That's me, communing with the fishes in French Polynesia.

ABOUT ME: I think I meant to be a marine biologist. The obsession started with sharks: a randomly assigned research report for my high school freshman English class, for which I checked out a book called (duh) SHARKS. The book's not even out there anymore; it was probably outdated when I read it. It had a cover image of a tiger shark, mouth slightly agape, fin breaking the surface right by the "h" in "sharks." It had horror stories from attacks and amazing pictures of divers with whale sharks. I was totally hooked. (Sorry.) As I read more (and actually started to get credible books) I began to appreciate that sharks are really, really, bad-ass. They're beautiful. They're mysterious. They're occasionally forty-five feet long. They occasionally show up in tabloids eating Russian submarines. What's not to like?

About the same time I started spending my Friday evenings at home looking at pictures of sharks in magazines (high school was great), I was also starting to go on longer and more interesting backpacking trips in pursuit of freshwater fish to catch. These were mostly with my friend Mark -- some of them are documented in my travel section -- and culminated in our three-week bear-dodging effort in Alaska. Since Mark, an expert outdoorsman and our unquestioned leader, often appeared to be trying to kill us ("Ahh, that landslide looks FINE for climbing!"), I felt it was only fair for me to learn a little about the things we were going to all this effort to extract from the water.

After all this, by the time I went off to college on the beach at UCSB, I figured I'd probably be a marine biology major. Which led me to my first internship, as a fish counter in the lab of excellent UC Santa Barbara marine scientist Milton Love (author of the book Probably More than You Wanted to Know About the Fishes of the California Coast). My duties as intern were to show up, sit down at a small light table, and put on a pair of gloves, while Dr. Love or his colleagues would dig back into the freezer and emerge to hand me a basketball-sized chunk of frozen inch-long silver fish. Then, using a pair of tweezers I would separate them out (the fish, not Dr. Love and his colleagues) based on whether they had two spots or three spots. I did this for about two months, after which I pretty much stopped trying to become a marine biologist and decided, what the hell, I'll just try and write for a living.

So that's me: professional writer, amateur marine enthusiast. My wife and I live in San Francisco, with a view of the Bay and whatever fish are crazy enough to be found in it. We share the house with a dog named Milo; I'd guess a medium-sized bass could probably take him.

You can email me to talk writing, fish, or writing about fish at: eric at darwinslepthere.com