Bob Crouch

Crouch was a damned good navigator and a better smuggler. He piloted the Good-time Girl at Lionfish Salvage for better than twenty years and never once hit a reef or a dangerously large shark. In his youth he and his brother Eli were top-dollar ticket men, dyed-in-the-wool killers.

History
Crouch was born in 1809 to May and Stewart Crouch in a slum of Port Mire. His brother Eli followed two years later, and by the time the two were in their teens they had fallen in with the notorious Dockside Boys. By 1823 they were well-known ticket men with enough scalps on their belts to braid a lanyard!

During the Galt-Mirewell War the Mirewell Royal Navy retained the two ne'er-do-wells to off Galt bigwigs. This they did with extreme prejudice until the early 1850s when Bob killed his brother Eli in a dispute over a game of cards. Crouch then disappeared for most of a year before reappearing on Lionfish Island where he befriended the pilot Ellis Winters and took a job as assistant navigator.

After Winters' death Crouch remained on at the Salvage company. The old piece of boot-leather was killed in action in 1878 when Jack Stroud, leader of the cult of assassins known as the Dead Whales, caught him off-guard in Tannerford at Fabian Pendleton's 227th birthday party.