Press & Media

Short biography

Nate Eckler is a USCG Licensed 100 Ton Master with forty years on America’s coastal waters. Vigilant, the first Walker Shaw novel, is his debut.

Full biography

Nate Eckler is a USCG Licensed 100 Ton Master with forty years on America’s coastal waters. He has worked as a captain, delivery skipper, marine consultant, yacht broker, and maritime instructor, and has run all three coasts—the Pacific, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic seaboard—which he describes as one job in three different environments.

He came up through a youth maritime program that kept a working fleet—pleasure craft, commercial vessels, and former military boats—alive as classrooms, including a floating barge he converted into an 1,800-square-foot classroom and workshop. He was twelve when he started helping rebuild a World War II-era Air Force crash rescue boat, thirteen when he first stood behind her wheel, and he returned years later as her Executive Officer and eventually her skipper. The same program later operated the former Coast Guard cutter Morris, a 125-foot Active-class cutter built in 1927 to chase rum runners during Prohibition and the last of her class still afloat.

Command of a training ship means answering for the vessel and for a deck full of teenagers who have never stood a watch. Many of those cadets went on to become Coast Guard officers, merchant mariners, military leaders, airline pilots, business leaders, and professional captains. Watching that happen taught him much of what he knows about how crews hold together—and how they come apart.

He writes about the working waterfront because the real version of it is quieter, stranger, and more consequential than the version that usually reaches the page. In his novels the procedures are accurate and the weather is accurate. What happens in between is invented. He lives aboard The Mad Hatter, a 53-foot yacht in New Orleans, with his wife and four dogs.