Hard Day At The Office
Marine Biology Adventure Memoir Shark Conservation Sport Diving Australian Maritime History Environmental Non-Fiction Extreme Travelogue
Hard Day At The Office drops you straight onto the deck of Grahame Southwick’s dive boat off Australia’s wild coastline, where every sunrise promises razor-sharp adventure below the surface. In this first-edition paperback the veteran shark-tagging skipper recounts 302 gripping pages of swimming with tiger sharks, wringing diesel from engine bilges, and teaching nervous tourists how to breathe underwater while a bronze whaler circles the ladder. Southwick’s laconic Aussie humour and eye for detail turn each chapter into a mini-expedition: you taste the salt sting on a regulator mouthpiece, feel the thud of a bull shark bumping the cage, and hear the deckhand’s shout when a manta ray the size of a Cessna glides past the stern. The result is a pure-adrenaline memoir that doubles as a love letter to the ocean.
Collectors and arm-chair adventurers prize this 2011 first edition because it captures a vanishing era of hands-on marine research before drone surveys and satellite tags took over. Southwick’s stories come straight from the logbooks—no ghost writer, no embellishment—making the book a primary-source chronicle of shark behaviour, dive safety evolution, and small-boat seamanship in the early 21st century. Young adults studying marine science or sport-diving instructors looking for real-world case studies will dog-ear pages on shark-feeding protocols and engine-room jury-rigs, while leisure readers simply ride the narrative wake from one close call to the next.
The copy offered here is clean, tight, and unmarked—no ex-library stamps, no inscriptions, no sun-faded spine—so the vivid cover photo of a great white sliding past the port-hole remains crisp. Light edge scuffing is all that separates it from shop-fresh, making it an affordable way to own a signed-adjacent first edition: Southwick personally handled the entire first print-run in Darwin, so every unblemished 1st is increasingly scarce. Slip it into a mylar cover and it becomes the standout narrative non-fiction title on any shelf devoted to sharks, diving memoirs, or Australian maritime adventure.
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