2nd book this week from Australia that we are thanked in! Mountains of the Sea

So a long time ago, in another time and place, I ran a non-profit for the surf community that I co-founded. We used to do an annual conference that covered all sorts of heady topics on surfing, the culture, surfboards, the environment, etc. The first one we held I met a gentleman named Gunter Swoboda that came over all the way from Australia to attend. We hit it off and spent quite a bit of time talking about all sorts of things during his stay. One of those topics was an article he read in Surfer's Journal about a member of the Proletariat who had sailed with Captain Cook and wound up staying in the Hawaiian Islands and becoming enamored with their culture and with surfing, in particular. In research, Gunter and I found out the story was fiction but we decided to option the story from the writer and see if we can turn it into a screenplay.

Fast forward quite a few years. The screenplay was written by Gunter with intense research, countless suggestions and edits on my part, a new partner was brought on, job changes abound, I had to back out of the project after about 20 edits but still loved the project. Well the screenplay was done but with a dirth of big budget epic sagas being produced in Hollywood, Gunter decided to reverse engineer the screenplay and write a book to get the story out. Well...the book is out and looks amazing. It is called "Mountains of the Sea" and is a mix of "Dances with Wolves," "Master and Commander" and "Endless Summer." Published by Eloquent Books and can be bought on Amazon.com.


There we are in the first paragraph. Guess the Plop is a good wingman for Australian authors...Even though I read the screenplay so many times my eyeballs were bleeding from it, I can't wait to read the novel (I know what happens in the end).