Lew Decker

Author of the critically acclaimed memoir FINGERPRINTS…A Coffeehouse Reader, Lew Decker has also written for the sailing magazines “Cruising World” and “Latitudes & Attitudes”, and for “CQ”, a magazine devoted to the amateur radio community. He spent several years building the forty-foot Norman Cross-designed trimaran “Sun Flower” and then cruised from California through the Panama Canal and up to the Florida Keys. After working as a professional yacht delivery skipper on the East Coast, he became a charter captain in the Bahamas and in the Virgin Islands. Lew has crossed the Atlantic under sail and at various times in his sailing career has visited nearly every island in the Caribbean. He spent a year hanging around the bars of Key West and still considers the island town to be his spiritual home. A retired middle school teacher, Lew resides in San Diego with his wife Kathleen and an English Springer Spaniel named Riley Dog.

FINGERPRINTS...A Coffeehouse Reader is a memoir that began as a series of writing exercises while Lew was on a bicycle trip in Durango, Colorado, in 1994. During the ensuing years he accumulated over 160,000 words, all in pencil on yellow legal pads, and all of it written in coffeehouses in various parts of the country. His wife Kathleen encouraged him to edit the lot and put the best of the stories into book form. FINGERPRINTS is the result, a mosaic of people and places and events in Lew's life and is a reflection of the relationship he had with his father. Each of the forty-eight chapters is unique and in the telling of them he tried to leave the reader with some universal truths.

Lew has a novel soon to be available on Amazon.com. Set against a backdrop of the Bahamas and the incredible islands of the Caribbean, ALLIGATOR FOOD is the sexually charged story of Nathan Addison, a Key West local determined to recapture his life. Bound for a sailing adventure in the lower Caribbean, Nathan and his crew make their way to St. Thomas where he starts temporary work as a charter captain. While he is sailing through the British Virgin Islands, Nathan falls in love with the mysterious Rilee Britton only to see her walk out of his life at the end of the charter. A downward spiral of alcohol abuse ensues, reaching the ultimate depths when a reef emerges from the darkness in one of the most remote areas of the Caribbean. ALLIGATOR FOOD is the literary account of Nathan, his beloved "Serendipity", and their story of life-altering loss and redemption.