He calls it his "idyllic year." Randall, now 81, had bought the sailboat hull while in graduate school on the West Coast, and finished it himself over two years. He sailed into the Pacific in 1956 with minimal knowledge of navigation but a full-fledged interest in the study of fishes.

A half-century later, he and the University of Hawai'i Press are presenting the world with a stunning book, "Reef and Shore Fishes of the South Pacific: New Caledonia to Tahiti and the Pitcairn Islands," with 720 pages, close to 1,500 fish species, more than 2,000 color photographs and drawings, and an equally impressive price of $75.

Randall has written books on fishes in the Caribbean, the Great Barrier Reef and the Coral Sea, Oman and also Hawai'i, and has unfinished books or ideas for books in other oceanic basins. On several Pacific islands, he was the first person to ever collect fish species. He is a world figure in coral reef fishes and a half-time senior ichthyologist — the term for a student of fish — at the Bishop Museum.

Anyone interested in following Randall's wake through the Pacific will find that his book includes virtually every fish you're likely to see through more than a dozen chains of tropical and subtropical South Pacific islands. He left out some islands at the fringes simply because the book could not physically get much bigger.

But he's going to get to those — Randall is working on a comprehensive book on the about 600 species of Hawaiian fishes you're likely to see from the shore to roughly 600 feet deep, and another on the fishes in the same depth range off Easter Island or Rapa Nui, and is collaborating with others on a book on the fishes of islands in a little colder water in the western South Pacific — Lord Howe, Norfolk and the Kermadecs.

The book leaves out some species, including animals that have never been reported except when reefs have been poisoned, and ones that live under the sand, or deep in caves.

"There's everything that you could see as a diver in this book, although a dozen or so fish that have just been discovered are not in the book," he said.

The frustration of trying to write a complete book about fish is that there are still lots more fish to be discovered. Randall said there are mysteries galore at the deeper end of the zero to 600-foot zone — the area that's deeper than most tank divers can go. The region has not been well documented, and one colleague estimates there may be 2,000 species there that no one has examined and written up.

Since his idyllic year with his wife and daughter in French Polynesian waters, Randall has cruised that ocean in many different boats, and in submarines as well. Some of the vessels are pictured in the book.

He has carried his trusty film cameras throughout, and more than 1,900 of the fish pix are his own. Each photo is accompanied by a detailed description of the fish, its range of sizes, where it's found, often something about what it eats.

Occasionally, he'll add a behavioral note, such as that the chevron butterfly fish "has the smallest territory of the genus and is the most aggressive in its defense."

And a tip about the flashlightfish, which has a light organ under its eye — perhaps for seeing food items at night. If you want to catch one, Randall said, you go into a cave at night, turn off your light and wait.

"After a few minutes of total darkness, the flashlightfish emerge from hiding and are readily seen by their bright light organ," he writes. They can also switch off their lights, same as a diver can.