Writer, surfer, and househusband Richard Taylor is mad about beaches and islands, and was inspired by a house exchange that whisked him and his family from a freezing Ottawa winter to a year of some of the world's best surf on the east coast of Australia. In an era of packaged paradises and cyber surfers, the forty-something writer's first case of the mid-life blues seduced him into recapturing his youthful romance with surfing.