Dallas Murphy

Dallas Murphy grew up in South Florida, where, diving, fishing, and sailing, he fell in love with the ocean and particularly the Gulf Stream. He is the author of two professionally produced plays, The Terrorists and The Explorers, and eight books, a mix of fiction and nonfiction. His three-book series, Lover Man, (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Lush Life, and Don’t Explain were about a reluctant sleuth who lives off his dog, star of screen, TV, and dog food boxes. Apparent Wind was about a real estate swindle and ecological destruction in the Florida Keys. Most recently, he published Rounding the Horn, a nonfiction account of Cape Horn, including exploration, human and natural history structured around his own sailing trip down by the Horn. In 2007, he published To Follow the Water, about the history of physical oceanography and its evolution to the present.

He has participated in five oceanographic cruises aboard Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution ships Oceanus and Knorr and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ship Ronald H. Brown. In April 2010, he accompanied University of Miami scientists on a cruise aboard Knorr to the Agulhas Current, the Indian Ocean’s western boundary current. In 2010, he returned to the waters north of Iceland with WHOI physical oceanographer Robert Pickart. For Murphy’s daily at-sea journals from Dr. Pickart’s Irminger Sea cruise in October 2008, please see https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/into-the-wild-irminger-sea/.