CAPT. KENT DRESSER · AUTHOR

SALTWATER COWBOYS

What happens when entrepreneurs take on the wild, unpredictable business of saving boats?

Saltwater Cowboys is a true story of leadership, entrepreneurship, risk, and privatization. It is told from the perspective of a career-long professional mariner who entered the business as a dispatcher at fifteen, worked his way up to captain and salvage master, and had a front-row seat to the inception and development of one of the most remarkable industries in America: quick-response marine assistance.

An industry built by entrepreneurs, risk takers, and exceptional people

Wickford, Rhode Island. 1989. I was fifteen when I answered my first call as a dispatcher for Marine Rescue Services. I had five radios, an important job to learn, and no idea how much the people I worked with and the people on the other end of those radios would change my life.

That call was the beginning of a career that would span three decades and lead to the successful training business I run today, as well as this book. Along the way, I made remarkably wonderful friends and colleagues. I still consider the people at Marine Rescue Services, now Safe/Sea, family.

This book is about the independent men and women who built the quick-response marine assistance trade. Brave, stubborn, generous, difficult, salt of the earth, and sometimes a little too salty. They worked in places where help could be a long way off. In fact, they were the help. They took care of their own and helped build, grow, and govern an industry through initiative, skill, and hard work.

There are dangerous jobs and hard-won lessons in leadership and risk. There are drug runners, cowboys, privateers, old salts, and young captains who could handle a boat with the best of them. And there are some damn good sea stories.