Author Jonathan White was the guest speaker at a Boothbay Harbor Yacht Club event June 23. Following a cocktail hour and dinner, yacht club member and founder of the "Lunch/Dinner with the Author" series, Carole Cochran, introduced the author and marine conservationist to a crowd of 96 people.

White, along with his publicist, Michael Strong, had been traveling around Maine to promote White’s new book, “TIDES: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean.”

The sun and moon are both players when it comes to the tides. Most of us know both have a profound effect on them. And tides have a profound effect on anyone who lives near the coast, or works or plays on boats.

We know there are two high, and two low, tides daily along the Maine coast. We know tides factor into decisions such as when to go clamming, swimming, hauling lobster traps and pulling smaller boats up on a beach.

Anyone with a boat with an outboard motor, a keel, or both, knows there are certain waterways near the coastline we should steer clear of at low tide, for fear of going aground or ruining the lower part of a motor.

But when White, an experienced sailor, was woken up by gale force winds early one morning in 1990 on his 65-foot schooner, anchored in Alaska’s Kalinin Bay, he went up to the deck to see if everything was okay.

It wasn’t. He had gone aground.

White knew that if the tide was low they were golden. The boat would float when the tide came in. He found a tide chart and learned  it was peak high tide.

“The boat filled with water when the tide came back in,” he said in an interview. “It was caught in the mud.” At that time, White knew a little about the moon’s effect on tides, but not enough to satisfy his curious mind.

He started reading and researching, and eventually traveling around the globe to learn everything he could about the tides all over the world. The more he read, the more questions he had.

Ten years later, he had read 300 books and visited countless places, including the Arctic, China, France, Chile, Scotland, Venice and Panama. Now he has written his own book.

“I didn’t have any intention of writing a book about tides when I first started researching this. I just wanted to learn about them.”

The more he read about and studied the tides, the more fascinating, complex and poetic they became to him. “But I wasn’t seeing that part in books. I wanted to bring in the human element, the cultural, spiritual, mythological element, that is really so much a part of the tides, that most science books don’t even touch.”

White’s website, http://jonathanwhitewriter.com, states: “In ‘TIDES: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean,’ writer, sailor and surfer Jonathan White 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 25-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.”

As for the tides around the world, White said they are different everywhere, but Maine’s coastline stands out. It is part of the same system as the Gulf of Maine, Bay of Fundy system, and the Bay of Fundy has some of the most extraordinary tides in the world — the largest by 10 feet. “It has had a record high tide — 54 feet 6 inches. Only one other place has such a large tide — in Angave Bay, near the Hudson Straits. The next largest tide is in France.

“The tides boil down to vibration,” White said, by explaining the moon-sun effect on tides to someone who knows little about the science of the tides. “Different ocean basins have natural periods of vibration. They have a tendency to vibrate when it’s exposed to a certain frequency from the sun and the moon.

“All of the ocean basins in the world respond in some way to the sun and the moon, but some more than others.”

White said that for 15 years, not a day went by that he didn’t think about the tides and his determination to write a book about them. “I knew I had to do it, so when I finally committed to doing it, I knew I had to go all the way with it.

“I did this, at least in part, for my son.” I had this vision to do the project, but I was ambivalent about committing to it when my son was 5 or 6. I knew I didn’t want to die not having been a model for my son, pursuing something that I felt so strongly about. I was pursing a dream.”

A passage on the book cover reads: “In Tides, … White takes readers across the globe to discover the largest, fastest, most dangerous and breathtaking tides in the world.”

The book was researched and written over a 20-year period. White said it is only about 17 percent science. “The essence of it is a sailor having an accident due to the tide, and deciding to learn about how it works.”

White, who lives on a small island in Washington, is more than an author. He’s also a marine conservationist, a sailor and a surfer. His stories have appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, The Sun, Orion, Surfer's Journal and other publications. His first published book was 1994’s “Talking on the Water: Conversations about Nature and Creativity”.

“Tides” was released in February. It is available in bookstores, including Sherman’s in Boothbay Harbor, and on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound and BAM! websites.