Reading and reviewing this book is one of my more memorable moments as a scientist and a surfer. I actually read it while flying over the Pacific Ocean and going to sea on the R/V Atlantis from Easter Island to Tahiti. I had plenty of opportunities to look at the ocean and relate to the descriptions provided, such as crossing ground swells, short period seas, and capillary waves forming on a calm, glassy sea. As a professor in oceanography and a surfer, I thought I had a pretty good understanding of how swells and waves formed before I read this book. Now I realize that there is much more to know and that details related to the transfer of wind energy to ocean swell energy are still not understood.

Naar, D.F. 2005. Review of Surf Science: An Introduction to Waves for Surfing, by T. Butt and P. Russel with R. Grigg. Oceanography 18(2):261–262, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2005.65.

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