To see what he could see

Oh, just hold on a minute," author Neville Peat says, his voice threatening to trail off amid the surf-like hiss of telephonic static as he describes the view from his Broad Bay study, out across Otago Harbour where a shiny-bright HMNZS Otago cuts its way through the narrow channel.

"She looks really beautiful; she's going past some guys collecting cockles; they are wading and the tide is advanced; there are seven of them ... anyway, sorry about that. Where were we?"

This set of quotes tells a story in itself: Peat, the keen observer; a collector of many details; a man in love with the sea; an author of 40-odd books who is aware of the myriad tangents he can take in his craft, should he allow himself to be distracted.

The latest career twist has been lengthy. Turning his gaze from the mountains, fauna and folk on which he based 2008's High Country Lark: an Invitation to Paradise, Peat focuses on another great divide, the Tasman Sea.

He describes The Tasman: Biography of an Ocean as his largest project. Involving more than two years of research and writing and another year of production, he finished it in June last year. A 2007 Creative New Zealand Michael King Writers' Fellowship of $100,000 - our largest literary award - has helped cover expenses.

"The idea was suggested to me about four years ago," Peat explains. "It's a complex book and one people aren't necessarily going to read from one end to the other. It is a reference work as well as something people can enjoy if they want to get some travel stories or investigate something they may have read in the newspaper."

Having committed to a full-time writing career since 1986, Peat has published a wide range of titles, including regional natural histories, New Zealand guides, histories of the Antarctic and studies of birds.

His collaboration with Brian Patrick, Wild Dunedin: Enjoying the Natural History of New Zealand's Wildlife Capital, won the Natural Heritage category at the 1996 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, while Wild Fiordland: Discovering the Natural History of a World Heritage Area, also written with Patrick, was short-listed for the same prize in 1997.

Yet he also enjoys documenting how people relate to the natural environment. Although the first third of The Tasman explains the sea's geological history, its climatic effects (particularly on New Zealand), its fauna and its sometimes furious moods, the remainder of the book deals with how humans interact with it, "whether they be heroic types who paddle or row or those who simply love living beside it".

Peat has long had an interest in the sea. After entering journalism at Dunedin's Evening Star newspaper in the 1970s, he got his first overseas job as a shipping writer in Cape Town at a time when the Suez Canal was closed, meaning vessels came around the Cape of Good Hope.

"Looking back, I have had so much to do with writing about the sea, ships and harbours.