The honest page
Is This Real?
Yes. The Heart Shot Pirates are a real crew of real people, operating out of the Madison, Wisconsin area, on the Great Lakes. Because the crew's record is kept in a storyteller's voice, visitors sometimes wonder — so this page lays out the evidence plainly, and lets it speak.
The people are real
The crew is fourteen named people (and one cat), listed in full on the Crew page under their real names: a captain, his fiancée as Navigator, his best friend, his mother, his sister, his grandparents, and his friends. They live, work, and gather in Wisconsin. The First Mate, Oliver, is a real Nebelung cat — the only animal holding office, and he holds it entirely in earnest.
The paper is real
The crew sails under Articles of Agreement — a printed document the membership signed in person, in ink, in Wisconsin. The signed Articles are photographed on this site, deposited in the Internet Archive, and held at CERN's Zenodo repository under a permanent identifier (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23811830). Paper, signatures, and archives can all be checked by anyone.
The work is real
The Captain, Jace Krueger, is the founder of HSP Timepieces — bespoke automatic watches he designs and builds one at a time, sold to real customers who commission them. The crew's written record, the Heart Shot Codex, is a real book: catalogued in public book records and deposited under its own permanent identifier (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23811739).
The record is real
The crew stands in the public record where records are kept by others, not by the crew itself: a Wikidata item in the knowledge base behind Wikipedia, deposits in the Internet Archive, book catalogues, and museum correspondence — in October 2026 the Curator of the Chicago Maritime Museum answered the crew's donation offer with interest and asked for the Codex for her collection. The full list stands on the Press & Recognition page.
What "real" means here
The Heart Shot Pirates are not a company selling an experience, and the colours are not a costume the crew takes off. They are a company of equals who chose each other, swore articles, keep a written record, and intend to be remembered. That is the whole of the claim — and every part of it can be checked.