Corbett Hale knows the sea is an inscrutable lady-one day calm, the next a fury. But as he sets sail with a crew of three from the bay waters of the Chesapeake, heading to the Bahamas, Corbett cannot know what awaits them as he guides his beloved sloop, Gilead, into the Atlantic.

Sailing south, he confronts haunted memories from a time he spent on another water, in another part of the world. Even as the violence of the sea tests his courage and skill as a sailor, he finds himself both drawn back into the turbulence of the Vietnam War and pulled forward into a struggle for survival.

Light on Dark Water tells the story not only of a battle for survival at sea, but of one man's fight with his own sense of incompleteness, anger, and remorse, as he attempts to come to terms with the raw interplay of loss and grace that is the essence of life itself.