Desperation Reef

Acknowledgments

My introduction to the literature of surfing was the hundreds of Surfer magazines I read and reread as an adolescent. I didn’t just read Surfer; I memorized it. I loved the sassy writing, the exotic datelines, hip lingo, and its single-minded passion for riding waves. That writing, and of course the photographs, drove me to hours in high school classes, ignoring the teachers, while sketching romanticized waves in my notebooks. It drove me to Newport Beach where I began my own short wave-riding career, bodysurfing 15th Street — a stout beach break with hollow tubes — makeable with nothing but Birdwell Beach Britches and a pair of Duck Feet.

That said, much of the recent nonfiction surf lit is, in my opinion, even better, especially with regards to big-wave surfing and tow-in surfing, which changed the sport dramatically.

These books informed, delighted, and often thrilled me:

The Wave by Susan Casey

Maverick’s: The Story of Big-Wave Surfing by Matt Warshaw

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan (winner of the Pulitzer Prize)

Ghost Wave: The Discovery of Cortes Bank and the Biggest Wave on Earth by Chris Dixon

Caught Inside: A Surfer’s Year on the California Coast by Daniel Duane

Women on Waves by Jim Kempton

“Surf noir” is a literary subgenre that I’ve enjoyed since Kem Nunn’s wonderful Tapping the Source pretty much put surf noir on the map. His Tijuana Straits and The Dogs of Winter are wonderful, too.

Don Winslow’s novellas Sunset and Paradise — part of Broken — are powerful stories, steeped in surfing life and death.

Thank you, writers, you inspire.

Thank you, waves, you seduce and sometimes terrify.

Thank you, champion agents, Mark and Robert Gottlieb of Trident Media Group, and my wise and exacting editor at Forge, Kristin Sevick, for helping me make the paddle out and the drop into Desperation Reef.

And thank you, Rita, for life, love, and laughter.