Vigilant
A rescue at sea costs Captain Walker Shaw his command. It also uncovers a trafficking network built on one certainty: the Coast Guard will always choose lives over contraband.
A Walker Shaw Novel
Loyal to duty.
Loyal to duty.
True to the crew.Vigilant.
Walker Shaw knows the sea does not care about politics, paperwork, or good intentions. The Walker Shaw novels follow the men and women who protect America’s working waterfronts—and the criminals who learn to turn duty itself into a weapon. Every story is grounded in real maritime procedure and firsthand experience on the water.
USCG Licensed 100 Ton Master
Pacific · Gulf · Atlantic
Former Skipper · Training Ship Morris
The First Novel
Complete manuscript
Walker Shaw · Book 1
Vigilant
A rescue at sea costs Captain Walker Shaw his command. It also uncovers a trafficking network built on one certainty: the Coast Guard will always choose lives over contraband.
The Work
The Walker Shaw Novels
Maritime crime where the Mississippi meets the Gulf—cutters, towboats, shipyards, barges, and the people who keep America’s working waterfront moving.
Confluence
Walker Shaw knows taking down a shipment is far easier than dismantling the system that carried it. Along New Orleans's industrial waterfront, the most dangerous empires are built with infrastructure.
The Author
Forty years of navigation before the first page.
Nate Eckler is a USCG Licensed 100 Ton Master, marine consultant, yacht broker, and maritime instructor with forty years on America’s coastal waters. He has commanded former military and commercial vessels, including the former Coast Guard cutter Morris. That experience grounds the Walker Shaw novels in the real boats, people, weather, and decisions of the maritime world.
- License USCG Licensed 100 Ton Master
- Waters Pacific Coast, Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic Seaboard
- Command Former Coast Guard cutter Morris, last Active-class cutter afloat
- Instruction Powerboating and sailing
- Trade Yacht delivery, marine consulting, brokerage
- Based Gulf Coast
Notes from the Dock
Come Aboard.
Read the prologue to Vigilant first—it is free, and there is nothing to fill in. Then, once or twice a month, dispatches from the Gulf Coast: real maritime history, working waterfronts, life aboard The Mad Hatter, and the afternoons that end up inside the fiction.
No spam. No algorithms. Just occasional notes from the working waterfront.
Recent
Read them all
Dispatches
The Two Maps of South Louisiana
There is the South Louisiana on the highway map, and the one you see from the water. They are not the same place.
A Chip Bag, a Soda Can, and Five Miles at Idle
Five hours into a delivery, a hose let go. What got us home came out of the galley and the trash.