The text combines autobiography and natural history, impassioned argument and state-of-the-art oceangraphy It follows the author from stream to river, from pond to lake and loch, from shore to deep sea, on a journey from childhood to adulthood spent in boats in conditions fair and foul The book also explains what it is like to be a lobster how some fish commute between the surface and the darkest depths, when the laws of physics say they should be crushed to death and the fate of the wild salmon, that heroic fish whose future is now imperiled by its farmed relatives