If island communities are – figuratively and quite literally – extended families, then the Sunbeam V is that aunt from away whose whirlwind visits seem to create holidays.

When the boat pulls into harbor on an icy February afternoon, word travels the length of the island within hours.

By sunset, the handful of fishing families who make their homes on these chunks of offshore granite leave the daily grind to crowd into the boat’s galley for a quick prayer and a slice of fresh-baked pie. The old stories are told with more gusto, and new gossip is aired, as young and old engage in a raucous game of dominoes or a rollicking contradance.

“It’s nice to just have a couple different faces than the two dozen or so you’re used to seeing,” said Eva Murray, who came to Matinicus as a teacher and stayed to raise her own children with her husband, Paul Murray.

“When the Sunbeam comes in, it really brings us all together,” said Wanda Philbrook, a native of Matinicus who holds court as reserve postmaster of the tiny post office that serves the town’s 30 year-round residents.

Matinicus is, as one native son described it, the end of the road. The rocky isle 23 miles off Rockland proudly bears the title of Maine’s most distant offshore community.

That’s precisely why the Maine Sea Coast Mission Society has been sending the Sunbeam to Matinicus and a dozen other islands scattered along Maine’s craggy coast throughout the past century.

“Sometimes it’s just a reminder that somebody cares,” the Rev. Gary DeLong, the mission society’s executive director, said, speaking from his Bar Harbor office. “Some guy will drive by and see the Sunbeam tied up at the harbor, and though he doesn’t stop by, he’ll see it as a sign that he’s not going it alone.”

The Sunbeam was conceived as a turn-of-the-century floating church, to which wealthy summer residents donated their millions to save the souls of native islanders.

Today the mission society boat is not a sanctimonious benefactor, but rather is kin to these close-knit villages. In the joy of an island wedding or the sorrow of an island funeral, the Sunbeam and its crew join the circle of mutual give-and-take that keeps island communities alive.

“They’re all connected to it,” Sharon Daley, mission society nurse, said. “They want the Sunbeam to be there.”

Steward Arline Pomroy had fish stew bubbling on the stove and a pie in the oven before Mount Desert Island, the Sunbeam’s home port, was even out of view on a recent midwinter sail to Frenchboro, Swans Island, Isle au Haut and Matinicus.

She wanted to get the cooking out of the way before the boat hit open water, where rolling swells can make even opening the refrigerator door challenging. Endless bags of groceries had been stowed away, enough to sustain the six-person crew for months at sea, or to put on one of the Sunbeam’s famous community suppers, the keystone of its nondenominational mission.

In word and deed, the Sunbeam preaches the Christian love of God and one’s neighbor, and asks little in return. It’s a laid-back, mellow ministry, and that is why it has survived for almost a century.

“This is a mission society – which scares the hell out of people who don’t know where we’re coming from,” said the Rev. Ted Hoskins, the Sunbeam’s itinerant minister for the past seven years.

Hoskins shares his faith by visiting with elderly residents and carrying news from friends and relatives on the mainland. He reads to schoolchildren, and he talks shop with the lobstermen. His sermons, often delivered aboard the Sunbeam, forgo hellfire and brimstone to focus on love, mercy and quiet spirituality.

“The word ‘missionary’ means that I’ve been sent. It doesn’t mean that I have to wheedle people into believing what I believe,” Hoskins said.

“It’s just a matter of respect. It’s paying attention to the things that they care about,” he said. “I’m not trying to weasel in, or weasel something out of them.”

Hoskins understands the peculiarities of island life. For 67 years, he has spent summers on Isle au Haut, often preaching in the same church where his father delivered sermons.

The minister made a career preaching to urban United Church of Christ congregations, but his “retirement” has been spent sleeping on narrow bunks aboard the Sunbeam.

In his jeans, flannel shirt and bushy white beard, the unassuming preacher is comfortable around a dock, winning over many an island’s less “church-minded” residents, said Warren Williams, who has called Matinicus home off and on for most of his 82 years.

“He doesn’t think anything of bombing into a fish house,” Williams said. “I don’t think there’s a house on this island that Ted Hoskins couldn’t go into and be greeted.”

Moments after the Sunbeam arrived at Matinicus, Hoskins borrowed a car and set out to visit each of his far-flung parishioners.

“I’ve married most of them, baptized their kids, buried their parents,” he said. “I just like to let them know I’m thinking about them. The boat just keeps coming, to be with them and share their journey in life.”

This fall, the mission society installed a $37,000 telemedicine system on board the Sunbeam, and hired Daley, a registered nurse from Islesboro, to facilitate the new long-distance medical service for islanders. Day to day, her role isn’t that different from that of Hoskins, Daley said.

“Some of what I do, even more than the telemedicine, is just the contact,” she said. “I like the fact that you might know the grandparents, and the aunt and the uncle … even the family dog.”

Daley schedules open clinic hours on the boat when people can drop by to “see” their doctor on the mainland by way of a digital video camera. Daley, too, dons her winter coat and pops in on ailing islanders to take their blood pressure, share a cup of tea and invite them to church on the boat.

Every day, she sees the mission society’s motto come alive: “‘Love in action’ – I can really say that’s what I’ve seen,” Daley said.

As the sun shone on open water to the horizon line, Hoskins, Dave Allen, the Sunbeam’s captain of 37 years, and second-generation engineer Mike Johnson sat nonchalantly drinking coffee in the boat’s pilothouse while 30-knot winds transformed the Sunbeam into an amusement park ride and wreaked havoc with the stomachs of novice sailors and any object that wasn’t nailed down.

Yet on today’s Sunbeam – equipped not only with Maine staples such as a cribbage board on the table and an Uncle Henry’s in the head, but also with a satellite TV dish, a microwave and a geopositioning system, life is downright cushy compared with the shipboard existence of their predecessors.

Over dinner in Matinicus Harbor, Williams told the story of his father, the Rev. Anson Williams, who 70 years ago served the mission society on an old wooden incarnation of the Sunbeam.

One stormy day, Williams needed to reach Saddleback Ledge, a sliver of rock protruding from the waves between Vinalhaven and Isle au Haut.

To call Saddleback an island would be a compliment. The boat could not drop anchor in the storm, but the pastor was determined to minister to the two men who lived together in solitude, manning the now-automated lighthouse.

So Williams mounted a breeches buoy, little more than a wooden plank and a couple of pulleys strung on a sturdy rope, and rode, skimming over the wild waves, to reach his parishioners, said his son, laughing as he told the old tale.

The Sunbeam V is actually the seventh boat to be used by the Maine Sea Coast Mission Society since its founders, two brothers, the Rev. Alexander MacDonald and the Rev. Angus MacDonald, started visiting offshore islands in 1905 in a frail little sloop called the Hope. A yacht called the Morning Star followed, then the first of five Sunbeams, named for the favorite hymn of a lighthouse keeper’s daughter.

In it early years, the Sunbeam was an essential link with the mainland – delivering food, mail, and Christmas gifts as well as religious instruction. Mission society staff might be an island’s only visitors during the long, snowy months of winter.

The Sunbeam has served as icebreaker, moving van, hearse, hospital and dentist’s office – even an escape vessel for residents fleeing the Bar Harbor fire of 1947. During the 1940s, the mission society successfully petitioned lawmakers to provide public education for lighthouse keepers’ children and then transported itinerant teachers aboard the Sunbeam.

Today, diesel-powered lobster boats can often travel shore-to-shore more quickly than the unwieldy, 72-foot-long steel vessel dubbed “God’s tugboat.” Weekly ferries, daily air hops and reliable telephone and Internet connections have shrunk the distance to the mainland.

As the needs have changed, so has the mission society, and practical services such as the telemedicine program and a new effort to help preserve Maine’s fisheries mark the next phase of the Sunbeam’s story, said DeLong.

“We’re simply hoping to catch up with our predecessors,” he said.

While life on Isle au Haut has been transformed since the MacDonald brothers first visited 100 years ago, one would never know it approaching the island from the sea. The gleaming, white steeple of the 1857 Union Congregational Church is still the first sign of civilization as one approaches the forested island.

Through the church’s unlocked wooden door, an ornate brass chandelier still lights the pews with the soft glow of kerosene lamps. An antique organ sits, waiting for a woman to sit ramrod-straight on the stool and coax out a hymn or two. And the collection plate, filled with one- and five-dollar bills from the autumn’s last service, waits quietly for spring.

“I think I could live on practically any of these islands and be happy,” said Daley, leading a twilight tour of Isle au Haut. “I like that the buildings are unlocked at night. I like that if you need something, somebody is going to be there to help you.”

In the early morning hours, an old brown compact car rumbles by this church, a yellow sign reading “school bus” wired to its grille. The roads are dirt, and a walker meets more deer and pheasants than people on most of these islands.

“I like the things this place doesn’t have as much as what it does have,” Eva Murray said of her life on Matinicus. “I like being able to walk down the road and no one is around. This is a community of people who don’t seek community.”

The very essence of island life, however, is communal living. If Warren Williams gets a craving for popcorn, he can’t just run down to the store. Groceries are flown in from Rockland by special order. So he calls around to find a neighbor with supplies and borrows a snack.

“That’s the thing about island people – they make do,” Daley said.

Everyone wears at least two hats; more often they wear five or six. Children are truly raised by the village, with a dozen adults watching the youngsters’ every move. If someone buys a new car, sells a home or gets in a fight, word travels the length of the island instantly.

“Secrets are hard to keep here,” Paul Murray said.

Paul Murray is soft-spoken; Eva Murray, more expressive, with black eyebrows and flying hands punctuating her statements, but the husband and wife of 13 years are in sync. Both make the same point: Island life is rewarding, but it isn’t the postmodern utopia that it’s often painted to be.

“This isn’t one big happy family – it’s one big happy seventh grade,” Eva Murray said. “People say, ‘Do you love it?’ And I say, ‘Yes – 51 percent of the time.'”

Good or bad, the island life that the Philbrooks, Murrays and Warrens have chosen, however, is disappearing. As Maine’s fisheries decline and its tourism grows, island communities are losing their land to outsiders and their children to the mainland.

The result: No islanders, no Sunbeam.

“Everything’s changing,” Hoskins said. “There’s a million summer people panting and drooling to buy any piece of property larger than 2 inches square. Ten years down the road, most of the islands are going to be summer people.

“Then we’ve got a 10 million-dollar boat and nowhere to go.”

DeLong said that some islands already have dropped off the Sunbeam’s list of destinations, because they have become summer colonies. He called the trend a “life-and-death situation.”

DeLong, the child of a minister and a mission society nurse, was raised on Beals Island.

He, too, trained as a UCC minister before joining the mission society in 1998.

“These islands have been models of a kind of interdependence, a unique community,” DeLong said. “They are microcosms of the whole issue of community-based economics.

“Regionalization is the death knell of being able to maintain that fierce interdependence that has existed in these small towns.”

So to save the islands’ viability, the mission society is making its first foray into politics.

Beginning in May, Hoskins will leave the Sunbeam ministry to become a fisheries liaison, representing islanders too busy working the sea to spend hours tracking regulatory change. He will carry the views of the independent island fishermen to the Legislature and to state and federal regulatory hearings, and then keep islanders informed of industry news.

“I became more and more aware of these islands as resource-based communities on the brink of extinction,” Hoskins said, explaining that the mission society must evolve or it risks being lost along with the unique island culture from which it was born.

“My purpose is not to hold onto the past, but to make sure that people have a chance to participate in the conversations that will affect their present and future lives,” he said.

Little Ship Sunbeam

by Henry Van Dyke,1926

A blessing on our Sunbeam craft,

Larboard and starboard fore and aft;

May God protect and guide her way

Through rocky reach and isle-strewn bay!

Her freight is golden gospel love;

Her powerhouse comes from Heaven above;

Her chart is right her compass true;

Her captain Christ. His friends her crew.

To lonely folk she brings good cheer;

Relief to those in pain and fear;

To children something warm and bright;

To those who sit in darkness, light.

Then let the wind blow high or low,

Serene and brave our boat shall go;

For Jesus sails the sea again,

Along the granite coast of Maine.