As a diving photojournalist, HILLARY HAUSER has gone solo to 200 feet on the outside of a Hawaiian crater, explored sinkholes and caves in South Australia, slid into a flooded cavern underneath a mountain in Death Valley, gone down the face of a huge Fijian wave, and crashed on the backside of Molokini Island, Hawaii, in a canoe with six other people. She has chronicled the lives, and deaths, of fishermen, including a dear friend killed by a white shark.

In this book Hauser tells the story of her most challenging episode of all: a frightening plunge into a deep, dark hole of cancer, relationship failure, and depression. She describes her climb back to the surface – and sunlight – again, a journey that offers a front-seat view into the sea and its creatures, fishermen and the dangers they face, the minds of daredevil surfers who ride enormous waves, and the insights of stellar explorers like Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man up Mt. Everest.

Dancing on Waves is also about her adventure in co-founding (along with friend Jeff Young) Heal the Ocean, a Santa Barbara, California-based environment group, in 1998. As Executive Director, Hauser has led the group to extraordinary success in the upgrade of wastewater infrastructure, which she has focused on as essential to protect the ocean. She is an original member of the Women Divers Hall of Fame (2007), and in 2009 she received the venerated NOGI Award (“the Oscar of Diving”) for Distinguished Service from the Academy of Underwater Arts and Sciences.