Retired ship's captain Bernard Commons caught the writing habit while anchored off Sumatra on a salvage vessel waiting for much bigger ships to bang into objects below the surface.
With time on his hands, the former Royal New Zealand Navy officer found penning his recollections from a lifetime on the high seas a worthwhile distraction.
While down time was relatively plentiful in the Straits of Malacca, it still took the master mariner 20 years to have the memoirs published in full.
The result is an e-book, One Sailor's Yarns, published by local editor Claire Plaisted. It's a collection of short stories on memorable moments, from racing 18 foot (5.5m) wooden skiffs in the Hauraki Gulf as a schoolboy to commanding giant floating behemoths in the Straits of Hormuz.
"The book contains a series of short stories, some are direct descriptions of what happened, others are partly fictitious to protect the identity of those involved," the 79-year-old Rotorua resident says.