A Brief Look At Herring Spotting
In Lower Cook Inlet
by
Jay Kelley
Frequent storms assault the Kamishak Bay area on the west side of Lower Cook Inlet. The narrow
boulder strewn beaches rise abruptly becoming massive bluffs and promontories.
Ocean swells, turbid with silt, surge and swirl in apparent slow motion
over and around the many reefs and shoals. Just a few miles off shore
an active volcano rumbles and smokes. The area, covering hundreds
of square miles, is desolate and uninhabited except for brown bears, wolverines,
moose, wolves and a variety of birds and small animals. April weather
is fraught with gales and storms, dense wet snow squalls, freezing rain,
fog and rough water. Brutal winds persistently rake the cliffs.
Sea water, gouged from the ocean surface by violent down drafts, is flung
hundreds of feet upward in twisting walls of white spray. Tidal fluctuations
exceeding 36 feet produce fast moving currents and huge swirling eddies.
The Alaska Range looms upward from the shoreline. Formed by tectonic,
volcanic and glacial forces, the mountains rise to 10,000 feet. Augustine
Island, a 4000' cone shaped volcano five miles off shore, erupts from time
to time spewing an ash column tens of thousands of feet into the atmosphere.
Glowing hot boulders, some the size of houses, come bounding down its slopes.
At night the mountain provides an awesome display for the fishermen
and spotters anchored in nearby Iniskin Bay. It is a risky area for a for
a small airplane.
From the fishing grounds
the closest safe port for a float plane is Homer, 75 miles across the waters
of Cook Inlet, at the mouth of Kachemak Bay. During a storm the trip is
scary, especially in the dark or in low visibility. Radio talk with
other airborne fish spotters helps to dispel the apprehension. At
the end of a long tiring day, I start across lower Cook Inlet for Homer.
The northern point of Iniskin Bay disappears behind me. I'm suspended
in turbulent gloom, encapsulated in my Supercub, unable to see more than
a half a mile in any direction, with heaving gray water 200 feet below.
I key my microphone.
"Hey Dan,... this is Jay in triple-six pop, ....you on this one?”
"Hi there J-bird.
I'm here. Ain't this weather terrible? My loran says I'm 58
miles southwest of Homer, but I'm having to deviate way south to keep from
icing up in a big, wet, snow squall out here. Where are you?"....
(Dan also flies a Supercub).
"I just left Iniskin
Bay.. I'm heading across, but it's getting really low and thick.....does
it look better to the south?"
"Yeah I think so.......It
does seem to be getting a little lighter. I picked up a bunch of ice out
here in this squall and it ain't melting off. There's a lot of carburetor
ice too. My engine almost quit when I pulled the carb heat on the
first time. Wow!.....scared me. You might wanta start heading
south from where you are.”
"Sounds like a plan,
Dan, I'm turning south. What kind of a ground speed are you showing?
My loran never works in bad weather."
"It’s indicating 43 knots,
pretty stiff head wind out here towards the middle, but it's not as bad
as it was back by Augustine Island. You staying in town tonight?
We oughta get a bunch of us together for dinner."
"Yeah I've got a room
at the Lakeside Inn. Parker's staying there too. So are Frank
and Jim and three or four other spotters. Have you seen Parker's
observer? She's gorgeous,.... long dark wavy hair, green eyes,...
What's his secret, anyway?
A different voice pops
in... "Hey guys, quit drooling she's married and has two kids".
Dan interrupts,
"Who's that? Ronnie¹, is that you?"
"You betcha, guys.
I'm five miles west of Homer Spit gettin' ready to land. The weather's
not too bad after you get within about ten miles of Homer but the wind
is from the east about 35 knots. I've got a tiedown on the ice at
Beluga lake so it shouldn't be much of a problem there, but if you're going
to the boat harbor you might wanta look it over real good....pretty big
swell in Kachemak Bay, although you might be able to land in the entrance
of the boat harbor."
I key my mike, "Oh that
sounds wonderful, Ron, I guess we'll just have to see what it looks
like when we get there. If it's too bad maybe I'll go to the lake
too. I have a secret tiedown spot there if I can dig ‘em out of the
snow, except there's no fuel at the lake."
A smug smiling voice
pipes up, "It sure is nice to be driving an amphib....no worries
about parking or fuel. " It's Terry. He flies a Cessna 185
on amphibious floats and can land at the Homer airport. Parking for
him is no problem.
"Hey Terry," I say, "Are
you still not smoking?"
"That’s right, I haven’t
had a cigarette for over a year now. How about it? When’re you gonna
quit?"
I ponder a moment
and say, "On my next birthday, one month from today."
And yet another voice
chimes in. It's Parker². "Jay" he says, "I'll bet you
a thousand dollars that you can't quit smoking."
I rise to the challenge.
"You’re on, Parker. We’ll talk about it at dinner. Let's discuss
the terms then, like how long do I have to quit before you pay up?"
200 feet beneath me an
old 80 foot wooden power scow, the Harry B, is packing a heavy load of
herring across to Homer and is taking a beating in the huge gray waves.
She pitches down into a deep trough and takes a big one right over the
pilot house. I know the skipper and the three crewmen. Tony, the engineer
is working over time to keep the engine room relatively free of water,
and Greg, the skipper is working hard at the helm, trying to steer the
straightest course to Homer in those monstrous wind driven waves.
The other two crewmen could be sleeping, or puking their guts out.
I feel fortunate not to be down there on the water. The people on
that boat will be bucking those waves for hours after I have arrived safely
in town. The radio chatter subsides as we all work our way through the
weather. The lonely edginess eases as Homer gets closer.
I contemplate past seasons and think of the many pitfalls of herring spotting.
Fuel for spotter planes
is available from some of the tender boats that follow the fishing fleet.
Most tenders have high sides making them troublesome to tie up to and are
usually in water that is too rough for a small float plane. Most
spotter pilots modify their aircraft fuel systems to provide up to eight
hours of uninterrupted flight. Those that have the typical four hour
range might carry extra fuel in gerry jugs aboard their planes and have
55 gallon barrels of fuel stored in appropriate locations around the fishing
grounds. The spotter pilot often faces tough decisions with respect
to fuel, weather and a suitable spot to put his airplane during a storm
or at night.
In the Kamishak area
Iniskin Bay offers some protection but not always. It depends on
wind direction and speed. During a previous fishing season I got
up one morning aboard one of my boats for an Iniskin Bay opener to
find the wind gusting to 60 plus. The wind was howling over the nearby
bluffs and there were severe down drafts hitting the water. When
the time came to fly, I taxied away from the boat straight into the
wind for 25 minutes angling toward the cliffs and the head of the bay trying
to see a pattern to the gusts before getting up enough nerve to take off.
Taxiing in that gusty wind into a three foot wind chop was an adventure
in itself. Huge powerful gusts would come at erratic intervals, sometimes
so strong that I would have to add power and push the stick forward to
keep the airplane from being blown into the air as I taxied. I watched
down draft after down draft smacking the water at the base of the cliffs
ahead of me knowing that each one became a gusty burbling updraft around
its outer edges after it touched the water. Finally as an other big
gust approached I gave it full throttle and the Supercub rose like an elevator
straight into the air up the face of the cliff to 1500 feet in just a few
seconds. Where the cliffs rounded off at the top the wind was even
stronger. I was able to continue climbing and without turning, backed
away from the terrain by slowing down to about 70 mph. We all flew
in that wild wind for four hours, ‘round and ‘round Iniskin Bay, occasionally
getting flipped upside down by the continuous severe turbulence coming
over the steep bluffs. Planes were going up and down around me like
yo-yo’s and it is the closest I've ever come to getting sick at the controls
of an airplane. I flew with the window open in the 35 degree weather
slowly munching on soda crackers to keep myself from puking. After four
hours of gradually diminishing turbulence, the fishing opener was ended
by the Alaska Department of Fish & Game. No fish were caught.
I landed for fuel checked the oil, and headed for Homer.
Sometimes the only option
for the spotter is to have his airplane hoisted aboard a boat and tied
down on deck. This procedure can be risky in a gusty wind and rough
water. Some pilots splice a long floating line to a ring at
the tail of their planes and to the cleats at the toes of their floats
so that with the assistance of the crew, they can keep the airplane from
turning as it comes aboard. In spite of these precautions, and the
help of a seasoned crew, a strong gust can result in disaster. Even
an airplane tied safely on deck can be wrecked by the wind. An 80
knot gust from the rear, broke both wings of a small plane during a herring
season in Prince William Sound several years ago even though the plane
was securely tied down on the deck of a 200 foot tender.
At night some spotters
anchor their airplanes in the water not far from their boats. The
anchor is set firmly into the bottom by a small powerful boat, called a
jitney used to tow and maneuver one end of the 900 foot long seine net
when making, holding and closing a set. The anchor line is tied to
a bright orange bladder float so that the pilot can find it and tie up
to it when he needs to. Anchoring a plane out by itself can be relatively
safe even in winds gusting up to 80 knots. But anchoring out also
has it's hazards and disadvantages. If it snows during the night,
the wings and tail have to be swept clean of snow or the plane will sink
tail first. The weight of wet spring snow on the tail will quickly
sink the narrow and least buoyant aft ends of the floats. The rearmost
float compartments fill up with water, and like dominoes falling, the remaining
float compartments fill up one by one. Soon the tail and half the
fuselage is in the water and all of the float compartments are full except
the fronts of the forward compartments. By this time the plane is
going down. Wet snow can sink a plane in fifteen minutes. The pilot
who sleeps on a boat with his plane anchored nearby is up and down all
night checking. Occasionally a boat will arrive late at night,
and anchor just up wind or up current from an anchored airplane.
The tired crew goes to sleep. The wind or current increases, and
the boat, dragging its anchor, drifts back into the plane. Even if
the plane doesn't sink it's likely to get bent or broken
Some pilots tie the fronts
of their floats to the stern of a seine boat and use a lifting sling to
take the weight off the floats. The sling (a spreader bar) attaches
to two steel rings near the wing roots on top of the plane at it's balance
point. A line is hooked to the sling from over the boat's power block
on the end of the picking boom and then to the deck winch. Tension
is applied which lifts the rear ends of the floats clear of the water and
forces the toes of the floats hard against the stern of the boat.
This is a secure arrangement which prevents the plane from sinking during
a heavy snow and keeps it from constantly bumping the boat in waves, but
offers little protection in a high wind. Occasionally an inexperienced
spotter pilot will tie just the fronts of his floats to the stern of the
boat. He’ll wake up in the morning after a heavy snowfall to see a submerged
propeller pointing straight up and the dim shape of his airplane hanging
from its bow lines below the surface of the water. Or during the
night the pilot might be awakened by a lurch and the sound of his airplane
being crunched as his boat drags anchor into the boat behind. Huge flat
sheets of ice up to 2 feet thick break loose from the frozen shorelines
at the heads of bays during tide fluctuations. They move with massive
inertia out of the bays on tidal currents paralleling the shoreline.
These flat icebergs can sink a plane, break it loose from its anchor, or
damage it in any number of ways. A good skipper and crew post a watch
if there are floating ice sheets and have electronics which sound an alarm
if the boat starts moving beyond the scope of it's anchor line.
Some spotters fly on
wheels during the Cook Inlet herring season. They all use big fat
tundra tires and make camps near the beaches. I have an aversion
to flying a single engine airplane on wheels across 75 miles of open water.
It seems safer on floats, although the water below is often so rough that
a successful emergency landing would be impossible. A set of floats
at least imparts a false sense of security that allows for less pucker
factor.
Although spotters who
fly on wheels don't have to worry about their airplanes sinking at night,
there are trade-offs. Huge hungry brown bears just coming out of
their winter hibernation, roam the country side and are totally entranced
by the smell of food cooking. An other drawback is the very limited
place for landings and takeoffs. If the wind is gusty and blowing
the wrong way, it can be very tricky landing on a narrow, short, twisting,
bumpy, gravel bar or on a narrow steeply sloped, rough gravel beach.
In a strong gusty cross wind it's possible to ding a propeller, ground
loop and wreck your plane or get blown off your landing area into the water
or trees. There is something to be said though, for sleeping on dry
land. You don't have to listen to three or four crewmen snoring in
loud discordant counterpoint to each other, or to the maddening sound of
tiny waves plooping against the hull of the boat beside your ear all night
long. On the other hand boats have stoves. I camped out
alone for three weeks one April and May in my winter tent on a beach near
Togiak Alaska. I slept in two down sleeping bags, a heavy wool stocking
cap, an arctic snow machine suit with all my clothes on, a set of thermal
long underwear, and was still cold. The other option is to fly back
and forth from the nearest town each day and sleep in a hotel room each
night. That too has its drawbacks.
The sight of Homer in
the distance jolts me back to the present. As I arrive over the Homer
spit the wind is strong and gusty. The water outside the boat harbor
is too rough to land on with a two foot wind chop running at a 45 degree
angle to a 4 foot swell rolling all the way in from the head of the bay
20 miles to the east. I decide to land cross wind just inside the
rock jetty at the boat harbor entrance. My touch down spot
would be just inside the tip of the jetty with a gusty burbling cross wind,
but out of the swell and wind chop. This landing would leave about 350
feet of distance in which to come off the step to a slow taxi and make
the turn into the narrow rock walled entrance of the boat harbor.
This accuracy landing is done by slow flying the plane just above the water
for the last 200 feet or so of the approach and then touching down as slowly
as is safely possible exactly where you want to. I would have had
to transport fuel in gerry jugs to my tiedown spot on the ice at Beluga
Lake had I landed there, a time consuming and inconvenient ordeal after
a long difficult day.
Several of us have a
nice dinner together and de-brief the events of the day. One
of the spotter pilots flying a Cessna L-19 bird dog, had somehow managed
to take off with his anchor still out. He actually got airborne with
the anchor and 12 feet of anchor chain hanging from its 40 foot line.
When he realized what he had done he knew he had to somehow pull it in
or cut the line. It would have been disastrous to try to land with
it hanging down because of the sudden drag it would create when it touched
the water before the airplane touched down. Tied to a safety line,
his observer crawled out onto the float while they were flying and pulled
the anchor in hand over hand.
We all go to bed early
knowing we will be up long before dawn in order to arrive on the other
side of the inlet at first light. My alarm clock goes off at 3:30am.
The cook at the hotel is kind enough to have hot coffee and donuts waiting
for us before we have to leave in the dark for another day of herring spotting.
One of my skippers has
provided me with a truck to drive. The drive to the boat harbor helps
my eyes adjust to the dark. Several of us preflight our respective
airplanes which are tied up in boat slips. A Supercub appears to
be mangled in its slip. A closer look reveals a twisted fuselage
and a crumpled tail. Apparently a couple of drunks running a powerful
skiff in the middle of the night ran into the plane and left it virtually
totaled, needless to say a terrible loss and disappointment for the spotter.
My floats don't require much pumping and after my preflight I'm the
first to taxi out of the boat harbor into Kachemak Bay for takeoff in the
dark and the 75 mile trip southwest across the open waters of Cook Inlet
to the fishing grounds at Kamishak Bay.
The weather is marginal
and there is still a pretty big swell rolling in from the head of the Bay.
I line up for a cross wind takeoff parallel to the swell. After one
more glance at the instruments I give it full throttle. There
is always a certain amount of dread during a rough water takeoff in the
dark. You can't really see far enough ahead to avoid running into
a half submerged log or anything else that might be floating out there,
so there is a bit of a calculated risk in doing it. The plane quickly
gets up on the step and rises into the dark after a short bumpy run along
the water. The Supercub gets off shorter and handles rough water
better than most larger airplanes so the exposure to the rough water is
minimal during the takeoff run.
The lights of Homer soon
disappear behind me as I head across the inlet. About 30 miles out
I start running into snow. It gets thicker and thicker and soon there
is no forward visibility, although there isn't anything to see anyway.
I check the leading edges of the wings for ice and leave the carburetor
heat full on. There is a lot of fog mixed with the snow so it's basic
needle ball and airspeed and hold the compass heading that I established
outbound from the Homer VOR before the signal faded out due to distance
and low altitude. I get through the snow shower within a few minutes.
After another twenty miles or so the first gray light of dawn starts to
show. My arrival at Iniskin Bay would be on schedule at first light.
Soon the search for schools of herring would begin.
As I proceed southwest
the visibility begins to improve and the base of the overcast rises allowing
me to climb up to a thousand feet. Soon I can see the lower half
of Mt. Augustine ahead and to the left. Parker overtakes me
in his Cessna 180 and waggles his wings as he goes by. No one talks
much in the mornings on the radio. We are usually caught up in thoughts
of the day ahead, thinking about strategy and where we should start looking.
My survey will cover about 150 miles of shoreline and include off shore
shoals. I check in with my boats by radio to find out what's been
happening through the night. One of my skippers invites me down for
coffee and a planning confab. I land and tie up with the toes of
the floats straight into the lee side of the boat. Butch, the skipper,
asks me to fly down to Fortification Bluffs about 25 miles south.
He had heard some radio chatter on his scanner about a boat making a set
in the dark down there. He says it had to have been a sonar set because
there were no planes flying then.
I leave half my coffee.
Two crew members untie my bow ropes from the boat as I climb down onto
the middle of the 1/8” woven stainless steel walk wire stretched between
the bow cleats on the toes of the floats. Holding onto both sides of the propeller and
standing on one leg, I yell “okay.” The crewmen throw my bow lines
into the water and I give a big push against the side of the hull with
my other leg and the plane moves straight away from the boat. The
airplane’s water rudders have to be up for this maneuver to work well.
As the plane moves out of the lee of the boat , the wind catches the left
wing and the plane begins to pivot, but the skipper of the boat is alert
and motors gently ahead before my right wing tip touches the side of his
52 foot seiner. I scramble into the pilot's seat and crank the starter.
The engine fires off and away I go.
When I arrive there are
two boats near Fortification Bluffs with their nets out. Their cork
lines form big circles on the water, but I can't see any fish in the nets.
Hundreds of seagulls are very excited about the process though. Those
seagulls are a sure indication that there are fish in the net. I
call Butch on one of our secret radio channels and tell him what I see.
He begins the hour and forty minute trip.
In the meantime
I continue my survey hoping to find a bunch of herring that no one else
has seen yet. There are about 30 other airplanes surveying in the
area. Some of them are faster than mine. I continue flying
along the coastline and notice that the whole fleet appears to be converging
towards Fortification Bluffs where those first two sets were made.
Soon the fastest and closest boats arrive and make sets. A big blue
tender begins pumping fish from the net of the first boat to make a set.
There are still no fish visible near the surface however, and I soon learn
that the fish are too deep to see from an airplane and that the boats are
making sets using their sonar. I feel somewhat useless, but am assured
by my skippers that they are still very interested in my observations regarding
the way the fleet is deployed and what is going on. Nevertheless
I still fantasize a little about getting one of those billed caps that
says on it in big letters, "SONAR SUCKS."
Eventually I begin to
run low on fuel. The only nearby tender from whom I can get fuel
is underway in water too rough to land in, so I fly back to the fuel barge
which is anchored in Iniskin Bay. When I arrive the wind has come
up to 35 knots on the Bay, and the tide is running hard in the same direction.
The barge is straining against its anchor chain as the wind and tide pull
against it. There are three airplanes tied up to the barge, one is
tied up to the stern, the easiest place to pull up to. The other
two planes are tied up nosed into either side of the barge, directly across
from each other close to the stern. My only choice is to try to pull up
to the left side (port side) of the barge toward the bow. I choose
the left side because I get in and out of the airplane on the right side
and can be quicker in grabbing and securing the right bow line (the upwind
line) to the boat if I don't have to walk across the walk wire to the toe
of the left float.
After landing I taxi
slowly upwind past the barge to gauge the speed of the current and wind
and to plan my approach which will be tricky and potentially hazardous.
Airplanes on floats will weathervane into a strong wind soon after you
shut off the engine. If I shut down too soon the airplane will turn into
the wind before it reaches the side of the barge and I'll possibly ding
my left wing tip and drift quickly back into the other airplane tied nose
first into the side of the barge near it's stern. If I shut
the engine off too late I'll be drifting too fast when I reach the side
of the barge and could crumple a float against the steel hull. I
decide that the best approach is from down wind and down current toward
the left side of the barge at an angle quartering the wind direction.
There are four people on deck waiting to catch me. Three of them
are pilots and know exactly what to do. I angle toward a point slightly
in front of the bow of the barge at a fast idle against the wind and the
current. As I draw close with my door open, the moment comes and
I shut off the engine. Several feet before the left wing tip
will strike the bow of the barge at about a 45 degree angle I push hard
left rudder to turn the airplane so that the nose is headed more directly
into the side of the barge. The plane will stay turned for only a moment
in that strong wind although the current from the tide may help to stay sideways to the wind.
I scramble out, duck under the wing
strut, grab the end of the 20 foot line that is spliced to the front float
cleat, scamper forward to the front of the float and throw the line into
the waiting hands one of my spotter friends. He takes a quick wrap
on a deck cleat and pulls me in while an other guy stands by to push my
left wing tip away from the side of the barge if necessary.
Such a docking is much
more difficult when you have no help. Once under very similar wind
and tide conditions I approached a boat the same way. There were
two people on deck, Perry and Leilani, waiting to help me, but when I went
to throw them the bow line, it was wedged behind the rear float strut.
The airplane started to turn back into the wind so I ran onto the walkwire,
hooked my left elbow over the root of the propeller and my right elbow
over the railing of the boat. I was hoping that I could hold it by
brute strength while Perry climbed onto the float with me to extricate
the stuck line. The wind was blowing too hard and inspite of my desperate
effort to keep the airplane toed up to the side of the boat it began to
quickly weathervane back into the wind. Soon I was spread eagled,
suspended over the water with my left arm hooked around the baseof the
prop and my right hand gripping the boat railing. I couldn't let
the airplane go, so I let go of the railing and dropped into the water.
I caught the walkwire with my left hand as I went down. The airplane
somehow drifted free of the boat without banging a wingtip and I boosted
myself up onto the toe of the float. I heard raucous laughter and
looked over to see Perry and Leilani doubled over at the railing, laughing
so hard there were tears running down their faces. I started laughing
too. I made sure my bow line was free and clear, got in and started
the plane and was successful in my second attempt at docking it up to the
side of the boat. Leilani loaned me a pair of her Levi's and Perry
found a jacket for me to wear while they dried my clothes in the boat's
clothes drier.
Back on the fuel barge
there is fresh coffee. We stand around on this gassy smelling floating
platform drinking quick cups of coffee and exchanging stories of the day.
One by one we help each other to depart until mine is the only remaining
airplane. Rather than turn myself loose at the front of the barge,
I loosen the lines and ease the airplane sideways back to the stern, hop
on, and then just drift away on the wind and tide, fire up and fly again
to find those elusive schools of herring.
By the end of the day,
the Lower Cook Inlet herring quota has been caught. It’s a relief
to be done with this fishery. Lower Cook Inlet can dish out some
nasty weather in April. I head for Cordova, about 4 hours away across
the Chugach Mountains and Prince William Sound. There the floats
will come off, and the landing gear will go on. After a night’s sleep,
I’ll make the eight hour flight west to Togiak for at least three weeks
of camping on the beach and surveying 200 miles of shoreline and offshore
areas for the huge schools of herring that show up there in May.
The Togiak area like
Lower Cook Inlet is also fraught with danger for spotter pilots. Newly
emerged from winter hibernation, brown bears roam the beaches at night,
and have destroyed tents, ripped into airplanes, eaten meat caches and
generally raised havoc. Wind, however, is probably the most
potentially disastrous problem. One season in the late seventies
13 airplanes were destroyed in a big wind storm. All of them were
tied down on the same beach. After that bit of devastation we learned
how to tie down airplanes on the beach so they could withstand 100 knot
winds without self-destructing. The trick to this high-wind tiedown method
is to completely bury four old tires edgewise in the gravel beach. The
tires are arranged in a square with rope loops sticking up out of the gravel.
A pilot can orient his plane in any one of four directions. Most
important, however, is to tie the tail with enough slack so the plane can
fly on the ground in a level flight attitude when the wind blows hard.
We would tie down the wings, and also bridal the landing gear where the
gear legs attached to the fuselage so that any backward jerking motion
caused by a high wind would be stopped by the lines tied to the strong
landing gear leg attach points instead of the weaker wing-tie-down rings.
There are those who fly Togiak on floats. I tried it for two consecutive
seasons, but prefer the options afforded by wheels. And have since
always done the Togiak herring season on wheels.
Herring spotting is exciting,
demanding, and dangerous. Each area has its unique challenges.
Every year at the end of the season I think to myself that I’m not going
to do it again next year, but by mid-winter I usually change my mind.
The adventure is phenomenal, the scenery incomparable, and the flying is
extremely challenging. The camaraderie is terrific, the income can be excellent
or disastrous and anything in between. The post season debriefing
parties at local watering holes are always fun and boisterous. Anticipating
a season of herring spotting is probably very similar to the anticipation
felt before going into battle. Nevertheless, once committed and fully
engaged it goes quickly........... Maybe I’ll do it again next season.
¹
Ron Gribble and his observer were killed April
9th 1997 in a mid-air collision at the mouth of Galena bay near Valdez
Alaska in Prince William Sound during a herring survey.
² Tom Parker was killed on April 9, 1991 exactly
six years earlier to the day in a mid-air collision at the mouth
of Boulder Bay (less than ten miles from the mouth of Galena Bay)
during a pre-opener survey for the Prince William Sound herring season.
Both of these men were high time pilots and veteran herring spotters.
The other pilots survived. The weather was blue sky good on both
days.
Jay Kelley is an ATP pilot
with single and multi-engine land and sea ratings, helicopters and gliders.
He has over 27,000 hours PIC. He moved from Alaska to Hawaii in 1988
where he flies volcano tours in fixed wing aircraft during the winter.
During the summer months he flies in Alaska. He gave up fish spotting
in 1994.
© 2006 Jay Kelley
All rights reserved