A retired welder for the city of Yonkers and a lifelong river fisherman, Mr. Deluccy is a member of the Yonkers Yacht Club, where he keeps his boat, CZ, named after Chester Zigmunt, an old fishing buddy.
It is a pretty town, intersected by a tree-lined river where fishermen stake out their favorite spots.
The last of the river's fishermen have become walking relics, their work virtually destroyed by pollution and overfishing.
Mr. Cronin, a Yonkers native, said that his own environmentalism grew largely from watching the river's fishermen follow the seasons and tides.
But when they arrived in a village called Merotandrano, on a small tributary of the river, a fisherman gave him a Mangarahara cichlid that had been dead only a few days.
Apparently, the North Sea used to be a landscape of valleys and rivers, and fisherman often find mammoth fossils and things like that; but the BBC says that this is the first time the remains of a cave man have been found in a sea bed anywhere in the world.
"The Isle" is set on a remote river on which fishermen ply their trade from small floating cabins.
The artist's "Riverbank of the Marne" from 1888, a landscape of the river with two fishermen in the foreground, is one of the collection's highlights.
Maine officials also hope the agreement will help foster economic revitalization of communities along the river, drawing recreational fishermen and kayakers.
