Walk on Water

Three oceans. Three decades. Three stages of a life lived close to the Water and close to the bone.

In a remote open-air bar in Lombok, a conversation begins over beer with ice — and a story unfolds about a young man, a Pacific voyage, and a surfboard that has been waiting fifty years to be reclaimed. Jake's voice is unhurried, warm, and quietly wise, carrying the particular freedom of a man who learned early that the world is larger and stranger and more beautiful than anyone warns you it will be.

That is Journey One.

Journey Two takes us to the North Shore of Oahu in 1973 — the year professionalism eclipsed the soul of surfing. The contests arrived. The cameras arrived. Something pure and wordless began its slow conversion into spectacle. The Holy Goof is an elegy for that moment, told from inside it, by someone who was there.

Journey Three finds Jake in 2010 — now an e-journalist, kitesurfing inside the crater of an Indonesian volcano, and finally, at last, finding in Lady Osley the partner the ocean never quite was.

Walk on Water is not a surfing book, though the surf is always present. It is a book about the heart in three stages of life — young and hungry, middle and grieving, older and finally, quietly, home.

Written by a man who travelled the world as a journalist for Windsurf Magazine, competed internationally in windsurfing, placed fifth at the CISM World Games as a wrestler, and spent a lifetime reading the ocean from Hawaii to Western Australia — Walk on Water carries the authority of genuine experience and the grace of a writer who knows that the best stories are the ones that were actually lived.