Born in New York, Peter Hunt spent six years of his childhood in Athens, Greece, where he started diving in 1978. Hunt worked on several wreck diving boats based out of New York during high school and college, including the Wahoo, from which he made 13 dives to the Andrea Doria in 1983 and 1984. After graduating with a history degree from Brown University, Hunt joined the navy and trained as an A-6 Intruder attack pilot. During his naval service, he completed three aircraft carrier deployments to the Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean, and Western Pacific over ten years of active duty, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross and three Air Medals. Hunt went on to fly for United Airlines until being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2005 at age 43. That is when his writing began in earnest. Peter Hunt holds a master’s degree from the University of Washington, is the father of two adult children, and lives with his wife on Whidbey Island. He is the author of Angles of Attack, Setting the Hook, and The Lost Intruder.
Nearly two decades after a young-onset Parkinson's disease diagnosis, former Navy pilot Peter Hunt discovers more to smile about every day as he searches for meaning in life's daily routine. Insightful and inspiring, Blue Water's 100 vignettes illustrate how great life can be, not despite or because of suffering, but in nature's reassuring acknowledgment of pain as essential to humanity.
By age 43, Peter Hunt had lived an adventurous life so when diagnosed with Parkinson's disease he accepted it as simply a new challenge. But Hunt's previous tests had been by choice, Parkinson's was not. What if Parkinson's disease was welcomed into life as an opportunity to grow, not as a victim's label? Beyond Identity’s collection of short stories, essays, and poems asks. "who am I?"
In 1989, a U.S. Navy A-6 Intruder crashed off Whidbey Island, Washington. The Navy's search for the jet came up empty handed. Former Navy pilot Peter Hunt knew the lost Intruder well, as the jet came from his squadron; he had flown that aircraft. Hunt long imagined the thrill of finding the sunken A-6. In 2014 he struck out to find the missing A-6 while battling young onset Parkinson's disease.
Peter Hunt crewed on five Andrea Doria expeditions, the “Mount Everest of wreck diving,” in the early 1980s before becoming a Navy pilot. Twenty years later, Hunt set out to dive the famous luxury liner again. An introspective odyssey of memory and heart-pounding adventure, Setting the Hook explores thirty years of extreme diving in a personal tale of learning to accept life’s oldest challenge.