'Captain Puckett: Sea stories of a former Panama Canal pilot' due in 2018

Here's our official news release on the book:

Come along with retired Panama Canal pilot Kenneth P. Puckett as he shares "sea stories" and other personal memories of the kind that have made him a popular lecturer about the canal and other maritime topics. The book, co-authored William D. LaRue, is due to be published by Chestnut Heights Publishing in April 2018.

For 16 years until he retired in 1996, Captain Puckett helped to guide ships through Panama's historic canal on more than 1,400 transits. On these pages of his memoirs, he navigates through tales of his rocky childhood in northern Kentucky; his military adventures in both the U.S. Navy and U.S. Army, where he served two tours of Vietnam; and what it was like in Panama in the 1980s as the Central American country fell into chaos under the dictatorship of Manuel Noriega. Captain Puckett also shares what it was like being a maritime pilot on the canal during its turbulent years of transition in ownership from the United States to Panama.

But don't think Captain Puckett didn't have fun along the way. He blends into this autobiography many of his unforgettable anecdotes, such as the time he encountered a "pooping monkey" on a ship's bridge, and how he once pranked a captain into thinking he had plowed his ship through a banana farm.

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