Ryan Dacko has packed a lot of livin’ over his 45 years. He has worked as an underwater welder, served on the crew of an oceanic icebreaker, and he sailed to both the North and South poles as a Coast Guard seaman.

Living with his wife, Tatiana, and three children in Syracuse’s Onondaga Hill neighborhood, Dacko’s ready for the ride of his life, one that could eventually take him all the way to Hollywood.

After many years of research and a lifelong love of a certain 1975 summer blockbuster, Dacko has written a novel called “The Book of Quint,” a prequel to Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel, “Jaws.”

A year after Benchley’s book was published, Steven Spielberg filmed it. Shot on a budget of $9 million, the movie earned an astounding $476 million at the box office.

Dacko wrote “The Book of Quint” to celebrate the 50th anniversary of “Jaws,” which is approaching in 2025. “The Book of Quint” is the prequel to “Jaws”– the prequel that Spielberg always wanted to do as a follow-up to his hit movie. Dacko’s book follows clues and characters from the movie and creates an entire backstory for Captain Quint, the fearless fisherman made famous by Robert Shaw’s performance.

“It’s the human stories that I’m interested in,” Dacko said in a recent telephone interview. “Heck, the shark is only in the movie for a total of three minutes!” And the film is 124 minutes long.

Dacko has been obsessed with “Jaws” for most of his life. Even as a second grader at St. James Elementary on Syracuse’s South Side, he wrote a book report on Benchley’s novel.

Dacko later graduated from Bishop Grimes High School before he began his own seafaring careers.

Those years aboard icebreakers and Coast Guard ships gave Dacko a deep personal understanding of the occupational risks and challenges on the ocean.

Dacko has dabbled with screenwriting over the years. While in the Coast Guard, he used his free time while on a tour of duty at Antarctica to create a screenplay called “And I Lived,” a melodrama about high-school lovers. In 2007 he wrote the script for “Plan 9 from Syracuse,” a documentary about his attempt to gain attention from a prominent movie producer by staging a cross-country run from Syracuse to Hollywood.

As a novelist, Dacko was most inspired by the late-night shipboard conversation in “Jaws” in which Captain Quint recalls the sinking of the USS Indianapolis in the waning months of World War II.

“Eleven-hundred men went into the water…” So begins the haunting monologue in which Quint describes his experience on that doomed warship which had just delivered the first atomic bomb to Tinian and was on its way to the Philippines, when a Japanese submarine sank it with two torpedoes.

The big ship welt down in 12 minutes, leaving hundreds of crew floating in the ocean with hardly any food, water or lifeboats. During the next five days most died from a combination of exposure, salt poisoning, dehydration and the worst mass shark attacks in recorded history. Just 316 of 1,195 crew survived.

“This historic event provides the motivation for Quint’s iconic character in ‘Jaws,’” Dacko said. “That speech by Robert Shaw inspired it all.”

Back in 2020, Dacko spent 14 long months researching the Indianapolis tragedy. In 2021 he threw himself into writing the novel and in May 2022 he connected with Benchley’s widow, Wendy Benchley, and eventually received the estate’s permission to pen the prequel.

So as we approach the 50th anniversary of “Jaws,” Dacko has written the definitive prequel. Beginning with Quint adrift in the Philippine Sea, and following him first to San Francisco and then to Amity Island, we learn how he acquired his many scars, how he came to own his boat, the Orca, and how he developed his shark-hunting techniques.

Now Dacko’s inviting all fans of the movie “Jaws” to come together and show a demand for a prequel to be made by Universal Studios.

“With your pledge, not only will you experience ‘The Book of Quint’ as a published novel, but the numbers will be sent to Universal to show them the demand is there for more to the ‘Jaws,’” he said. “In essence this is a giant petition to Universal Studios. Everyone says it would make a great movie.”

Dacko’s novel is published by the London-based Amberley Publishing. An E-book in Kindle, Apple iBooks and Google Books is already available after European publication on Nov. 15, 2023. And Amberley is releasing “The Book of Quint” in North America on Tuesday Jan. 23, 2024.  It has already been labeled a best seller by Wal-Mart after a successful pre-order over the last two months, and an audiobook is also in the works.

You can follow the current status of the project on Dacko’s weekly broadcast called “The Jaws Obsession” on all major podcast platforms, or by visiting linktr.ee/bookofquint.