By Bryant Carpenter
Staff Writer
March 5, 2026
Just past the train station, on the landing at Waterfront Park, work trucks have been backed onto the Fishers Island Ferry. The 7 a.m. boat readies to ride. The crew is bundled against the cold and the streetlights glow as cars pull up and kids slip out and amble aboard one by one. They ascend a red steel staircase with yellow railings and duck into the cabin. Their tickets don’t really need to be checked. They’re here every weekday. They’re heading to school.
The ferryboat MV Race Point docks at Fishers Island, NY following a trip from New London, Conn. Jan. 17, 2026.Ned Gerard/Hearst Connecticut Media
Nine miles long, one mile wide, Fishers Island sits like a checkmark in the northeast corner of Long Island Sound. Yet it checks no single box.
Fishers Island lies two miles off Groton Long Point, but is part of Southold Township on the North Fork of Long Island, 11 miles distant at its closest point. Once claimed by both New York and Connecticut, Fishers Island actually existed beyond the realm of both, as the possession of a single family, for much of its history.
So close, so distant: To this day, who checks it out? There is no hotel here. The bigger ferries out of New London steam past in summer, bound for popular ports like Block Island and the Hamptons.
Fishers Island is fine with that. It has its own summer flock, with deep pockets and a deep wish to keep things private. Heirs of some of America’s most gilded industrialists have homes here: du Pont, Firestone, Rockefeller, Simmons, Schwab, Whitney, Vanderbilt. There are Roosevelts. There is the Fishers Island Club, ranked among the best golf courses in the world.
Don’t ask for addresses. The wealthy east end lies beyond a gatehouse and street names are not posted. Once home to Fort H.G. Wright, Fishers Island has a tradition of being on guard.
Fort Wright sat on the west end. There, in and around a modest village, dwell 250 year-round residents who remain after the island population dwindles to a tenth of its summer swell and the seasonal businesses shutter and winter sets in.
Some families go back generations: Edwards, Norton, Ferguson. Some are relative newcomers: Eastman, Toldo, Rodriguez.
Some work for the island’s utility company. Some own summer shops. Some work trades and landscaping on the eastern estates. And some teach at Fishers Island School.
Yes, there is a school out here: K-12, so small the elementary grades are doubled up — tripled in the case of K-2. Secondary instructors teach every level and branch of their subject, grades 7-12.
Average class size is 5, total enrollment 57. Of that number, 30 are “Islanders” who live here year-round. The other 27 are “Mainlanders.” They’re from Connecticut.
Coker, Heinzman, Vona: Kids from southeastern coastal towns who were looking for a smaller, but challenging school, with more personalized instruction and greater opportunity to participate in activities, for a place to find themselves, for a place to fit in.
They found it at the end of a 45-minute ferry ride, in a one-story brick building with an anchor outside the front door, on a wind-whipped, sea-washed strip of stone and sand whose natural wonders are incorporated into their curriculum.
It’s no free ride. Fishers Island, checking no single box even with its school, is public for Islanders, de facto private for Mainlanders. They pay a tuition that, combined with ferry expenses, runs up to $5,795 a year.
That’s oftentimes less than the average Connecticut private school. And, at any rate, the kids have found their island.
“This school, it’s such an open opportunity for anyone to try anything,” said senior Ariah Vona of Groton, who arrived in the fall of 2021 as a shy eighth-grader. “And then you can really find what you like, especially for me with basketball.”
Opening tip
Basketball is where this story originated. A year ago, St. Bernard of Montville hosted Fishers Island in a girls game. The idea was to come back this season and tag along with a CIAC team paying a visit to Fishers Island.
Except there were none. No CIAC team scheduled Fishers Island in 2025-26. But there still was Fishers Island basketball, just as there has been for nearly a century.
And then this rock revealed a few of its hardly hidden secrets. Fishers Island School basketball teams, mirroring staff and student body, is a fairly even split between Islanders and Mainlanders, a cross-pollination embodied in Superintendent/Principal Christian Arsenault, a Connecticut native who now lives on an island he once mistook for Montauk.
Arsenault had previous ports of call in Hartford and Pittsburgh. He figured he’d give Fishers three years. Nine years later, his kids are students here and his wife is a licensed captain for the “Sea Stretcher,” the boat that runs people in medical crisis to Lawrence + Memorial Hospital in New London.
“We all sat down as a family and said, ‘This is what we’re gonna do; we’re gonna ride it out as long as we possibly can,'” Arsenault told a visitor. “You walk out your door, you literally know everyone on this island, and it’s what makes it special.
“Being a parent, knowing my kids can just go outside and if something happened to them, somebody’s going to help them out, it’s just a really cool thing that I didn’t know still existed in this world, and here it is.”
There are pros to island life, there are cons. Fair weather teems with open shops and summer dollars, boats and beaches and golf. Winter is bleak. Village Market is the only food store that’s open. The Pequot Inn pub is closed, so too the ice cream shop and two boutiques. The bowling alley stays open. The movie theater, for lack of heat, does not.
“It’s quiet, very quiet in the winter,” said Robin Toldo, a chef who ran the seasonal Food Arts Cafe. “You have to be the right personality to live here. If you are a real social person who likes to go out to restaurants, who likes to go out to movies and things like that, this is not the place.”
Seasonal wealth supports the island, yet squeezes it, too. Like much of coastal New England, Fishers is gentrified, even in the west end, where new summer money has driven up housing costs.
Affordable housing for year-round residents is a chronic issue. One organization, Walsh Park, was created 40 years ago to provide it. Walsh Park has 35 units. Arsenault and most Islanders on his staff live in properties owned by the school.
Mainland staffers commute, either on the “Popeye,” a small launch out of Noank, or on the Fishers Island Ferry with students.
It’s their bus ride: 7 a.m. out, 4:45 p.m. home. The latter boat gets back to New London at 5:30 — later if the seas are rough. The horns sound on days that extend nearly 11 hours.
“Riding a ferry every day is definitely a different experience,” says freshman Lil Heinzman from New London. “But it is a good time to get your homework done before 8 a.m.”
Day laborers ride, too. They occupy benches and tables starboard and amidships. The school group sits port, with the best views of sunrise and sunset. Photo libraries of staffers are a palette of purple, pink and orange.
Julie Arcelus, the guidance counselor, also has first-day-of-school pics on her phone. They were taken at the ferry landing. Her daughter Catherine, a junior, has been at FIS since elementary school, while her son, a soccer player, opted for Waterford High School.
“She recognized that the teachers knew her learning style,” Julie Arcelus said. “The support was there; the high level challenge of learning was there. For the trade-offs of not having as many classmates, she recognized the benefits were outweighing the trade-offs.”
Like Arsenault, Arcelus was hired nine years ago. Both came from big schools, Arcelus from her native eastern Pennsylvania. On their first day, the school was stone quiet, even during lunch.
They were waiting for something to happen. Nothing did. “This is different.”
Later in the week, a student in a frog-green wet suit sprinted past them in the lobby and vaulted into a waiting van, joining classmates for an ocean dive during the two activity hours that cap each school day.
Arcelus and Arsenault exchanged glances. “What planet did we land on?”
One that spins in tight orbit. Every morning, Arsenault stands outside the school door and welcomes Islanders as they’re dropped off and Mainlanders as they walk up from the ferry landing a quarter-mile distant. He greets every student by name.
Arsenault knows the names of every parent — every grandparent, too, if they’re regulars at school events, which most Islanders are. On Fishers, graduations, concerts and basketball games are happenings.
And on Fishers, Islanders not only know every Islander, they know what vehicle they drive. Islanders not only see each other every day, they see each other coming from a long ways off.
Said FIS senior Anthony Toldo, “When we’re driving over in town we kind of forget it’s not like the island and start waving at everybody.”
“In town” means greater New London. Islanders are connected to Connecticut, not New York. They have groceries and goods shipped from Connecticut, or shop there in person. Their electricity comes via underwater cable from Connecticut. The island zip code of 06390 aligns with Connecticut’s “06” sequencing, not the “1” series of New York.
Islanders, however, pay taxes to New York and journey to Southold for permits and licenses. Southold also provides police, who rotate in pairs, spending a week on the island before shipping home.
But the connection is not direct. Unless you’ve got a boat, you cannot get to Fishers from New York. You’ve got to ferry in and out of New London.
Enter the Vikings
Fishers Island School opened in 1916 and graduated its first class in 1929. High school basketball was likely played that year. There is a photo of a girls team dated 1929. There is also one of a boys team, and while it is undated, some players appear in the 1930 team picture.
Basketball has continued since. One constant was the Edwards family. Sons of Clarence Edwards Sr., a ferry chief engineer, started playing in the 1930s and the line continued to Ben Edwards, a great-great grandson who graduated in 2024.
Ken Edwards, a grandson, played in the late 1950s. His teams played home and away against Connecticut coastal schools and also ventured inland to Cheshire, Hamden Hall and Durham.
Home teams literally played host. Visitors stayed overnight and, on occasion, went to school with their opponents the next day.
“It was good,” Ken Edwards said. “We’d have a dance or something afterwards, and they would try to steal our cheerleaders and we would try to steal theirs — successful sometimes, too.”
Edwards stayed with Dave Newton on his family farm in Durham. He went up against 6-foot-7 Wayne Lawrence of Stonington, who led the Bears to the 1956 CIAC Class M championship with a combined 114 points in two tournament games.
“I jumped center against him because I was the tallest kid on the team,” Edwards said of their regular-season matchup. “He was on the bench after the first quarter. They killed us.”
In the late 60s, the Vikings welcomed Glen Norton, an Army brat who’d just moved to the Island. He wore No. 10. In 2023, the season after Norton’s death, his grandson Casey Norton wore No. 10. Now another grandson does, senior Griffin Harris.
“We were looking at pictures and I saw it right before basketball season,” said Harris. “That’s what sparked it. I wanted to wear it. It’s kind of passed down like this.”
John Peishoff was the star of the 70s. In 1982, Dan Gillan took up the coaching reins and steered the program — plus the school’s two other sports, cross country and golf — for 30 years. In 2009, Zach Hoch graduated with a school-record 1,179 points.
By then, Fishers had a new school. Built in 1972, the building where Christian Arsenault greets students every morning underwent a $9 million upgrade last year. The biggest change in between came in 1987. Facing declining enrollment, FIS opened its doors to out-of-state students in grades 4-12. (K-3 kids are deemed too young to ride the ferry on their own.)
Three years ago, Fishers Island shape-shifted in basketball. Long an independent, the Vikings joined the Coastal Prep League, a circuit of Rhode Island private schools. Fishers took the league by storm, sweeping the crowns in 2024. The girls repeated in 2025.
Naturally, FIS games check multiple boxes. They’re played in New York, most players are from out of state, and the referees are from Connecticut’s Eastern Board.
Jim Calkins of Lebanon and Henry Gunther of Niantic have been working island games for more than 30 years. They like the school, the kids, the people.
“Good to see you still out here,” one Islander greeted them recently.
“Is your kid playing?”
“My grand-kid.”
Referees ferry out with the visiting team, plus the Connecticut kids if it’s a Saturday game. They all go back together.
Rides home are amicable, though there was one game so physical the teams were kept on separate sides of the cabin, with a Southold cop stationed between them. Mostly, all that gets rough is the Sound.
“Let me tell you, we’ve been here in snow,” Calkins said. “We’ve been here in storms when the boat’s up in the air.”
As with any small school, athletic success ebbs and flows. Teams are no-cut and open to students as young as seventh grade. Inexperience in the higher grades can make for long campaigns. Conversely, a talented class that cuts its teeth young can find great success in latter years.
The 2026 boys team is island-heavy. Kyle Coker, an ebullient sophomore from Groton, is the lone Mainlander who starts. The rest are Islanders: Toldo, Harris, his cousin Lukas Norton, and freshman A.J. Vega.
The girls are a mix, starting Vona, Heinzman and Catherine Arcelus alongside senior Dallas Rodriguez and junior Madelyn Seal of the island.
PE teacher and athletic director Adam Baber, who played at UConn-Avery Point, coached both teams until this season. With his daughter moving up the sporting ranks in Ledyard, he handed the reins to assistant Adam Murray, the agriculture technology teacher.
Murray has been at Fishers for seven years. He was born in Arkansas, grew up in Mississippi and lived in Tennessee and North Carolina before moving to Waterford. His voice retains a southern lilt. When Murray visits family, however, they tell him he talks like a Yankee.
Islanders
Some year-round Islanders have been here their entire lives, such as the 87-year-old Ken Edwards, an estate caretaker. Some moved in and became institutions, such as Steve and Sarah Malinowski, who founded Fishers Island Oyster Farm in 1981.
Spanish teacher Yaritza Gello came from Cuba 24 years ago with her CT-born husband. She arrived in a cold winter. The new culture was hard to cypher. It wasn’t “huggy-kissy” like home. It was not loud.
“But it’s beautiful, and once you’re part of the circle, once you’re part of the community, it is absolutely beautiful,” said Gello.
Others grew up here, raised families elsewhere, and returned, such as Patti Griffin, the last baby born in Fort HG Wright Post Hospital before it closed in 1949.
In high school, Patti fell for an Army brat who moved in with his mother to help an aunt and uncle run the Pequot Inn. Glen Norton loved the place and didn’t want to leave. Patti went to college in Boston and discovered how sheltered her island existence had been. “It is culture shock,” she said. “I went through a little of that.”
Patti became a nurse, Glen an IT specialist for Honeywell. They lived in Indiana. Expecting to be there a year, they stayed for nearly 40.
They did visit Fishers every summer and moved back upon retirement. Patti helps out at Ferguson Museum and watches her grandsons Griffin and Lukas play basketball in a white-walled gym trimmed in blue, where a silhouette of Fishers Island stretches across the heart of the floor.
“I always missed the ocean more than anything else,” Patti said. “Not so much the people, because a lot of the people I grew up with had long left. I always missed the security of it, the quiet, the peacefulness, the natural environment.”
Recent arrivals herald the same charm. Robin and Jared Toldo relocated 14 years ago with their five kids — since increased to six — from Grand Rapids, Mich. Jared, a mason, had grown up in Rhode Island and Connecticut. He wanted his children to live by the water.
“This is about as oceany as you can get,” Robin said. “Our kids love it. They’ve gotten used to it. When we moved here our oldest was 13 and she hated us for the first six months … They grew to like it. I think that they all kind of came out of their shells here.”
Fred, the oldest boy, set the tone, heading out on his bike every day, fishing pole in tow. Fred was also the kid in the wet suit who had Arsenault and Julie Arcelus wondering what planet they’d happened upon.
Anthony’s skills in basketball are second perhaps only to those in spear-fishing, a pursuit he’s passed on to teammates like A.J. Vega.
There’s a story. Vega used to live in New Britain. His father, wanting a better education for his son, got a tip from a fellow mason who had just done work on the island. The Vegas wound up moving to Fishers three years ago.
“I’ve come a long way compared to Connecticut,” A.J. said. “If (you’re) looking to get away from the big environments and really be one-on-one and get your work done, then this is definitely the place. This is going to get me toward college and where I want to be.”
At Fishers, if you don’t do your homework, don’t contribute in class, it will be noticed. Dallas Rodriguez says she’s gone from C’s to A’s since arriving four years ago from Pittsburgh.
“At my other school I was never comfortable with going up to the teacher to ask for help or staying after school or even being in sports. It wasn’t my thing,” she said. “But then I came here and I started playing sports, I started going to the teacher for help. It completely changed who I was … I was able to open up.”
Fishers, though, was slow to open up to her. “I didn’t truly fit into the island life until probably last year,” Rodriguez said. “You kind of have to break it apart and then your fit yourself in there.”
Once you’re in, you’re in. Islanders stick together — out of necessity, tolerance, affection.
“People know you; people know you a lot,” said 5th/6th-grade teacher Tawnya Eastman. “We’re friends because we’re all we have. The amount of reliance we have on each other is phenomenal. Like, you’ll never run out of food because somebody will just feed you.”
The Mystic native learned that the day she moved in 22 years ago. Discovering she’d forgotten to pack pots and pans, Eastman’s clamor was calmed by a neighbor.
“My house is two doors down. Just go in and take what you need.”
Eastman and retired science teacher Carol Giles coached the girls team for six seasons. They stepped in when the previous coach abruptly left.
This is how it works on Fishers. With a low head count, multiple hats must be worn. The fire department is all-volunteer save for one full-time paramedic. That’s Porfirio Rodriguez, Dallas’ dad. The job is what brought them to Fishers shortly after Dallas’ mom died. Porfirio wanted to give his daughter a fresh start.
Most Islanders are firefighters. Most are EMTs, though a resident doctor is on call 24-7 at the island medical office. For the longest time it was Ralph Hoch. Like Moonlight Graham in “Field of Dreams,” Hoch was an aspiring baseball player who opted for a career in medicine. It was left to his grandson Zach to be the sports star, who arrived from Coventry, R.I. when his school’s athletic teams were on the chopping block.
Zach Hoch is the all-time leading scorer at Fishers Island. He piled up 1,179 points in three seasons before graduating in 2009.Bryant Carpenter/Hearst Connecticut Media
COVID prompted an enrollment spike. FIS shut down like everyone else in March 2020, but had already been using Zoom for stormy days. And while most schools toggled between remote and in-person learning, Fishers was open throughout 2020-21.
Struggling with remote learning in Smithfield, R.I., with their grandfather Glen terminally ill on the island, the Nortons came over in the fall of 2021. They embraced basketball. Lukas said he never would have played at Smithfield. He also relishes a school where he can study seals in Oceanography, then study them right off the coast.
“This is 10 times better from where I was,” Lukas said. “It’s a much more isolated feeling, but it’s also such a community feeling, so together, and I love that.”
Mainlanders
Confines are cozy in the FIS gym. The baselines and far side of the court are tight to the wall. Behind the Viking bench is room for only four rows of bleachers. Folding chairs are set up in the corners.
It’s a Thursday and classes end early for basketball vs. Highlander Charter School of Warren, R.I. Mainland parents arrive on the 11:30 ferry, gliding into Silver End Cove through pilings skirted with ice.
Islanders arrive. Robin Toldo has a letter she just picked up at the post office. (There is no postal delivery; every Islander has a P.O. box and a Village Market account, the numbers of which cashiers know by heart.)
Opening tip is 1 p.m. There are two games to be played and a 4:45 ferry to catch. If a game is running long, the refs will be told to keep things moving. If that fails, Arsenault can ask the ferry to hold the boat, though he’s never had to do that.
The girls tip off and Lil Heinzman scores seven straight points. The freshman has been here since sixth grade.
“When I was in New London, I didn’t really care for school that much. I didn’t really see the importance; I didn’t really understand it,” she says. “And then I came here and, in maybe a year or two, I figured out school is important.”
Ariah Vona figured out how much she loved basketball. While living in Groton, she’d been too intimidated to try out for her middle school team. On the island, she became a top player, not only with FIS, but a travel program back home. Her athletic emergence mirrored personal growth.
“I used to be really, really shy,” Vona said. “I wouldn’t talk to anybody. Now I’m much more open.
“It was definitely hard for me at first, adjusting to the long days and the smaller class,” she added. “But I can honestly say that the community here is like no other. Me and my classmates, that’s like my second family.”
Family: In a K-12 school, upper classmen are de facto big brothers and sisters to the younger kids. Camaraderie between Islanders and Mainlanders is by and large good. Weekend sleep-overs are common.
“I don’t see much of a line anymore,” said Julie Arcelus. “There were times when I first started I noticed it more. I feel it’s pretty well-meshed now.”
Tensions tend to defuse quickly. The school is too small for staff not to notice problems or students not to learn how to work them out.
In the FIS-Highlander girls game, the referees manage late-game emotions. The Vikings pull out a 1-point win on technical foul shots, but there will be no need to keep players separated on the ferry. Of greater concern is the hour. The girls end after 3. The boys warm-up is truncated.
Anthony Toldo still has time to open that letter his mother brought. It’s from The Citadel. His sister Constance is a senior there. He’s been accepted, too.
The news helps assuage defeat. FIS beat Highlander in January, but is stymied in the rematch.
Kyle Coker’s smile won’t be chased long. He and his family are happy with the choice they made two years ago when his father Kendall, a psychology teacher, got a job at Connecticut College. Word of mouth led them to Fishers.
Said his mom, Chloe Coker. “Sometimes he complains about the long days. ‘My friends are home already.’ But then he weighs it with all the opportunities he has and says, ‘I get it.'”
And Arsenault gets that he’s in new terrain. The boys game is pushing 4:30 early in the fourth quarter. For the first time, he calls the ferry and asks them to hold the boat.
Afternoon is waning, the light a burnt orange over the western edge of Long Island Sound. It sets behind New London Ledge Light as the Fishers Island Ferry throttles into the Thames. By the time it docks at Waterfront Park, streetlights have come on. Headlights splice South Water Street.
A ferry horn sounds. Kids gather belongings and descend the red steel staircase with the yellow railings, heading for cars that will carry them home.
Bryant Carpenter is a sportswriter with the Record-Journal. He joined Hearst Connecticut Media Group in 2024. He’s husband to Colleen, father to Laura and Danny, author of “Life Is Still Good,” rider of bicycles, and loyalist of the Boston Red Sox and Bruins.
