The NORTHING Launches in One Month
Machinery Technician Second Class Jordan Cale takes the lead in this northern Coast Guard adventure, leaving us all to wonder if we really know our own.
My first Coast Guard weekly serial story launches one month from today's 236th Birthday of the U.S. Coast Guard! 🎂
So far, the feedback from friends, family, and Reddit’s r/USCG community has been positive and supportive. I’ve got some great feedback and a few reality checks on procedural issues.
Staring at 0800 (Phoenix, AZ time) on Friday, September 4, 2026, and every Friday thereafter a new chapter will be dropped As part of the True North Trilogy! And it's all free until the story ends.
The Story
Machinery Technician Second Class Jordan Cale is the newest man aboard, and that’s exactly how he likes it: no history, no attention, nine months of being simply squared away. Then his cutter goes quiet on a "mail run" into the high Arctic, and the officer who spent two years earning the crew’s trust turns out to be the reason the ship is about to die. In the freezing hours that follow, Cale will lose shipmates, his name, and come out the other side wearing someone else’s life, carrying a key, a set of numbers no one alive should be trusted with, and a debt to seventeen people he intends to spend the rest of his life repaying.
Northing is a complete story. It has its own ending. But the sea doesn’t forget what happens in it, and neither does whoever was there.
Datum picks up the where Northing ends: an ice analyst’s offhand note, a suspiciously well-funded salvage charter, a stubborn old surveyor’s private notebook. None of it means anything alone. Together, it draws a line back to the people responsible, and forward, toward the man Cale has become.
And lastly, Fix will bring what happened into the open, into depositions and a courtroom, where our man on the ground has to decide what he owes the truth against, what he owes to his his own survival, and the conspiracy that started with one ship finally runs out of places to hide.
Same key. Same ship. One story, told in three parts, built from the first page to end somewhere, on purpose.
Progress
As of today, I've got roughly 80 (yes, eight-zero) chapters planned out, and more than half already drafted. So, join Petty Officer Cale and me for an an forgettable trip to Alaska in, NORTHING and The True North series.
