Orcas Island resident Jonathan White’s book “Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean” has been selling well and garnered positive reviews from newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal, Seattle Times, Oregonian, The Surfer’s Journal, San Diego Union Tribune, Publisher’s Weekly, Tampa News and more. He has been interviewed on many TV and radio programs, including NPR’s Living on Earth, Michael Krazny’s The Forum (out of San Francisco), The Leonard Lopate show in NYC and The Bill Bradley Show.

“Tides” won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award for Best Book. Of 430 books submitted from Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, BC, and Alaska, only six were selected. White shared this honor with Sherman Alexie’s “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” and Corinna Luyken’s “The Book of Mistakes.” White’s book also received a National Outdoor Book Award.

On Thursday, March 1 at 6 p.m. at Darvill’s Bookstore, all are invited to celebrate award and a one-year anniversary of “Tides.” White will give a brief talk, but mostly it’s a party.

In his book, White, who is also a sailor and surfer, takes readers across the globe to discover the science and spirit of ocean tides. In the Arctic, he shimmies under the ice with an Inuit elder to hunt for mussels in the dark cavities left behind at low tide; in China, he races the Silver Dragon, a twenty-five foot tidal bore that crashes eighty miles up the Qiantang River; in France, he interviews the monks that live in the tide-wrapped monastery of Mont St. Michel; in Chile and Scotland, he investigates the growth of tidal power generation; and in Panama and Venice, he delves into how the threat of sea level rise is changing human culture – the very old and very new.

White crisscrossed North America last year, giving more than a hundred talks at aquariums, libraries, yacht clubs, literary events, Audubon Societies and museums. He gave presentations at LLBean in Maine, the Library of Congress in D.C., the Sausalito Audubon Society, the Harvard Bookstore, the Herreshoff Museum in Rhode Island, the Explorers Club in NYC (where he had to borrow a suit and tie to meet dress code), the Seattle Aquarium, the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry and throughout Alaska.

As White enters year two of the book’s publication “Tides” has been nominated for several other awards, been translated into Chinese and is being considered by the BBC for a documentary film.

With the paperback release this June, Jonathan will embark on an “abbreviated” tour with visits this summer to San Francisco, Oregon, Washington and New England. He’ll be in the United Kingdom in June with speaking events at the Hay Literary Festival, the National Oceanography Centre, the Royal Maritime Museum, and the Bristol Festival of Nature, among others.

Jonathan is currently working on an article for Wooden Boat Magazine about the restoration of the Western Flyer, the boat John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts sailed to Baja in 1939. The Log of the Sea of Cortez, published in 1941, memorialized the trip. The Western Flyer was considered lost until it was discovered on the bottom of the Swinomish River a few years ago. A barnacled ghost of what it was, someone bought it for $1 million and is restoring the 75-foot trawler in Port Townsend.

“You could say the boat’s worth nothing … and everything,” said White. “I’m fascinated by the Flyer and the Baja trip with Steinbeck and Ricketts. It’s a perfect intersection of boat, ocean, literature, ecology, and metaphysics – and the entire trip was organized around the tide!”