SIXTY YEARS AT SEA

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 18, 20 July 1935, Page 27

SIXTY YEARS AT SEA

A FINE CAREER IN SAIL

A proud record of 60 rears at sea, of which only six months were spent in steam, was that of Captain Eobert Owens, who passed away at Auckland last Monday evening. His first illness, despite three shipwrecks, was a slight paralytic stroke in 1925, which forced him to give up the sea. Signing on a schooner at his birthplace, Port Madoc, "Wales, as a boy in 1865, Captain Owens made a number of trips to the Baltic and later joined the Moderator, a :Cull-rigged ship engaged in the Indian trade, says the "New Zealand Herald." Two years later he was On a schooner, which was run down by a steamer ofE Lundy Island and sank in two minutes. Captain Owen's first command was the Excelsior, which he ran for several years to the Mediterranean and the West Indies.

Through disaster Captain Owens and his crew found themselves on the way to New Zealand. The Maria Agathia, on a Homeward voyage from the T.Vest Indies, was dismasted in a storm in the Bay of Biscay. Hex boats were swept away and the outlook was forlorn when the New Zealand clipper Rangitikei, outward bound with emigrants for New Zealand, came up. Abandoning the wreck, the crew went on board the Kangitikei and reached Auckland on May 17, I§B3. Captain Owens had the experience of arriving in the country without clothes of his own and without a penny. The captain of the Rangitikei invited him 1o remain on board while he sought for a job,l and in two weeks he became mate of the Auck-land-owned schooner Ida C. Owen, running between New Zealand and Australia. Later he sailed the Forest Queen, a ketch of. 42 tons and then 40 years old, to Auiitralia, and returned to marry his fiancee, who had in the meantime arrived from Wales. He later sailed on the Energy and was back on the Ida C. Owen as master when that vessel ran on a reef at i Papeete iwhcn. undo.- a pilot's control.