who pursue a variety of important fish on Georges Bank and the Gulf of Maine face drastic cuts in catch limits next year because of dwindling groundfish stocks. Cod and yellowtail flounder are in such a dire state that fisheries managers advising the New England Fishery Management Council are calling for catch limit cuts of 70 per cent or higher beginning next May.

The Island’s reputation as a cultural hot spot is deserved, according to a recent study that says artistic and cultural endeavors are twice as prevalent on the Vineyard as elsewhere in the state.