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.
Notes from the Dock
Dispatches
Maritime history, life aboard The Mad Hatter, and the research behind the Walker Shaw novels. Subscribers get these first.
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.
Why I Wrote VIGILANT
People ask why, after a lifetime on the water, I wrote a novel. I don't think I decided to. I spent forty years collecting…
These are short pieces about working boats and the water they work on.
Some are history. Some are procedure—why a thing is done the way it is done, and what happens when it is not. Some are simply an afternoon that went wrong and had to be sorted out with whatever was aboard.
They are also the raw material the Walker Shaw novels are built from. When a repair or a decision in one of the books feels unusually specific, it is generally because it happened first, on a real boat, to someone who had no choice but to deal with it.
The Mad Hatter turns up often. So do the Gulf Coast, the lower Mississippi, and forty years of other people’s boats across three coasts.
None of it is advice. A licensed master’s opinion is still an opinion, and the water has a habit of disagreeing with all of them. Read these as notes from a working life—and if one of them saves someone a bad afternoon, so much the better.
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.