About

Nate Eckler holds a USCG Master’s license and has spent forty years navigating the coastal United States — the Pacific Coast, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic seaboard — as a licensed captain, delivery skipper, and marine surveyor. He commanded a youth training ship, the former USCG Cutter Morris. VIGILANT is his first novel.

The water

Forty years is long enough to stop finding the ocean romantic and start finding it interesting. He has delivered boats he would not have bought, through weather he would not have chosen, on a schedule someone else set. He has surveyed hulls whose owners very much wanted a particular number written down. He has run the Pacific Coast, the Gulf, and the Atlantic, and learned that they are three different jobs wearing the same uniform.

TODO — this is the section worth expanding in your own words. Specific runs, specific seasons, specific boats. Two to five hundred words. Specifics beat adjectives every time, and you have forty years of them.

The Morris

Command of a youth training ship is not a command in miniature. You answer for the vessel and for a deck full of teenagers who have never stood a watch, and the sea does not grade on effort. What a crew is, how it forms, and how it fails are all visible faster there than anywhere else he has worked.

TODO — worth a few sentences of your own here too. This is the most distinctive thing on your whole site.

The writing

The real version of the maritime trade is quieter, stranger, and more consequential than the version that usually reaches the page. Most thrillers get the boat wrong, then get the paperwork wrong, and the paperwork is where the actual stakes live. In these books the procedure is accurate, the survey is accurate, and the weather is accurate. What happens in between is invented.

Contact

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