Carter ‘Hop’ Cowan
looks across the narrow strait from his rural home on Cebu Island and wishes that
he and his family were back in the States.
But the sea captain’s course back to his homeland is not as easy as
crossing the sixteen miles over to Pacijan Island from just outside Danoa City,
where he lives with his wife and 14 year-old son.
“It’s hard to believe
that after so many years of living at sea and fending for myself – and taking
care of my crews and passengers at sea – I can’t manage our lives here,” Carter
says, his eyes scanning the horizon as if searching for a safe passage out of
this situation.
 |
| Carter with his wife and son in happier days |
“This situation”
involves a 68 year-old seaman (still afflicted by wounds sustained when a boom
slammed into his neck and head during a storm that sunk the yacht he was delivering
from Japan to California), his 49 year-old wife Vivian (suffering the
devastating effects of late-stage cancer), their son Hopkins (a very promising
student), Carter’s own boat (left in northern Australia after foundering
there), personal financial ruin caused by mounting medical bills, and lack of
work for experienced men in the Philippines.
“I’d find a way to sail
us back to the US if my boat were seaworthy.
But here I am. Old injuries keep
me from the jobs I used to do, and I can’t earn passage for three of us back
home.”
The irony is that when
it went down in the mid-Pacific, the Empress
took Carter’s entire collection of Asian art, statues, carvings and antique
swords and knives – and that treasure now lays under two miles of water. “Hell, I know exactly where that boat went
down. I got the coordinates from the
transponder, and if I could only get at that boat, there’s a small fortune
there just large enough to pay my off wife’s medical bills and put us back on
our feet.”
Now impoverished by
medical bills, Carter can’t even leave the Philippines, because he doesn’t even
have the money to fly the 355 miles from Cebu to Manila, where the US State
Department might lend him the money
for a ticket home. And his situation
just deteriorates every day. “Even my
neighbors here can be a threat to my safety.
Once they know that there is nothing they can get from you, you’re
useless to them.”
Carter, who graduated
Thomas Dale High School in Chesterfield Virginia before attending Virginia
Commonwealth University in the late 60s, moved to Harrisburg Pennsylvania in
the early 70s. He later returned to
Virginia, where he lived in Richmond, Petersburg, Blacksburg, and Arlington,
until he followed a girlfriend from Richmond to California’s Marin County in
1978, where he first got involved with the sailing life. One friend remembers that Carter immediately
fell into seagoing as if he were made for it.
And perhaps he was made for the sailor’s life: after about a year, he shipped out from San Diego
on the Taiyo, bound for Tahiti.
In late 1979, Carter
served aboard the Taiyo as an officer
on the Sir John Barrow Memorial Expedition, under command of Glen Christian, an
English-born direct descendant of Fletcher Christian. Tracing part of the route of the HMS Bounty, the group did extensive
research on Pitcairn Island that was recounted in a later documentary alternately
titled Island of The Bounty and Children of The Bounty
Late in 1980 Carter
wound up in Ala Wai Harbor in Hawaii, working as chief engineer on the Good Fortune, a 62-foot Garden ketch
that had lain untended for several years after a mid-ocean mishap that resulted
in the death of a crew member. “The sail
covers were shredded, and the caulking on the deck had shrunk and disintegrated. The engine needed a lot of work, every bit of
teak was pale grey, and the hull leaked.
Our crew gave that boat a brand-new life.”
By 1982, Carter was
back in Midlothian Virginia, where he had spent his childhood. He spent some time with his parents in
Richmond, working in a boatyard and seeing old friends from Midlothian and the
Richmond area while waiting for his next billet. The next year, he went back to sea, heading
for the South Pacific. And for the next
17 years, Carter sailed the world, working in boatyards and refurbishing yachts
when he wasn’t delivering yachts for the rich and famous.
Carter and his wife Vivian
were married in 1986, and the next year he captained The Sol on an expedition that that exposed to the world the very
destructive muro-ami fishing operation, in which huge industrial pounding
devices were used to smash coral reefs in order to drive the fish living there
into waiting nets. (Muro-ami was a
scandalous practice that not only resulted in deaths of children used as
divers, but also smashed the living coral into small fragments and despoiled
huge sections of the life-giving reefs – longlasting and practically total
destructive effects that have since been condemned by fishery-management
agencies worldwide.) Carter’s vessel
carried the film crews that obtained the footage used by in different reports
by Geraldo Rivera, Barbara Walters and 60
minutes reporters in 1987 and helped secure the ban on the destructive
technique in the Philippines.
 |
| Carter on shipboard |
With the money from the
muro-ami expedition, Carter purchased the Matilda
in 1988, keeping it in Midlothian’s Tichou shipyard. He then sailed again for the South
Pacific. During this period he continued
his shipboard work, at the same time earning certificates in Celestial
Navigation, Maritime Engineering, and Piloting, until getting his Captain’s
ticket. And even then he continued
educating himself in the ways of the wind and tides – and in the laws of the
sea.
In 1999, he went back
to Petersburg Virginia to heal after receiving some serious injuries during a storm
that sank the Empress in the
mid-Pacific. Once healed, he returned to the Philippines,
hoping to get back to yacht delivery and the life of a sea captain.
And life continued,
much as it had before. Carter and his
wife raised their son Hopkins, now an honors student currently enrolled in 7th
grade at North Eastern Cebu School.
But the fair weather
that Carter had enjoyed for so many years on the waves seemed to slip away for
Carter. Work slowed down, circumstances
grew leaner, until he would leave to take charge of other people’s boats, while
his wife and son lived aboard the Matilda. But when his wife was diagnosed with cancer
in 2008, Carter’s life began to really change – work seemed to slip away with
the tide, and the international financial crisis quickly changed the world of
deep-water sailing.
And that was only the
beginning. Medical bills mounted while
work disappeared altogether in the bad economy that hit the Philippines like a
tidal wave, affecting tens of thousands of workers. So Carter headed for Australia after hearing
a rumor of work there. At that point, more
disaster struck, as his boat was disabled at sea. Barely able to continue paying rent on the
tiny house for his family, Carter limped his beloved Matilda (now disabled) into Elizabeth Bay on the northeast coast of
Australia’s Arnhem land, not far from Darwin in the Northern Territory. The little boat was almost beyond repair –
but that didn’t matter, because Carter had no money for any repairs at all and
was running out of options.
Stranded, Carter
managed to find a job as a mechanic at a pearl farm outside Darwin. Sending his wages home to his wife, he was
able to acquire various Australian visas so that he could continue
working. He abandoned the Matilda, and worked hard in hopes of a
sea change for the better. But that
change never came, and Carter’s visa expired, forcing him out of Australia’s
better economic atmosphere. He was
quoted in a local Darwin news story, saying that he didn’t mind the long
working hours there. “Immigration had a
minor heart attack when I got here but we were able to work it out. Basically I’ve been here on various working
visas. It’s a worthwhile project, the
people I work with are pretty reasonable, and I’d rather work out here where
the air is clean and the food is good than to be working in a ship yard in
Darwin.”
Friends tell how Carter
influenced them throughout his life.
Robert O, who met Carter at Pacific Maritime Academy and sailed with him
out of Ala Wai, says, “No matter how big a boat is, it’s still pretty
small. This guy’s always had a generous
spirit and a sense of humor – the kind you need to make long hauls across the
ocean.”
Longtime friend Debra B
says, “He taught me many, many things.
I’d grown up spending time with my dad outdoors, hiking, hunting. And Carter re-introduced me to my love of the
outdoors. We had a lot of outdoor
adventures together. My half-vegetarian
diet is based on all the cooking he taught me to do.”
And it’s a funny thing
about sailing folk: they keep in touch
and fall out of touch as the wind and the waves take them away and may or may
not bring them back. You may never want
to drink with the ones you want standing beside you on the deck – and vice
versa. And even so, you’d welcome either
one of them like a long-lost sibling when they bump into you in some far-off
port of call. But the hard thing is that
you can rarely find them when you need them.
Those few friends he’s
been able to contact cannot raise the money needed to help bring the family
back, though they’ve contacted the Red Cross and even have found some money
coming to Carter from the state of Virginia (the complicated process of even
gaining access to the files would take months of work from overseas).
Still, Carter shows the
tenacity and strength he’s learned from years at sea. He’s determined to get somehow back to sea,
get his wife to the States where she can get better treatment for the cancer
threatening her life, and teach his son the ways of the sailor. Then, while watching the way the wind changes
the surface of the Strait of Cebu, he says to no one in particular, “Always
wanted to make the circumnavigation – I’ve planned it over and over in my
mind. Looks like it may not happen now.”
Readers can send
advice, encouragement, or prayers to: Captainswife44@hotmail.com.
Donations may be sent
via PayPal to: Captainswife44@hotmail.com.
# 30 #
David
Hakim is an internationally-published journalist and award-winning author who
has run several newspapers – and recently received a commendation for his short
story That Man in
the London Aesthetica Competition. He can be
reached at 415.378.6170 or dhakim@earthlink.net
© 2013 Hakim - ALL
RIGHTS RESERVED: use without profit allowed only with author’s express written
permission. Please don't wake up my attorney. Please.
