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.