Growing up in the San Diego suburb of Coronado, Katherine Nichols heard tales of five drug-dealing surfer dudes who attended her high school in the 1960s, more than a decade before her. They included swim team members who smuggled marijuana from Mexico by swimming it in rafts across miles of ocean. Headed by their former coach and Spanish teacher, their little startup became the Coronado Company, a worldwide drug ring using ships and amphibious landing craft.

Their rise and fall is chronicled in Nichols’ book, “Deep Water: From the Swim Team to Drug Smuggling,” published this month under Simon & Schuster’s new Simon True young-adult imprint of true-crime stories.

For a time, the Coronado Company laundered money through Hawaii when dealing with suppliers in Thailand, and a chapter on Waikiki in the 1970s, where they do a little surfing in front of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and learn to say “slippers,” not “flip-flops,” is deftly drawn by Nichols, who lived in Honolulu for 20 years and was a reporter for the Honolulu Advertiser and Honolulu Star-Bulletin.

Nichols, who was interviewed by phone from Boston, where she lives, will read from “Deep Water” Wednesday at the Hawaii State Library.

QUESTION: What appealed to you about the six principals in the Company and helped you get inside their heads as if they were fictional characters?

ANSWER: I grew up surrounded by the story and surrounded by the ocean on the Coronado Peninsula, and then, of course, in Hawaii, where I was a triathlete, swimmer, paddler. My affinity for the ocean certainly informs the book and my understanding of these guys a little bit because they were all ocean lovers. It couldn’t have happened without (President Richard) Nixon’s war on drugs, which tightened up the borders and created opportunities for guys who understood the ocean.

At first I approached with a judgmental attitude: These guys are criminals. But I worked hard to get to know them beyond that. And it’s interesting now that marijuana is legal in (several) states. They were pretty decent people — varsity athletes, a class president. They loved being part of a team (and had that) unity, that focus.

And it’s easier to have some empathy because they didn’t kill anyone. They stayed with marijuana and didn’t do cocaine and heroin. That was a much more violent world and the consequences were more severe.

Q: You start out with Eddie “the Otter” Otero, the best swimmer in the group, as a junior being recruited by recent grad Robert Lahodny and ring leader Lance Weber. Were the principals all upper-middle-class kids? They didn’t need the money?

A: Yes. They were a bunch of white kids, not rich, but nobody was suffering economically. They figured they could make a little extra money, have fun and adventures. (The Company made an estimated $100 million.)

Q: You just received your master’s of business arts degree from Yale. Would the Coronado Company have made a good case study?

A: Yes! It’s an interesting business study, the ultimate entrepreneurial lean startup. They saw a business opportunity and thought they would dabble, then their Spanish teacher had the vision (to expand).

They had to face boat fuel scarcity and higher prices during the Arab oil embargo of 1974. They all sort of considered themselves economists on a certain level. I wrote the book while I was at Yale, and school informed the book because I was able to understand the business angle in a way I wouldn’t have appreciated previously.

Q: What was most impressive?

A: Their operational skills. How they scaled up from 20 pounds to 20 tons of marijuana.

Q: Your book is nonfiction but has a novelistic narrative, largely written in dialog. How did you reconstruct those long-past interactions?

A: Narrative nonfiction is the genre. Originally, I had fictionalized it in a novel, but after my agent submitted it to Simon & Schuster, they asked me to start over and write the true story. I said I can’t verify a conversation between two former drug smugglers that happened 40 to 50 years ago when both are now dead, and they were fine with that.

So while I conducted deep research into events and court records, and had tremendous support from the drug enforcement agents and U.S. attorneys who worked on the case, when I interviewed classmates, friends, Eddie’s widow and others, I got different stories. Connecting all these views was a way to insert creativity.

Q: Did you interview any of the protagonists?

A: I’m not allowed to say whether I interviewed any of them directly. They’ve gotten out of jail and straightened out their lives and they don’t want to be seen as participating in these things. Lou (Villar), the former teacher and CEO/kingpin, turned 80 in January.

Q: Is “Deep Water” a cautionary tale?

A: Yes. That’s the intention of the Simon True series: to show crime with consequences. The book shows how people get in and then don’t know how to get out. It’s a real harsh lesson when you think you can just do a little bit. It’s a coming-of-age story. … It was glamorous till it wasn’t.