Hip & Shoulder Books has released Deep Water, a surf/travel memoir written by Brendan McAloon and presented by Surfing World magazine. Deep Water is an evocative reflection on McAloons years as a globe-trotting reporter on the tour, its personalities and subcultures. Though it's long on exotica - Indo, California, Ireland, Hawaii and more, Deep Water is a eulogy to McAloon's childhood in Ararat and his early surfing forays along Victoria's southwest coast. For a man with an outrageously generous job description - fly around the world and we'll pay you for your thoughts - he displays a keen sense of wonder at how it all came about. There's a healthy dose of the other side too - lost sleep, vicious hangovers and soul crushing departure lounges; but the wider impression is one of gratitude to the sport and the employers who kept him in orbit. McAloon also shows himself to be an avid reader of surfing lore and literature, quoting everyone from Jack Finlay to Daniel Duane, Bunker Spreckles and even Alain de Botton, as he takes a good-humoured tilt at the impossible task - a wide-angle portrait of surfing and everyone in it. The author deftly puts himself just out of the spotlight in all this, turning his gaze instead to a raucous cast of collaborators and heroes like Jon Frank, Pancho Sullivan and Fanning. The photography of Frank and Grambeau (and others) lifts the text into a dreamy realm. But above all, it's beautifully crafted yarn-spinning that gets this one over the line - be sure to look up ASB's personal favourite: the gut-wrenching dread of being caught inside at Sunset. Deep Water is being distributed to surf retailers by Renniks Publications.