This is the story of a 1,000-mile kayak voyage up the coast of Japan made by ten students: four British, six American. They experienced both the stifling calms of the Inland Sea and the storms of the Pacific, the frenzied excitement of the great Tinjin Festival, and the peace of tiny isolated islands whose inhabitants had never before seen a foreigner of any nationality. They visited the atomic dome at Hiroshima and watched the intense religious ritual of a modern Samurai swords-man. By the end they felt that, though their voyage had only been fleetingly written in the water, what they had learned would not be so soon forgotten.

The sturdy individualism of Newfoundland's men of the sea takes them on a hazardous journey along the Labrador coast in search of the fish on which their livelihood depends.