REEDVILLE--When Linwood Bowis and Dorolena Thomas exchanged vows in the late '70s, more was being joined than the easygoing Northern Neck lad raised on the water and the pretty, outgoing Tangier Island lass who grew up with water all around her.

It was also the linking of two families, which today handle most of the public comings and goings on Tangier, a five-mile-long island in the Chesapeake Bay that's home to more than 600 people.

First, there's the Chesapeake Breeze, a cruise boat Linwood captains out of the couple's Buzzard Point Marina near Reedville, at the tip of the Northern Neck.

From May until mid-October, seven days a week in the heart of the season, the longtime cruise boat captain takes the graceful, 100-foot vessel to Tangier and home again. He gives tourists the chance to experience the bucolic island, an enticing throwback to a simpler time.

During those busy summer days, Dorolena's brother, Steven Thomas, is at the helm of a cruise boat that shares his name, bringing tourists and visitors from the other side of the Chesapeake--captaining cruises to Tangier from Crisfield, Md.

If you're coming from Onancock on Virginia's Eastern Shore, your cruise boat captain aboard the Captain Eulice most days will be Freddie Pruitt, Dorolena's uncle.

And if you want to get mail, freight or a quick shuttle to or from Tangier from the Maryland mainland at Crisfield, the captain of the mail boat is--you guessed it--another relative. This time it's Dorolena's brother, Rudy Thomas Jr., on the 65-foot Courtney Thomas.

"If somebody's coming or going from Tangier on something other than their own boat, it's a pretty good bet that someone in Linwood's family or mine is taking them," said Dorolena, smiling.

There was even a cruise-boat component in the couple's courtship and the proposal Linwood made to his wife, who manages their cruise-boat office at Buzzard Point.

It hinged on the 15-minute window when the two boats the young couple worked on for their fathers were both at the same dock in Tangier.

Linwood's boat--his father, Stanley, had bought it from Dorolena's father, Rudy Thomas--would pull into the harbor at Tangier in late morning.