After his oceanographic parents are suspiciously killed by the sea, a boy is forced to help his evil Uncle perform research towards world oceanic domination.
Darwin is a boy in a precarious position; he sleeps most nights suspended in a hammock on the bottom floor of his parents' laboratory, where an underground wave pool laps beneath him. On a visit to a research site known as Miss May Point, Darwin's parents are killed by a wave as his Uncle Victor stands aside. With their death, something comes alive in Darwin: not a spirit or a wind in his sails, but something less appealing, akin to an intestinal parasite or a toenail fungus. The ocean which Darwin has loved becomes that which he fears most. In close second is his Uncle - where Darwin's days used to contain the joy of observing, annotating, and meditating on the ocean, they now contain fear and vast amounts of technical research and tea-making. Darwin's Uncle is ambitious with the ocean; his goals seem suspiciously similar to "engineering the sea for world domination", a task for which one requires a sizeable amount of information on tides, currents, salinity, etc. Yet the sea does not permit him to obtain the data he needs, leaving Darwin at the brink of a thesis he'd rather leave behind...