All Aboard the Island Hopper

For the last 25-plus years, there aren’t many who have travelled more diligently and more far afield with a surfboard in tow than the writer Michael Kew. His passport, dog-eared and creased a couple times over, has been stamped in more than 45 countries. And while his itinerant inclinations once had him chasing stories from Norway and Greenland to East Africa and the Seychelles, it’s his classical, if not romantic, tropical wanderings around various outposts of Micronesia and Oceania that have been his most consistent muse through more than a half dozen books of salt water–soaked writing. 

“Not sure what to say, I love warm water,” summed up Kew recently, his trademark rapid fire laugh punctuating the thought. “The colors of a perfect reef pass with good waves, good weather, and maybe a cold beer ― it’s a pretty hard vibe to beat.”

A Santa Barbara City College alum and former Rincon regular, the 52 years young Kew, who now calls the forests of coastal Oregon home, is returning to town this week to celebrate his newest collection of writing, Xanatollu: Surfing the Island Hopper Express. Kew’s eighth book, it is perhaps his most polished effort yet, one that transcends the topic of surfing in a new way for the author and offers a fascinating and fun read for those who ride waves just as much as it does for the non-surfers among us.

Certainly, Kew’s ear for dialogue and ample skill as witness of the far flung is, as per usual, at the heart of his writing, along with his understated passion for animating surf lore and finding good beer. That being said, Xanatollu is less a Beat-inspired meditation on surf adventure and more of something in the ways of Kew’s other primary literary inspiration, famed travel writer Paul Theroux. 

Instead, it is a mix of well-researched aviation and World War II history chopped up with edge-of-the-earth, intentional travel along the fabled commercial airline route of the book’s namesake, Island Hopper, a United Airlines flight that connects Honolulu, Hawaii, to the U.S. Territory of Guam via multiple stops at remote atolls throughout Micronesia and the Marshall Islands. And while Kew certainly scores waves, it’s his figurative “surfing” of the unique flight route and the various ports of call and interactions with people along the way that makes up the real meat of the book.

“Basically, I was drinking wine in front of my fireplace here in Oregon a couple winters back trying to come up with a good idea for a new project,” says Kew of Xanatollu’s origin story. And so, at the start of September in 2024, Kew set out on a seven-week trip aboard the Hopper in search of what he likes to call “travel magic,” packing little more than a surfboard and his own curiosity. “Traveling and exploring and then coming home to my own little hermitage in the woods here in Oregon and writing about it ― it’s all I really know what to do and I feel lucky for it,” he said.

411: Author Michael Kew will be at Mollusk Surf Shop, 208 Grey Avenue in the Funk Zone, on Saturday, October 3, for a book signing and slideshow from Micronesia. The event, which starts at 5pm, will include live music from Landomon and Easy Trip. An after-party is planned at The Mullet next-door and will feature Kew’s old footage of the surf scene at Rincon from 2010 through 2014.