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Woodie Butler, the Real Yacht Cowboy

Meet the Real Yacht Cowboy

U.S. Coast Guard veteran Woodie Butler has been selling boats since 2000, from Miami’s Thunderboat Row to the marinas of the Caribbean. They call him the Yacht Cowboy, and every page of this book was earned on the docks.

Buying or selling a yacht? Talk to the Cowboy →

AVAILABLE NOW ON AMAZON · HARDCOVER, PAPERBACK & KINDLE

Yacht Cowboy

A Cowboy's Code in a Billionaire's Playground

by Woodie Butler, the Real Yacht Cowboy

Million-dollar yachts, Caribbean nights, and a cowboy who lives by his own code. Yacht Cowboy drops you into the high-stakes world of the super-rich, where the deals are big, the boats are bigger, and loyalty is the rarest thing on the dock.

Written by a real yacht broker who has sold boats from Miami's Thunderboat Row to the marinas of the Caribbean, it's the kind of story only someone who's lived it could tell.

Buy on Amazon – Hardcover, Paperback & Kindle

Giving it for Christmas? Order early. If your book won't make it by Christmas, send us your order number below and we'll email you a 20% off card for anything on YachtCowboy.com, plus your personally signed bookplate.

Get a Signed Bookplate from the Yacht Cowboy

Buy Yacht Cowboy on Amazon in hardcover or paperback, then send us your order number below. Woodie will personally sign a Yacht Cowboy bookplate made out to whoever you like. It goes right inside the front cover, so you never have to mail the book anywhere.

Hardcover Special Edition: the first 1,000 hardcover readers get a numbered signed bookplate, from 0001 to 1,000. We’ll email you your number.

Paperback: the first 1,000 paperback readers get a signed bookplate (not numbered).

Perfect for gifts: “To Mike, Merry Christmas.”

Prologue

Off Turks and Caicos

The thing nobody tells you about a boat on fire is the sound.

Jake Butler heard it from forty yards off, treading black water with salt in his eyes: a roar like a grain dryer gone wrong, and under it the crackle and pop of ninety feet of fiberglass and teak giving herself up to the flames. ROOSTER was burning from the salon to the flybridge, fire pouring out of her windows and climbing her tower like it meant to reach the stars. Fifteen million dollars of Teddy Vance’s boat, lighting up the bottom of the sea.

He didn’t remember going in. He remembered a streak of fire coming in low across the water. He remembered the kid yelling his name. Then white. Then the water.

His shirt was gone. His bad knee felt like somebody had driven a nail through it. His straw hat floated a few feet away, upside down, a little boat of its own, and he grabbed it out of pure stubbornness and jammed it back on his head.

“Dre!”

Nothing but the fire.

“DRE!”

A fuel tank went with a deep, gut-punch whump, and burning pieces of ROOSTER came raining down around him, hissing as they hit the sea. In the light of it he read the letters on her transom one last time before the flames took them.

ROOSTER. And under it, in gold: Stuttgart, Ark.

Somewhere out on that dark water, a radio had gone silent in the middle of a word. Somewhere a satellite phone had gone dead in the middle of a woman’s sentence. He didn’t know who was still alive. He didn’t know who had done this, or why, or how far it reached.

He knew the kid had been standing right beside him.

His hand went to his bare chest without his asking it to, and found the cord still there, and the little white shells, every one.

Nine months ago he had been a rice farmer from Stuttgart, Arkansas, with a wife in the ground, a note on the farm he couldn’t pay, and a daughter who still believed her daddy could fix anything.

He would have given anything on God’s earth to be that man again.

“DRE!”