| Athens Banner-Herald
Howard Scott — veteran lawyer, freshman novelist, and yacht owner — was sailing the high seas of the Caribbean on the night of Jan. 28 when he and the crew spied a distant flare blazing red in the dark sky.
“We were in the middle of nowhere and it didn’t come from land. We had no idea who was having an emergency so we changed course,” Scott said recently in a phone interview from San Juan, Puerto Rico, where his yacht Capricho was in dock.
Scott, who is from Athens, and his crew were cruising that night from Turks and Caicos Islands to Puerto Rico, when they saw the flare over their starboard bow.
“After crossing about five miles out of our normal course, we came up on a cargo ship capsized and four Dominican Republic nationals in the water,” he said.
The anxious men, soaked with diesel fuel leaking from the overturned cargo ship, were waving their arms in an effort to attract attention from the men aboard the Capricho that included Capt. Ethan Olmstead of Key West, First Mate Eddie Linares of Hollywood, Fla., and Chief Steward Jordan Gallagher of New Bern, N.C.
Scott and the crew didn’t want to be thrown against the cargo ship, so they circled the craft and tossed a life ring tied to a 100-foot rope to the stranded men.
“We got them on board and found out there were four other crew members trapped under the capsized cargo ship. The captain believed that one was dead and three were alive,” Scott said.
The men were trapped inside air pockets in the overturned craft, but the crew of the Capricho, without any diving equipment, had no way to rescue them, according to Scott.
“We sounded our air horn four or five times to signal them to see if they could dive in and come out to the surface, but we got no response,” he said.
A decision was made to radio for help and take the survivors back to Turks and Caicos, Scott said. They notified authorities and a rescue team was mobilized.
The crew aboard the Capricho was grateful for their rescue.
“We gave them food and water and they collapsed on the back deck. They slept for five hours on the way back,” he said. “They were just exhausted.”
When the Capricho reached the islands, the sun was rising and they learned authorities had sent out a rescue boat and a helicopter with divers.
“They dropped the divers in (the ocean) so the divers rescued three more,” Scott said, while a fourth man was not found and is presumed drowned.
The rescued men, Scott later learned, had been languishing in the water for more than nine hours.
“They surmised that the engineer on board had turned a valve to let some water in the ballasts and they think he put in too much or he thought he turned it off, but didn’t,” Scott said.
“When it got to the tipping point, it just turtled over and capsized within 10 seconds,” Scott said.
The men had no radio to call for help, but, fortunately, they had a flare gun that eventually led to their rescue.
Back on the islands, a writer for the local newspaper, the Turks and Caicos Sun, interviewed Olmstead for a story on the lifesaving rescue.
“It was a little emotional and tough to leave the scene knowing that there were three people there,” Olmstead said, adding there was a sense of “helplessness” at being unable to help those trapped inside the vessel.
“But knowing that we got back here in time to get those three people rescued, it was a pretty good feeling,” Olmstead told the Sun.
Scott, a longtime lawyer in Athens, recently released his first novel, one born of his experience of working as a lawyer. “Rascal on the Run,” has risen to number 3 on the new books sales category for Amazon.
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The novel of murder and mystery in Scott’s hometown of Athens has garnered what Howard called “an incredible response.”
“Go to Amazon. There are a lot of reviews and they are mind blowing. You look at the reviews and you’d think I paid somebody to write them,” he joked.
He wrote the novel during his retirement, but Scott also spends time on the high seas exploring the tropical islands of the Caribbean on a yacht named Capricho, a Spanish word for whim.
“That’s how we operate,” the adventurer said, “on a whim.”
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