In any honest surfer’s logbook, regrets and bummers far outnumber perfect rides. William Finnegan’s exciting new memoir, "Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life," includes sessions that range from fun to humiliating, terrifying to ecstatic, over his 50 years of paddling the surfer’s path.

Surfing, for Finnegan, is not just a sport, but a lifelong obsession.

"I’m fairly serious about it, and even though I’m ancient and live in New York, I still chase waves," said the author, a tall, broad-shouldered 62-year-old, in a phone interview from his office on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

Speaking of Hawaii, where his family lived while his father produced the original "Hawaii Five-O," among other shows, Finnegan recalled his most recent surf session here, in March 2014. "I really regretted not taking my gun," he said, using surfer parlance for a long, narrow board designed for big waves.

"Makaha was really big and really good. It was really too big for my board."

He went for it anyway — and nearly drowned. Near-death experiences recur in his book, from a Honolua Bay wipeout while tripping on acid to getting trapped at night off the rocky coast of Madeira, Portugal, in possibly the biggest waves he’d ever seen.

At Makaha, Finnegan was captivated by the sight of local surfers flying across the towering blue-black waves that obscured the gray sky. "I was scared … but I was seeing things out there that I would never forget," he writes. "I would never in this life surf like that, but seeing these things filled me with joy."

When Finnegan the surfer meets defeat, Finnegan the writer often triumphs. Still, why didn’t he take his gun to Hawaii when he knew he would likely find big waves?

Well, there was the hassle of packing and schlepping. After all, throughout his 20s, as chronicled in "Barbarian Days," he chased waves from Hawaii to Australia, Indonesia to Fiji to Africa, with just one battered but versatile board at a time.

Even if he had brought it, his gun, an 8-foot Hawaiian beauty shaped by Dick Brewer, is "really not long enough when it gets big," he admitted.

So why doesn’t Finnegan just get a bigger gun, already? It’s complicated. As one learns from his book, he’s a naturally frugal minimalist who wants to feel as little as possible between him and a wave. There’s also the question of why he puts himself in dangerous situations — as a surfer and as a war-zone reporter for The New Yorker and other publications — a theme he explores in "Barbarian Days."

Unlike big-wave riders, who, he says, are a different breed, Finnegan readily admits he feels fear. And that’s part of his charm as a writer and a surfer.

Although he’s putting off getting a longboard, which he seems to equate with inevitable senescence, Finnegan did own a few of them early on. He started surfing on a tanker as a Southern California 10-year-old.

As a 14-year-old in Honolulu, his "prized possession" was a new nose-rider "earned by endless hours of weed-pulling after school," he writes.

The board was stolen just before it became outdated. In Hawaii, watching local surfers push the limits, the young Finnegan witnessed the first ripples of the revolution in surfing that took off with the advent of shortboards.

The slightly built, prepubescent Californian also experienced the downside of being haole at Kaimuki Intermediate School, where his parents, civil rights advocates who believed in public education, sent him in 1965.

In his opening chapter, Finnegan describes the waves and local friends he made at Cliffs, the neighborhood break; his parents had rented a small cottage near the shore on Kulamanu Street. He also recounts, with characteristic diffidence and to often comic effect, the shocks he suffered at school, where he was bonked on the head with a 2-by-4 and lined up to fight progressively bigger brothers.

Adding insult to injury, his test scores landed him in advanced-level classes where he was the odd man out among Asian-American girls.

Finnegan was adopted by a clique of scrappy haoles who called themselves the In Crowd. Eventually the group became integrated with his surf pals, Glenn and Roddy Kaulukukui and Ford Takara.

From the Kaulukukuis, a surfing family whose father worked for the military as a lifeguard, Finnegan learned about Hawaiian culture. With regard to the fledgling Hawaiian sovereignty movement, "it was there, it’s the sort of backdrop to everything that’s happening (in the book), but the Kaulukukuis never really talked about it," he said.

About Roddy Kaulukukui, the brother his age with whom he keeps in touch, "I always had a sense that what he believed in was rooted in his upbringing on the Big Island, not on the military base in Honolulu. But the sense of dispossession was strong: ‘What are we supposed to do now, work for the Army?’" Finnegan lost touch with Glenn Kaulukukui, the older brother who turned pro surfer for a time and lived somewhere in the druggy jungle of Waikiki.

From a local girl who knew Takara, Finnegan learned something of Japanese-American culture and the pressures Takara rebelled against.

Decades later, Kaimuki Intermediate comes up in "Barbarian Days" when Finnegan recounts an interview with Barack Obama in early 2004 during his U.S. Senate run in Illinois. Finnegan writes that he ribbed Obama about having gone to Punahou School, and when he tells the politician where he went to school, the future president said, "No effing way." ("He didn’t actually say ‘effing.’ But we weren’t on the record," the author says in his book.)

Asked why he chose to open "Barbarian Days" with Hawaii rather than his childhood in Southern California, where his surfing life began, Finnegan said he’d tried but rejected a chronological approach.

"I had a very strong intuition that my two main stories were about getting hooked on surfing and how that played out in my life, and how I got started as writer," he said. "Those stories both started in Hawaii."

The sudden change in social environment when he moved to Honolulu, making him an outsider by virtue of his race, stood Finnegan in good stead as he gradually discovered his metier as a political journalist with a focus on developing countries.

"Being a fish out of water, a haole in a mostly nonhaole setting, an outsider trying to figure out local codes, was very much the beginning of life as a traveler and journalist," he reflected.

Throughout his Pacific travels, sensually recaptured in "Barbarian Days," he worked on a novel (still unpublished) about a brakeman on the Southern Pacific railroad in California — a job he worked after college — and filed dispatches, co-written with his friend Bryan Di Salvatore, to surf magazines. In his late 20s he went to South Africa to surf and got a close-up look at apartheid as a teacher in an all-black school.

Winner of the Overseas Press Club award for reporting in Latin America, Finnegan has also written extensively about drug abuse, disaffected suburban youth and poor communities of color in the U.S.

A constant source of warmth in "Barbarian Days" is the portrait of Finnegan’s close-knit family. The eldest child and a reluctant baby sitter to his brothers and sister, a doctor who lives with her family in Hawaii, he was inspired by both the political liberalism and narrative skills of his filmmaker parents, William and Patricia Finnegan.

Because he was in college at the University of California at Santa Cruz when his father started on "Five-O," Finnegan didn’t have much interaction with the cast and crew, although his siblings did.

"Once, when they shot an episode on a ship going from Honolulu to San Francisco, we were all thrown together and I worked as an extra. But they cut me out of scenes with Jack Lord because I was quite a bit taller than him."

James MacArthur and Kam Fong Chun were family friends, but "my dad and Jack Lord got to be enemies," Finnegan recalled.

By then the family was renting houses by the beach on the other side of Diamond Head, near the break called Tongg’s. After his father died in 2008, Finnegan, his siblings and their children returned to the neighborhood with their mother for a vacation. Finnegan is married to Caroline Rule, a lawyer, and they have a 13-year-old daughter, Mollie.

Reading "Barbarian Days," one comes to identify at least three saving graces that have kept Finnegan from happily surfing his life away. They are the interest in other people and societies that led him to journalism, and his designated family role as "Mr. Responsible," which he returned to after his decade adrift. Finally, his home for the past 31 years has been the island of Manhattan, not known for its surf, although he regularly chases swells from Long Island to New Jersey.

Reading "Barbarian Days," one can fully understand his need to chase certain waves, such as the perfect sirens of Honolua Bay, which are vividly remembered and lovingly described as the elusive objects of lifelong desire.

Even a photograph of one of his favorite rides, Finnegan found, cannot begin to capture what he saw and felt. Which is, perhaps, another reason why he wrote his memoir.

Although he sometimes suffers punishment and humiliation, he’s driven to catch waves by not only riding, but immortalizing them. "Like lashing yourself to the mast," he said, referring to the total-immersion research of 19th-century English artist J.M.W. Turner before he painted his storms at sea.

Finnegan will be returning to Hawaii in the winter to teach at Punahou and finally surf again, he hopes, with Roddy Kaulukukui.

"I haven’t seen Roddy, but I talk with him on the phone. He lives on Kauai and works in Hanalei, right near the great wave."

Over 50 years the old friends have kept the fires alive. "He is just as stoked as ever," Finnegan said. "When I talked to him this winter, he said, ‘You have to get over here, and I’ll put you on the right board.’"

There can be few greater words of welcome to a fellow surfer. It’s also an article of faith: that the right board exists to suit the skills of a fellow 62-year-old who’s not so familiar with winter’s gorgeous, gnarly Hanalei Bay.

In "Barbarian Days," Finnegan, whose family was Roman Catholic, writes of being released of any obligation as soon as he is confirmed in the church. From then on the family heads to worship on Sundays, and he paddles out to Cliffs. Although he calls himself an agnostic, did the waves, in some way, replace his early faith?

"There is a kind of broad analogy for me. I was raised in the church, moved away from organized religions and found this other transcendent experience in the ocean," Finnegan replied after a pause.

He added, "I can be a little superstitious about what goes on in the water because it’s got so much life and character and compelling power and beauty, good surf, that it’s very hard for me to see it as just a kind of physical phenomenon."

In "Barbarian Days" the near-fatal Makaha session of 2014 is followed by the description of a transcendent and redeeming session at triple-overhead Cloudbreak in Fiji in 2005. Although he still chases medium-big waves, Finnegan doesn’t surf Cloudbreak or Madeira anymore. That’s OK. He has this book to take him back there, and his readers along with him.

Excerpted from "Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life," by William Finnegan. Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright William Finnegan, 2015.

In June 1967, when I was fourteen, we moved back to Honolulu. We couldn’t get our old Kulamanu house back, and ended up in another cramped cottage farther down Kahala Avenue, with no good surf nearby.

The day we arrived, I took the bus to Roddy’s house. The Kaulukukuis had moved.

The next day, I got my mother to drop me with my board on Diamond Head Road, climbed the trail down to Cliffs, and, to my joy, found Ford Takara out surfing, still on his baby-blue board. Cliffs had been good all spring, he said. Yes, the Kaulukukuis had moved. To Alaska.

To Alaska?

The Army had transferred Glenn Sr. there. Glenn had run away again rather than move. But Roddy and John had gone glumly along with their dad and stepmom.

Waikiki became my home break. The surf was good in summer all the way from Tonggs to Ala Moana, and there were lockers at Canoes, a central spot, right on Kalakaua Avenue, where I could keep my board for the price of a combination lock.

The kids I met in the water mostly lived in a ghetto called the Waikiki Jungle. Some were haoles, usually living with waitress moms; most were locals with big multiethnic families. I asked everybody I surfed with about Glenn Kaulukukui. And everybody said they knew him. He was around, they said. They just saw him last night. Where was he living? Not clear.

Finally, out at Canoes one afternoon, I heard, "Focking Bill." It was Glenn, paddling up behind me, laughing, grabbing my rail. He looked older, a little haggard, but dauntless, still himself.

He was evasive about his living arrangements. He was working as a waiter, he said, living in the Jungle. Not going to school. He would show me the restaurant where he worked, slip me a teriyaki steak.

But I never saw the restaurant where he supposedly worked. Indeed, I rarely saw him on land. We surfed Canoes and Queens and Populars and Number Threes together, and I actually had trouble understanding some of what he was doing on waves, he was surfing so fast, turning so hard, transitioning so quickly, especially off the top. Climbing and dropping, stalling into the tube, squaring up to the breaking lip in a stable, high-velocity crouch.

Mixed in with the slow, gentle, outrigger-bearing, tourist-clogged mush at Waikiki, there were shallow reefs, at Kaisers and Threes and even Canoes, that produced, particularly at low tide, hollow waves — waves that created, as they broke, honest-to-God tubes. And I began that summer to find my way into the spinning blue bellies of a few waves, and even to emerge, occasionally, on my feet. Everybody talked about getting "locked in," but the thing itself, these tube rides, had the quality of revelation. They were always too brief, but their mystery was intense, addictive. You felt like you had stepped through the looking glass for an instant, and you always wanted to go back.

People said Glenn was on drugs. That seemed plausible. Drugs — marijuana, LSD — were everywhere, especially in Waikiki, most especially in the Jungle. It was the Summer of Love, whose epicenter was San Francisco, and we seemed to get a steady traffic of envoys from there, each bringing new music, lingo, and dope. I knew kids my age who smoked pot. I was too timid to try it myself. And when my little friends and I found ourselves once or twice at parties in tumbledown surfer shacks in the Jungle, where strobe lights wheeled, the Jefferson Airplane thundered, and big guys were probably getting laid in the back rooms, we stole beers and fled. I wondered where the hell Glenn lived.

Eleven years later, on a balmy blue morning, I paddled out at Cliffs. There, looking like he had never left, was Glenn Kaulukukui. He headed straight toward me, calling my name with a gleeful curse, reaching for my hand. He looked older — thicker through the shoulders, with shorter, darker hair, and a mustache — but the laughing light in his eyes was unchanged. He and Roddy and John were all now living on Kauai, he said. "We all still full-on surfing."

We commenced surfing small, glassy, uncrowded Cliffs, and I was pleased to see Glenn pausing on the shoulder of one of my waves, studying me closely, and then announcing, "Hey, you can still surf." His own surfing, meanwhile, even in soft, chest-high Cliffs, was glorious. The speed, power, and purity of his turns were on a level I had rarely seen except in films. And he didn’t seem to be pushing himself at all. He seemed to be playing — intently, respectfully, joyfully. For me, seeing Glenn surf like that was an epiphany. It was about him, my boyhood idol grown into a man, but it was also about surfing — its depth, or potential depth, as a lifelong practice. I told him I was off to the South Seas. He looked at me hard and wonderingly, and wished me luck. We clasped hands again. It was the last time I ever saw him.