Surfmen
by Chip Marshall
represented by Jeanie Pantelakis
Thomas Hooper was saved as a young man from a shipwreck on the Diamond Shoals off the coast of Ocrakoke Island, North Carolina November 1848. His family lost at sea, he is taken in by Captain McGuire, Rose, and Jacob, a black man who risked his own life to save his. Raised in and around the rough seas of North Carolina, he is one of the first men the head of the Lifesaving Service recruits to be the Keeper of the Cape Hatteras Station; the most challenging position on the east coast. This is his story…
In 1878 on the sands of North Carolina’s Outer Banks a group of seven men bond together against the storms of November and the storms of controversy as the United States Lifesaving Service is formed. Recruited and trained by a notorious confederate blockade runner, Captain Thomas Hooper, the men of Cape Hatteras Station face the sea and become the only hope for sailors in distress at the treacherous Diamond Shoals. As Thomas Hooper readies his men to fight the sea and struggles to keep the men from fighting each other, he realizes that the lives he’s there to save may well be the lives of his men and himself.