Neal Burgess, a semi-retired, middle-aged computer analyst from California, had just cashed in from a start-up company he helped bring to life. He bought the sailboat of his dreams and was enjoying his new liveaboard lifestyle in a small marina in southern Alabama, intending to just kick back, relax, do some writing, and focus on his Zen practice. Life there was idyllic and blissfully uneventful until the day he met Cap'n Billy, a prototypical, down-home good ol' boy who operated a small shrimping trawler along the inland waterways that lined the Gulf. Before he knew it, he was spending almost every night shrimping with Cap'n Billy, literally learning the ropes as he went and enjoying the never-ending yarns Cap'n Billy spun as they trawled.

However, all was not well in paradise. Cap'n Billy's boat was in sore need of some basic maintenance and major repairs, and his license was under threat from the marine police. On top of that, the sleepy little marina where Neal lived on his boat suddenly rose up in arms to challenge the rejection of a seemingly trivial building permit that was denied on the grounds it threatened the mysterious Perdido Key Beach mouse with imminent extinction.

Cap'n Billy is presented in a lively, colorful, first-person narrative that weaves seemingly disparate but curiously related threads from US Southern culture, single-handed shrimping, predictive data analysis, Zen practice, and conservationism to create a rich and engaging tapestry depicting life on the southern US Gulf Coast.