Episode 30: Mike Machowiak; What Survival Teaches About Love And Faith

 A home birth in a ham radio room on a Fairbanks-area homestead is only the opening scene of Mike Machowiak’s life, and it explains more than you’d think. Mike grew up around improvisation, cold mornings, and the kind of grit you don’t learn from a manual. From there, his family history stretches back to WWII Europe: the Polish underground, a POW camp and escape, Switzerland’s mountain culture, and the long, complicated ways trauma can echo into the next generation. 

We follow Mike’s path through welding, shipyards, commercial diving, and the early, cowboy days of Dutch Harbor where marine work is equal parts skill and hazard. He breaks down what underwater welding actually looks like, why maritime refrigeration becomes his niche, and how the Bering Sea fishing boom changes everything. Then the story pivots to adventure on purpose: he and Martha buy a steel sailboat, build real offshore competence, and spend years sailing the Pacific, balancing the romance of the sea with the realities of risk, fatigue, and loss. 

The most gripping chapter comes later with aviation. After Mike finally earns his pilot license, a fuel loss after departing Juneau forces a ditching in Lynn Canal. What follows is raw, specific, and unforgettable: cold water, hypothermia, rescue, and the medical decisions that save Martha’s life. If you care about Alaska, survival, seamanship, aviation safety, faith, and how people keep going after the worst day, this conversation stays with you. 

Subscribe for more long-form stories, share this with someone who loves Alaska and hard-earned life lessons, and leave a review so more listeners can find the show. What part of Mike’s journey hit you the hardest? 

Transcript

Welcome And Why Stories Matter

SPEAKER_06 0:00

Welcome to this episode of Doug Has Questions. Today my guest is a longtime friend Mike Makoviak, very talented individual in many ways with a really cool life story that I hope you all enjoy listening to. Welcome to the show, Mike.

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Thanks.

SPEAKER_06 0:15

Yeah, thanks for joining us.

SPEAKER_00 0:16

It's funny, it's a really cool story, but I mean, it it's just a story I know.

SPEAKER_06 0:22

It's the only one I know. Most people, when I ask them to come on here, they're like, well, it's just I don't really have much that I've done or anything. But it's always cool to other people. But when it's the the life that we've lived, yeah, because we know all the boring parts in between, you know. Yeah, and it's just you're just like, well, this is what I've done, and you've lived it, so it's not really that exciting. But people on the outside, it might some of the things you did, it's like, man, I I've always wanted to do that. Yeah, always wanted to do that. That sounds really cool. What was that? And so you never know what part of that is really interesting to somebody else.

SPEAKER_03 0:58

And we skip over a lot of the mundane.

SPEAKER_06 1:00

We can, yeah. Because we we can't talk about your whole life story because we've only got a couple hours here. We don't have most of it's mundane, so that's good.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

That'll be simple. Yeah.

Born On An Alaska Homestead

SPEAKER_06 1:10

So let's start off with uh early Mike. Early Mike. Where where where did you grow up?

SPEAKER_03 1:17

Well, I um I was born on a homestead. Actually, I was born in a ham shack, and I don't know if everyone knows what a ham shack is. My dad was a ham radio operator, KL7 DVO in Fairbanks. And uh we had a homestead, and uh we had a home birth. I was the second home birth. My sister was the year previously, she also was born in the ham shack, and so uh I was born on on the homestead in 1959.

SPEAKER_06 1:45

So explain the ham shack, because when you first said ham shack, I'm thinking you're smoking hams in there, but then you're talking about your dad with a ham radio, and I'm guessing it's something entirely different.

SPEAKER_03 1:55

Yeah. So um my dad, my dad uh during the war was in the underground, French underground, Polish underground, and one of the things they learned to We're talking about II, yeah. Uh one of the things they learned to do is to make radios with almost nothing, you know, just basic materials to be able to make a radio that you can transmit information on or receive information on. So he had good uh you know, primitive electronic skills where he could make uh make a radio to communicate with the outside. Um and so he continued on with that in his life, uh a love of that electronic stuff. I don't know, you know, Radio Shack, uh we have a Radio Shack here in town, but Radio Shack uh and and uh Heath I think was it Heathcraft or Heathkit. Um used to be a thing early America, 50s, 60s, people would buy when you couldn't afford to buy a TV, you could buy a kit and you could build a TV. So that's that we don't have that anymore. But anyway, so he was really into radios and and communication, and so there's there's a band, uh several bandwidths of radio um signal uh bandwidth, I guess is the right word for it, of different wavelengths uh for individuals like experimental aircraft, amateur radio operators, um, to experiment with radios and communicate, and you can communicate with people all over the world, multiple different countries and languages and stuff. And so my dad was into that, and we had a ham shack on our homestead, and he would communicate with Australia guys in Australia and Poland and Germany and all over.

SPEAKER_06 3:50

So is that just a separate building outside of the cabin, or is it inside the cabin just a special room that you had set up? Well, you say cabin. Cabin sounds really luxurious. I'll tell you what we had.

What A Ham Shack Really Is

SPEAKER_06 4:00

Tell me describe it in more detail.

SPEAKER_03 4:02

Okay, so um so Alaska was still a territory, and my mom and dad had qualified um to become citizens. At that time, if you lived in the States, you had to live in the States for five years or four years before you could apply for citizenship. Uh if you lived in moved to a territory like American Samoa or Alaska or Hawaii, I don't know, I guess Hawaii was a territory at the time, yeah. Um, then you if you lived there for two years, then you could qualify because they were trying to encourage people to move to these territories. And so my mom and dad moved to Alaska. After two years, they qualified for taking their citizenship exams and they passed and became naturalized. And uh after that they applied for the federal uh homestead program, which uh they acquired uh the rights to do a 160-acre agricultural homestead, and that's where I was born, outside of Ester. Uh so there was uh there was a cat trail between Ester, Alaska, and Ninana. Otherwise, uh it was pretty much a river boat or dog's led, because we they had snow machines, but they were pretty newfangled deals. But dog's led or cat trail in the summertime, and we homesteaded on a piece of property that was uh about four miles outside of Ester. My mom and dad were dirt poor. When they got to Fairbanks, I think they had $43 by the time they got there. They had come in from Ellis Island and with their savings had bought uh a Studebaker. I think it was 1949 Studebaker Coop. I can't remember the exact model, but it was on the homestead when I grew up. And it was a not a very big car, and there were six of them in there. Um six people from New York all the way across to Alaska. With all of the worldly possessions, all their worldly possessions, yeah. And and it it was if you saw if you saw this Dude Baker, you just you it just you wouldn't believe that six people could fit into the car, let alone have all their stuff piled on the top.

SPEAKER_06 6:15

And just the road conditions coming to Alaska at that time.

SPEAKER_03 6:19

That was uh, you know, it just after the war, so there wasn't 1952, so there wasn't really much of a highway. It was more of a mud trench. And you know, they would they would get to one of these mud hollows and then uh there would be a cat and they'd have to wait their turn because there was trucks, full-size semis being towed with a cat through the muck, and then cars and stuff, so they that's how they made their way, and they ended up in Fairbanks. Um but then they lived in Fairbanks for a little bit while they became naturalized and became familiar with it. So anyway, we ended up on the homestead. They they um uh surveyed the homestead. There was a primitive method, kind of like we do have today in DNR with um home sites and recreational cabin sites that you can go do. Um and we we had a quantit hut. So a lot of people have probably heard that term quonset hut. It's it's typically a half-round um building that's you know just basically long, it's a semicircle and elongated. But ours uh ours was military surplus, it was a tent. And so there were bows. I think there were three sections um that were they were curved, two by six curved bows, and then they had hinges, and you would open them up and pin them, and and it would make this. I don't I I'm gonna guess that the span across the bottom was maybe twenty feet. It might have been eighteen feet. And so that made this giant hoop, and then every four feet there was another hoop. And I don't I don't remember, I was too small to remember how long it was, but it was a it was this building, this quantit hut made with these bows in series, and then the covering was canvas, two layers of canvas with about an inch and a half of insulation, and that was what we lived in for the a lot. I think I was six years old. I I lived there for six years. So it was cold at that time.

SPEAKER_06 8:30

I was gonna say that had to be cold in the wintertime.

SPEAKER_03 8:33

I remember the day, I remember the day we got an oil stove. We always we had potbelly, uh you're familiar with potbelly stoves. So we had a potbelly stove, and so I think the building was maybe, I'm guessing maybe 30 feet long or something like that. So we had one potbelly stove. Um, and it was a full-size potbelly stove, but nonetheless. I remember every morning, you know, us little kids, we got up last. That was that was because we were little, I guess we got to, you know. But I remember when you woke up in the morning, everything was frozen. It was about minus 15 in the house in the morning when you woke up in the wintertime, obviously. And uh we would wait, they would, you know, get the fire started. There was a cook stove and this pot belly stove, they get things going and start melting water and stuff so we could eat. I remember the day we had one of those pot burner oil stoves, and we woke up in the morning and nothing was frozen. It was like, wow. It was so wow, it was just wild, you know. So yeah, that's how we and anyway, so in that in that uh Quanzett hut was the Hamshack. It was just a a little room sectioned off. And with the door, you know, he had he was able to have a door and stuff and close because you you can't have kids yelling and screaming and you know, whining in the background while you're talking to somebody important in you know who knows what Uzbekistan or something. I don't know. Anyway, yeah.

SPEAKER_06 10:01

So yeah, that's so as you're talking about that came up with a whole bunch of questions.

War, Resistance, And Escape

SPEAKER_06 10:07

Okay. So your d your dad during World War II, he was from Poland, correct? Correct, yeah. And so he was in the resistance, he was fighting on the Allied side after Poland had been invaded.

SPEAKER_00 10:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 10:19

How did he meet your mom, who's from Switzerland?

SPEAKER_03 10:23

Okay. So he was I he w he grew up in Ostrova, uh, Poland, which is kind of a little bit north of the middle of Poland. And Poland is a is a land, and the borders have changed over time, but it's a land that has been fought over. They've been occupied and liberated, I don't know how many times. Uh it's it's a rich land of natural resources, farmland and agriculture. It's very productive area ground. And the Prussians wanted it, the Russians wanted it, the Germans wanted it, everybody wanted it. So they always the borders were always changing. And the Poles have a history of being oppressed and then liberating themselves. And that's what happened in World War II. The the Germans invaded Poland. My dad was uh I think he was 15 years old. I think they they were living in Krakow at that time. Uh my grandfather was a civil engineer who specialized in bridges. And um he uh my dad remembers him. They the it's interesting, like so many places in the world, um the populace was talked into gun registration and all of these things. And so here's my own personal life experience about gun registration. Um you know, it's always sold as a as a methodology to protect people, but in reality what ends up happening is that anyone who has a firearm now is registered as having a firearm. And my grandfather had a Luger 9mm, a really high-quality pistol, um, and it was registered because they, I think like four or five years prior to the invasion of Germany, they'd gone into registered guns. And he um my dad remembers him, they they owned an apartment in a in a building in Krakow. And my he remembers my dad and he being on the back balcony, and and my grandfather had taken apart every the luger down to the finest little screws and springs, and he was throwing them. He they knew the Germans were coming. He was throwing them in in this courtyard in the back as hard as he could. He said, you know, no countryman of mine is going to be shot with my gun. Well, after the Germans invaded, then they came with a list to the door. Jan Machkovyak, you have Luger model da-da-da, serial number da-da-da. Where is it? I took it apart and threw it in the backyard to come with us. He went to Auschwitz. My dad never saw him again. Auschwitz, huh? Yeah. Have you have you been? I I haven't. And he did survive Auschwitz um after the liberation, but he didn't live too much longer after that. But my dad never saw him again. So my dad then went into the underground. You know, I mean his dad had just been t taken away by the Germans. And at that time the Germans and the Russians were, they both had invaded Poland and they were, you know, this is before the Germans decided the Russians were not their friends anymore. Um so my dad, my dad at 15 joined underground. And you know, uh, you know, he had a brother that was he had two brothers and a sister younger than him. Um I think the sister was like maybe 12 years, Basha was 12 years younger. She was no, she was 15 years younger. She was a she was just a baby at the time. Um and so uh he joined the the Polish underground. The Polish Underground was fighting against the Russians and fighting against the Germans. And so he was passing messages and you know, doing whatever he could. Um and at one point uh he was in a square waiting to meet someone he was supposed to pass a message to, and as he was in the square, he is sitting by the fountain and he looks and he sees he sees an SS guy coming here through the street, and he sees an SS agent coming here through the street, and another one coming here, and they just kind of walk up to him and you know, they he knew somebody to spill the beans. Anyway, so he went he went to a concentration camp uh or POW camp in France. And he was there for quite a while. He was and he was also i in his uh in his cell or his uh his space. There was a there was a r German submariner who had tried to uh give away their position um and was c caught uh betraying the Germans. And I'm trying to remember, oh, there was a French officer in the underground that was there as well. So there the three of them were there. He was 13 hours from being executed, and uh someone in the French underground had been captured and was taken to this POW camp. And apparently whatever information he had was important enough that they bombed the con the camp. They bombed the camp either to liberate him or kill him so that the information wouldn't get out. And who knows what that information was at the time, but it was important enough to make sure that he either was liberated or he was killed, because they did couldn't let the information get out. So my dad escaped and um he ended up working his way to the coast, and then uh French underground got him uh on a fishing boat and they got him over to Scotland. So then he finished the war in Scotland, England, Scotland and England defending uh the British Isles. My mom grew up in Volhous in Switzerland, and um she was a bit of a tomboy. She was she climbed Mount uh uh Pilatus with her dad when women just didn't climb mountains. That was not uh I have a picture of her and my uh grandfather with their big boots with big cleats smiling on the top of a rock, you know, uh as they're before they went to climb Pilatus. Anyway, um she was tall, very tall. She was five foot eleven. She was very tall for her age all the way through school. There's a photograph of her in grade school, and she's as tall as the teachers, and all the kids are half her height. Yeah, so it she had an interesting life as a result of that. But um, you know, in Switzerland, they're multilangu multilinguistic. There are four official languages of Switzerland French, Italian, uh Swiss German, and Romance. And so if you grew up in Switzerland, you learn, I I'm assuming still today, you learn all four of these languages. So she was very uh uh fluent linguistically, and uh she was great with uh languages, read a lot. She she would get in trouble. She'd in the wintertime she would go to a convent, um boarding school. Summertime they were up in the mountains uh with the uh uh dairy cattle. They push the cattle up into the alpine meadows and then hay the fields uh during the summer to put up hay for the winter, and the cattle are up high in the Alpines, and that's what she did in the summertime. In the wintertime, she was at school, and she got into lots of trouble reading forbidden books like you know, the Count of Monte Cristo and others, you know, she'd get caught reading those to all of her classmates and get into trouble. Anyway, she was quite uh successful with uh language, reading and writing and uh speaking, of course, and so that she was encouraged to go into the diplomatic service. And so she ended up in London at the end of the war, and that's where my dad and her met, was in London. So in future. See, that was a really long time. That's it. That's all right. I I think it's complicated.

SPEAKER_06 18:42

It life is life is complicated. But it just your dad coming out of his experience of his dad was in Auschwitz, he was in a POW camp, escaped, you know, gets funneled off the off the continent to to England and the British Isles, and then meets his future wife in in London and everything after the war.

SPEAKER_00 19:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 19:07

That's a remarkable story to that point. And then they decide, hey, let's go to what did they ever explain the rationale? Did they just they're enough, they're done with war and torn Europe and they wanted to get to the States. Was that why they came over, or was there a job available?

Watchmaking School And Alaska Dreams

SPEAKER_03 19:23

Well that's that that pretty much is it. But my dad uh my dad was really good uh with his hands and he had a really good mechanical uh understanding of mechanical so during the war.

SPEAKER_06 19:35

So he passed that down to his son, didn't he? I guess so.

SPEAKER_03 19:38

I didn't think I never thought about it that way because he was he was working on really tiny stuff. He he had a knack for fixing watches, you know, so guys would bring him their watches that weren't working, and he would take them apart and get them working and and and make a few bucks that way. Um so after the war, he actually uh my oldest sister Barbara was born in London, and uh she's nine years older than I am, so uh she would have been born in 51. And um because he had a strong interest in watches and clocks and stuff, um, and I think my grandfather on my mother's side w had fallen ill. And um they went back to Switzerland and he applied um uh for watchmaker school um and was accepted, which he and he did he did go through the entire watch master watchmaking school and was the first non he was the first foreigner whose language was not native German uh to pass the uh so we I've got his diploma at my in my office at home. So he was the very first non-German speaking um applicant who had passed the uh Meister Uhrmacher uh degree. So and they had to, they had to, you know, he didn't they didn't make an entire clock for the um for their graduation, but they would they had to draw straws, uh you know, draw out of a basket an assignment, and that's what they're you know, whatever it was, you're gonna make an escapement, you're gonna make a uh a master gear, you're gonna do this or that. And so then you would you would have a block of metal and your tools and you would make a gear or you would make an escapement, and that was your graduating project. That was part of the deal. So he he was really proud of that. And it did um when they did come to America, and Jack London was huge in Europe at the time, and the whole gold rush, Skagway, you know, the Klondike Trail, all of that stuff was bigger than life in Europe and uh in Poland as well, not just Europe, but Poland really. uh had a romantic uh idealization of Alaska and the Yukon and the gold rush and all that. And so while they were still in uh in Lucerne, they um started corresponding with a gal and I wish I remembered her name in Fairbanks. She was very well known at the time as kind of the um the welcoming person of Alaska. You know, people would write to her uh in Fairbanks and ask them ask her questions. Yeah and there wasn't there wasn't you know we didn't have we didn't have internet YouTube or any of those and you'd be really happy four months later if you got a response but people who were thinking about Alaska are just curious. They would they would write her a letter and and then she would she was the kind of the Maitre D. She would respond to all of these letters kind of like Santa Claus getting letters you know there is a you know there's a North Pole Alaskan there is people who answer all those Santa Claus letters that go there and that's kind of what she did. She answered all these l inquiries from people all over the world asking about what was Alaska like what do you do in the wintertime? How do you get water if everything's frozen? You know all these things. So they they had corresponded with her and uh developed a relationship and so actually um both Poland and Switzerland's kind of divided between Protestant and Catholic but both my mom and dad were steeped in Roman Catholic um traditions growing up and the priest that married them um later told them that you know you really should go someplace um away from Switzerland away from Poland someplace where you guys are starting your own life independent of you know previous because they wanted to get out of out of Europe too but where they would be basically they'd have to rely on each other. And that was that was a recommendation that he had made for them for the strength of the marriage and I think it really did um make a difference in their lives. So I thought it was good advice.

Family Secrets And Swiss Roots

SPEAKER_03 24:19

So do you have just the one older sister do you have other old so there's six six uh of direct siblings and then I have a cousin Werner so that's another interesting story. My mom while she was working in the diplomatic service before she was in London uh in Volhuzen uh Canton Luzern where she grew up um because she was getting into the diplomatic service one of the early um assignments that she had or jobs that she had was to work in the local House of Records or Hall of Records and you know there she's filing birth certificates and death certificates and uh you know just basically doing uh Switzerland uh the Swiss are a matriarchal society so your lineage and your heritage your rights all of those things are traced through your mother not through your father. I didn't know that. Even though you take your father's last name in Switzerland as well. It's not as complicated as Iceland. I have a lot of friends from Iceland and their names their last names change with each generation because uh you know your name might be Bjarne Aldovsson that's your last name Aldovson but your sister's um cara uh Aldof's Dotter so she has a different last name so it's Aldof's Dotter and um Aldolf's son you know so that makes it I don't that me seems like it would be super confusing to trace lineage that way. So not nearly as much uh with the matriarchal society but they did your lineage was traced to your mother. Anyway so as she's doing the books she's she sees this young man who's now four I think he was fourteen. He might have been a little bit younger when she discovered him his name is Werner and he is the daughter of his of her older sister Maria he's the son of m uh her older sister Maria she had no idea she had had an illegitimate child and he had spent his life in this orphanage because at that time illegitimate children were to be shunned and you were ashamed of having ill illegitimate child. And so she had this nephew that she didn't even know existed who was like I mean he might have been 13 years old but when they left Switzerland he was 14 and so she adopted him and he came so he came uh to the States with us so there was Werner um and then Barbara and uh Richard my older brother who's nine uh nine sorry my older sister's nine years older and Richard's eight years older than I am and so it was the three of them and my mother and father and my grandmother my mother side Graciella okay who came because she had lost her husband and she sold um the chalet and um and with those funds helped to move pay their transfer to pay pay the yeah transit on the ocean liner to uh the island in the middle of New York Harbor. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 27:47

And so how uh did they stay in New York for a little bit before heading off for Fairbanks or was it pretty much let's buy a car and start driving?

SPEAKER_03 27:54

I don't know for sure. I I got the impression you know and and so a lot of my story is based upon what what I remember and what I remember may not be accurate but it's the best I can do. I got the impression that they left pretty quickly and um they did stop in Chicago Chicago they stopped in Chicago um because there's a huge Polish um uh community in Chicago and um oh gosh they wanted them to stay so bad but they they together decided no we need to keep going they didn't want to move into a Polish community and I think part of it was that that advice from that priest you know not to settle too much into one of your heritages or the other but to make your own life and so they kept their plan to go to Alaska and eventually I don't know how long it took them to transit but by the time they got there they had 40 some dollars not much it was pretty much all gone.

SPEAKER_06 28:56

So so you were at the homestead till you were six?

Building A Home In The North

SPEAKER_03 29:01

No at the homestead we lived in a tent until I was six until you're six I lived in a tent until I was six okay then we got a basement then you got a basement oh man it was great.

SPEAKER_06 29:11

Nice yeah so how do you do a basement with I'm assuming pun uh permafrost up there?

SPEAKER_03 29:17

No well permafrost is is um permafrost is um what am I saying it's a little further north? No it is there. There's permafrost there but it's it's uh it's geographically unique. So we were on the south facing slopes of the ridges north of Fairbanks and on the north side of those so they're a geological formation of rock and I think mostly our our ridge that we're on was uh predominantly schist. So on the north side where there's very little sun you know except for summertime but in wintertime it just short hours of sunlight hit the north slope of those hills you would have permafrost lenticular permafrost where ice would have maybe formed in a a puddle or a pond or something like that and then froze and then the ground never quite thawed and then soil and stuff piles over the top of it and you get and so you have this lens of ice that's permanently frozen and never thaws out. That's one way that permafrost forms. On the south facing slopes where you had good sunlight in the summertime what what uh happened geographic or geologically was that the Tanana Valley is a very uh the Tannana River is a very silty river, glacial silty river it's formed by the Nabesna and the Shoshanna rivers coming together and then multiple tributaries of Tok etc as it flows down towards the Yukon and it has it's rich with glacial till in the in the windy seasons that glacial till would blow up like you see here in the Chilkat you get these dust clouds you know you look at it looks like a fire or something but it's just that really super fine glacial till and it blows against drifted against those ridges and formed Los L O S S which is a it's it's not it's not like clay. It gets really greasy when it's wet but when it's dry um it is uh it's it's like not quite a sandstone but you can like you can carve it with a shot we used to dig dig holes and then dig tunnels and stuff and we'd have all these underground things because it was it was deep and and it uh also had good uh drainage so on the south slopes of those ridges you're gonna see aspen and birch which are deep deep uh root um plants and on the north slopes you're gonna see moss and sometimes the moss is like two feet thick really cool when you're a little kid running you know just and then uh you'd have black spruce so on the on the north slopes you'd have black spruce so I'm not sure what triggered the question but we were on the on the south slope on the south slope it was easy enough to dig a good drainage it was ego easy enough to dig a basement yeah didn't have any worries about that right so we dug a basement uh built a a uh a concrete block basement and then later on we built a two-story house on top of that it was kind of moved in in phases so yeah so what with the homestead what were your parents doing for income or for a job were they farming on the property were they going into town to do job yeah it's not like they at that time again with technology they weren't sitting at home on the laptop remote working remotely I remember I remember when the power came and the phone came. Yeah so uh my mom um she was good with mathematics and had done bookkeeping uh in s in London and in Switzerland and so she she studied and ended up getting her accounting degree and so she was a CPA. My dad um had a uh shop a jewelry shop and because of his you know fine uh detail skills he had a jewelry shop and so they had a jewelry shop and my mom was doing accounting uh until we had uh somebody swindle um my dad out of I you know this was in the early sixties yeah it was the early sixties uh about thirty thousand dollars worth of jewelry which that's was a lot of you know that's a lot of money back then yeah you could buy a brand new car for I think for six thousand dollars back then so it was i it it destroyed them he paid off all their debts but they it just wiped out the business and so he uh ended up working for the University of Alaska as an instrument technician building instruments for uh research he worked uh first at the geophysical institute and then he worked at the IAB Institute of Arctic Biology and you know he would build different they they would build different specialized instruments for research one of the things that he and he and a Swiss researcher did the university didn't want to fund it so the Swiss researcher and he together built a chamber for measuring the respiratory uh rate of mosquitoes and so oh yeah I mean it's just just that's the kind of stuff that he so it was a little chamber that you would put uh a mosquito in and you could watch the pressure as as the mosquito respirated you could watch the pressure changing.

SPEAKER_05 35:04

I didn't know people were interested in the respiration rate of a mosquito.

SPEAKER_03 35:08

Well when you're running from them you want to know you want to know what's the rate right yeah yeah so that's the kind of stuff he did and he worked he worked uh for the university for a long time so so how how long did you stay were did you stay at the homestead through high school or so okay so we they moved to the homestead before there was a road there was just a cat trail. So they in the beginning they skied the three and a half four eight four miles I guess downhill to Esther in the mornings and then had a vehicle there and then drove off to work and then skied up in the winter I mean in the evenings and through the winter and then in the summertimes they would walk.

SPEAKER_06 35:50

So did they just leave you at home then with your older siblings?

SPEAKER_03 35:53

No with my grandmother with course moved there. So um and they did that until the Ninana Highway which is not the Ninana it's called the old road now the Ninana Highway got put in I remember that was really cool because you could drive the house now. Anyway so uh then once the highway was in you know then we we drove back and forth all the time. So yeah that was that was interesting too because alright because my grandmother was Swiss she she could understand English but she pretended she couldn't and I remember I remember as a little kid uh being brought you know we'd be off in the back room somewhere in the basement and my dad would call us out and we would come out and uh he we would you know what do you want you know and he'd say okay uh he would say uh ask ask grandmother um you know what's her what her favorite food is she's sitting right there just do it ask her so then we would turn around we'd ask my grandmother in Swiss because she couldn't speak English we'd ask her what her favorite food was and then she would tell us and then we would tell them you know and oh the guests oh they just thought that was wonderful because we were bilingual but it we didn't know we were bilingual. We talked to our grandmother in Swiss or my mom in Swiss you know anyway so there's there was always this odd little things like that happening. But yeah so my grandmother was was you know Swiss and so um she took care of us and then the older kids you know were started going to school um I think they I think they were going to school before the road was in pretty sure and so they were skiing back and forth with my mom and dad too. So we were about fourteen miles out of town. Esther Esther's about um eleven or something like that.

SPEAKER_06 37:47

Uh-huh somewhere in that ballpark yeah so how what what grade did you make it through in Fairbanks before freshman high school freshman and high school and then you went where?

Moving South And Not Fitting In

SPEAKER_03 38:00

Okay so the the pipeline the pipeline had happened or you know had just been completed I think 74 somewhere in that in that ballpark there and uh you know everybody was real estate was booming everything was booming so my mom and dad had wanted to move to a climate more similar to um what they had known in Europe growing up. And so they had friends in um in Washington and uh they selected a place in Stanwood, Commando Island Stanwood, Washington and that was in 74 and so they bought a little uh five acre you know uh farmstead farmstead or whatever I don't know what they call it back then but and it with a it had a had a barn and uh a little house and stuff and that's what we moved to and I remember uh we we sold the homestead they did pretty good uh on the sale somebody bought the whole thing it's been subdivided since I went back Martha and I went back in 1988 and it was kind of kind of weird going back to your homestead and it was a subdivision I don't recommend going back home it wasn't anyway um so they uh they bought this place in Stanwood and um my mom recalls us kids when we first because we were in a homestead surrounded by state land that we didn't there was we had no boundary our nearest neighbor in the beginning was like three miles away we would hike over to see our neighbors Wally or Wally and um Eddie I never remember his older brother's name now but we would walk over to see them or we would walk down to Esther and play with uh our friends down at Esther you know three miles away um so it we were we had the full run of the the wilderness you know and then we got to this little five acre um plot and my mom said yeah she remembered this for days we'd just walk along the fence this is our home yeah I think we did that to torment them a little bit too because we were not happy that we moved you you took us away from our wilderness paradise it really it really was a I mean it was a real shocker and we didn't really fit in uh it was a Norwegian um dairy community and you were either Norwegian or you were a jock or you were crap and so I was crap I wasn't I was neither one of those um and but it was good for my grades because I got straight A's from that point on. I wasn't doing so good in Fairbanks but when I got there it was straight A's was that because you didn't have all the other outdoor distractions I didn't have any friends or anything for three years. Actually I did have I had a couple of friends that um that uh I think had pity on me and uh befriended me so I did all right then but you know we uh on the homestead we grew up we were poor we um we would get a new Sears and Robuck was the thing then and we would get we could go through the Sears and Robuck catalog and mark the things that we really liked and we would get one set of clothes every year. Every year so that was the first first day of school we have one set of clothes and then we would have the hand me downs you know so my brother was eight years older than I am so the hand-me-downs were not forthcoming right away I had to grow into them so I I was pretty I remember and I remember us asking for bell bottoms because bell bottoms were in everybody wanted bell bottoms my mom and dad were not gonna have anything to do with the hippie movement or the bell bottoms or any of that crap took a long time for us to talk them into letting us have bell bottoms and then I fell out of a tree and gashed my leg almost hit my ephemeral artery and the only thing I could worry about was my bell bottoms the tragedy never again it's crazy stuff like that. Yeah you know Seth Cantor uh his book uh what is the name of his book uh The Caribou One do you know who I'm talking about?

SPEAKER_06 42:19

I know the name I don't remember I don't recall the name of the book.

SPEAKER_03 42:22

I'm trying to remember the book there's a there's a he writes about growing up on the North Slope and one of the things that he says in there that I totally relate to you know he's so he's a he's a Caucasian in a totally yupic environment and uh he's picked on a lot at school and he remembers as a little kid you know pushing on his nose all the time trying to get his nose to be flat so that he would fit in. Yeah. I so totally relate to that trying to fit in thing. When you went down to Stanwood well down to Stanwood but even even on the homestead because because we you know we didn't have much for clothes we we were we were the we were the outliers you know so anyway. What was the name of the book?

SPEAKER_06 43:12

Ordinary wolves ordinary wolves yeah that's right then he's our it's our production assistant director looks these things up for us. Yeah thanks. So it's good to have a smart person in the room.

SPEAKER_03 43:24

That was a good book I really enjoyed it. I I related well to it.

SPEAKER_06 43:28

Uh anyway so my dad tells a similar story about growing up because he was his his mama died when he was young and his dad pretty much left him and his brothers on their own and my my dad and his youngest brother were both taken in by families in town and my dad remembers that when they were still at the farm you know the disdain that other students just because he hadn't showered in a week. They didn't have new clothes there's ever I mean just milking the goats in the morning. Yeah and just everybody that you know that he's I don't think he Lost that feeling of not fitting in just because of the economic circumstances and the and the family circumstances at home.

SPEAKER_00 44:08

It can have a big effect on it.

SPEAKER_06 44:09

I think he he worked really, really hard to make sure my sister and I didn't have that same same feeling.

SPEAKER_03 44:16

That's what we try to do, I think, as parents. We try to fix the problems that we experienced, try to save our children from the hardship. And sometimes that's not good. Sometimes, you know, I think hardship is part of life and it builds character. And sometimes we can go too far and shelter our kids from struggles and hardships that they really need to work through.

SPEAKER_06 44:39

It's it's a fine line between the ones you need to protect from and the ones that they need to go through. Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 44:45

So yeah, I can relate to that. Anyway, so I when I graduated from high school, I I think we had the last day of school was a half a year, half a day. I think it got out like at 11 30. I was on a plane to Alaska at two o'clock.

Back To Alaska And Joe Vogler

SPEAKER_00 45:01

Boom. Boom. I was just out.

SPEAKER_03 45:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 45:03

So where when you came back up, where did you did you go back to Fairbanks?

SPEAKER_03 45:07

I went back to Fairbanks.

SPEAKER_06 45:08

Um with the goal of what was the plan. Just going back to Alaska.

SPEAKER_03 45:14

Coming back to where I fit in. And I and I felt I fit in. So actually I had a job with uh Joe Vogler, who is a uh historic character in Alaska. My mom, because she had the accounting uh business. We had interesting she had interesting clients. So she had Henry and Eddie Tiffany of the Tiffany's in New York. Okay. Their sons had come to Alaska as hippies, and she was doing their books. So I, you know, we and for years afterwards we'd we would get, you know, for Christmas, we would get this silver, uh silver platter or you know, two gallons of pure maple syrup, or you know, we'd just get this high-end stuff all the time. Because we knew Eddie and Henry Tiffany, you know. And uh and Joe Vogler was another client that my mom had too. And they they all had their interesting little corporate names like Joe's Joe's corporate entity was PBJ. Peanut butter and jelly. You know, you had to have something, so it was peanut butter and jelly. You gotta come up with something. Okay, PBJ. Anyway, so uh he was mining. He was doing lots of other things. He had real estate he was developing and stuff like that. So I went to work for him mining up in the central area, and uh we were putting together um a placer system on the on Ketchum Creek. Okay. So that's what I did. I um I worked for him through the summer, and we never actually mined. We were setting it up, and I had been promised 5% of the take. But since we didn't have mine, there's no 5%. So he said he would he would make it up to me. He said, Okay, I'll pay for your flying lessons. Um but what what Joe really had in mind, Joe, and I don't have to get into too much of Joe's history, but he was divorced, he had a couple of kids, he had come up from Texas with his wife, and he loved Alaska. This is such an Alaska story. He loved Alaska, would never want to leave Alaska. His wife hated Alaska, couldn't stand it, and uh so they divorced and she took the kids and went south. And so um here I was, I had just escaped um from my dad and home life and was on my own. And here was Joe, and he was kind of looking towards me like his son, and he wanted me to uh get a pilot's license and fly for him and in the Witchhopper Creek and stuff like that, which sounded really appealing, but as I got more and more into it, I realized that um the relationship that he was after was not the relationship I wanted. So um I got mostly through the um pilot training, and then he just decided when he found out I wasn't gonna come back and fly for him, he just quit paying for it. So and I was I was working at JCPenney's putting studs and tires for $4.95. $4.95. Studs and tires, yeah. So I I I just couldn't afford to pay for gas at the time. And gas back then was cheap, but I couldn't afford to uh so I I shouldn't have I should have finished it then, but I didn't. So it's about three hours short of getting my pilot. Three hours short and had the Yeah, well you know you make you make decisions.

SPEAKER_06 48:50

You have to make decisions based on the reality at the time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 48:54

So how long I probably could have done it, but I at the time I didn't I think it was an it seemed impossible at the time. Yeah. So yeah.

Welding, Shipyards, And Finding Faith

SPEAKER_06 49:02

So what was after JC Penny?

SPEAKER_00 49:05

Oh gosh, what was after JC Penney?

SPEAKER_03 49:08

Um did you meet Martha in Fairbanks? Oh no. No, Martha was much later college. Um I I had done a lot of welding on the homestead and welding uh at in high school uh in Stanwood, you know, the agricultural communities in Washington, uh, Pacific Northwest, they have a a program called Future Farmers, FFA, Future Farmers of America. And so I had I had gone through all those courses for welding and all that kind of stuff. So I I got a job welding. Um trying to remember where. Um, but I uh I was doing a little bit of welding. My brother was living in Anchorage, he was the head of the mechanical division of the Alaska Railroad at the time, and he had talked me into coming and working in Anchorage and seeing if I could find some work there. So I did come to Anchorage and I got a job welding, and then uh another friend of our family's who was uh had a homestead next to us was living, had gone to Perth, uh ran a shipyard in Perth, Australia, and then had come back and was in was in Washington working at Marco Shipyard, which you know for people in the maritime industry that was a pretty big operation, pretty significant uh shipyard for the king crab boom and all the rest of that. Anyway, he encouraged me to come down and go to college and work in the shipyard. So I went down, applied, got work at the shipyard because I could weld and started going to college there. Where were you going to college? What school? Shoreline Community College. Yeah. So I was doing I was doing mechanical engineering, but you know, it wasn't the uh upper division stuff, it was the lower division mechanical engineering and uh started on that program. And then um at some point I had to make a decision either to keep working or finish college, and I decided to keep working in the shipyard. So I ended up staying in the shipyards for a while. Um and then I ended up I wanted to go back to Alaska, so I came I went to Accutan. Um went to Accutan in 80 82 on a processor uh as an engineer. I actually went there as a oh no, I actually I think they hired me as a assistant engineer. Um so I worked there and then eventually uh ended up for a short period of time being the chief engineer on the floater. It wasn't a motorized vessel, it was a barge, floating barge, because the Pappy uh Pappy decided he had to leave. Pappy was a character. He was he was a great mentor. He had been in World War II, he was on a on a uh tanker, um, I think in the Gulf of Mexico or off the East Coast, a Chevron tanker, and they'd been torpedoed, and he was one of three people that survived that because the tanker blew up, and he had been down in the injury room. And when they picked him up, they thought he was dead because he was missing an arm and his leg was mangled, and they just pulled pulled him into the lifeboat, and and after a period of time he started coughing, so they realized he was alive. That's all anyway. They so they rejuvenated him and got him back. And I met him after the war. He was old when I met him, but he was he was a fantastic guy. But he did have a drinking problem. So he uh he would he would disappear in a gummy suit, you know, survival suit, yeah, and uh swim his way slowly to Accutan to the to the bar and uh stay there until he couldn't walk anymore. And the the people would be looking for him and finally they'd s they'd see this guy in this gumby suit coming swimming back, you know, with six pack on his chest, you know. They'd go get him anyway. They finally let him go, and so I I was the chief for a little bit. So that's kind of how I got into the engineering end of uh Maritime Deal. So yeah. But then I met I went back and went to school in uh so I don't know uh if you're gonna ask me something else, but I can just keep you just keep going, keep going. Okay, so sh that experience there, um, and I did uh I was there for quite a while. Um, but when I came back, I worked at uh this friend who had talked me into coming down and working at the shipyard. He started his own business. He and I together we were doing we bought this little shop up on Aurora and we were uh doing fixing frames on Jeeps and uh trailer hitches and and that kind of stuff, you know, just basically a welding uh shop for RV kind of stuff. We were doing that kind of stuff. And uh I was uh eating dinner across the street and there was a waitress there, and I was staying at the shop, that was where I lived, and I was working across the street anyway. Uh this waitress uh took an interest in me. Not that she was my age, she was much older, but she took an interest in me and found out what it was going on, she invited me to church, and so I started going to church with her and gave myself to Jesus at that time. It was a s it was a process of time asking questions. You know, some people have these amazing conversion deals, like you know, they were on Mount Everest and they were going to die. That's not how I came to the Lord. I I came to the Lord slowly with the kindness of Christians that um introduced me to Jesus, and that's what brought me to Christ. Anyway, so I was twenty-one at that time, and uh I wanna interrupt you there because it it looking at what Aurora is now.

SPEAKER_05 55:14

Oh that's the juxtaposition of you finding Christ on Aurora Avenue and looking at what the den of sin it is now is just yeah.

SPEAKER_06 55:27

It's it's just interesting. That that's really well God works in mystery.

SPEAKER_01 55:32

He works in mysterious ways. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 55:34

But I think that's just a a neat in my mind anyhow, it's a neat anecdote that that's where that's where you found God is in that place where now everybody looks at it as just a dentist in.

SPEAKER_03 55:46

Well, that was because there was a Christian there who took an interesting. Who took an interest and cared about me. And that's what made all the difference in the world.

SPEAKER_06 55:52

Isn't that interesting to just the difference one person at the right time in our life saying the right thing or taking an interest can change your entire life. Change the rest of your life. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 56:03

And it certainly did. It changed my entire life. Because up to that time I had I had been uh kind of devoting myself to different mentors that you know came along, people who were um who cared about me and took an interest in me, and I would just trust them. I would just do whatever they wanted, and that didn't always work out the way it should. Um because humans are frail and they make mistakes. Frail and perfect and imperfect, and and that was the difference when I came to Christ. I found someone in whom I could trust, you know, with all of my um being and not worry about being led down a a wrong path or being betrayed, and that made made all the difference. And it has made all the difference in my life. So he's been my closest companion.

SPEAKER_06 57:05

So it's do you think that did because you met Martha after that, yeah, correct?

Meeting Martha And Choosing A Path

SPEAKER_06 57:11

Do you think that led you to your relationship?

SPEAKER_03 57:13

Absolutely, because uh at uh shortly, you know, or at about a six-month period after that, I uh ended up with um with a church group in in Marysville. I had been going to um uh Calvary Temple area in um Seattle, mid-Seattle, and um and I went to a Pentecostal church for a while as well. I'm trying to remember the name of the church. I I I can take you right to it in Ballard. Um But I ended up in Marysville and uh was working for a guy uh putting in septic systems, you know, run the backhoe and putting in septic systems. And we did, I mean, there's another two hours conversation just there about all the wild things we did there. But um through the course of that I I uh became aware of a college in Portland, and a lot of people are familiar with Multnomah School of the Bible, but just up the hill from Multnomah uh is a was a small college called Columbia Christian College, and the church that I was going to was affiliated with them. And so I having gone to so many different uh Christian denominations, I went to the Christian Brethren, I you know, I went to the Pentecostal church, I went to um the uh some Baptist churches and and uh I in the course of all of these different experiences and going to different Bible studies, I had a collage of different um theologies uh from the scriptures. And um many of them clashed, they didn't agree, um they were uh mutually incompatible, they couldn't they couldn't both be right. And so I was uh a bit frustrated with that. And uh so I decided, and this this was the Churches of Christ is is the affiliated uh denomination with Columbia Christian College, which they they have their own issues as well. Um but they were a very much a Bible-based uh study of the scriptures kind of uh denomination, and so I was encouraged by that and applied and ended up going to Columbia Christian College, and that's where I met Martha. She had she had gone the year before uh and was on. I do a lot with my hands, I should be Italian. Uh she uh had uh gone to Columbia the previous year and was when I started, she was at uh Heidelberg doing a European exchange program. So she was in Europe at the time. So I met her the second year when we came back. And we had a lot of uh, you know, I remember I remember her friends, oh you'll you really like Martha, you know, she's coming back next year, you should meet her. And they showed me this picture of this drowned rat, you know. It was like Martha That's really appealing. You know, she was usually a girl and her hair was just soaking wet. She'd been in the rain, you know. But she was on some outdoor thing, and I thought, well, it's a drowned rat. That's really nice. Anyway, she turned out to be much more than a drowned rat.

SPEAKER_07 1:00:36

I would say so, yes.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:38

Yeah. But um, so I got to meet her when she came back, and we So that that's interesting though, that there were her friends like the year before you met. Like, hey, wait, you need to come back next year because we've got well, I was dating, seriously dating, a friend of hers at the time. Okay. In fact, we ended up being engaged. Yeah. Um, but what happened over time was that Martha and I, we weren't dating, but we were really good friends. We were and we were both outdoorsy. We I mean we were on ski trips together, we climbed Mount Hood together, we were on multiple climbing expeditions. I was teaching rock climbing at the college, you know, we did clo rock climbing and stuff together. So we did we did a lot of stuff all the time. We were always running into each other, and eventually um we ended up being together, so no no regrets whatsoever. So yeah. She's the next best thing that's ever happened to me. So and then the kids, you know, the kids are done, I've done a lot of different things, but I think my family's uh by far the the best thing that's ever happened to me.

SPEAKER_06 1:01:54

I think that's the way it should be. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:57

So anyway, yeah, so Martha and I uh met and uh we ended up getting married in 87. Um and uh I was working in uh I was working for His Sound, which was uh audio company that did sound systems for uh for churches, for churches, but also for um you know big uh what do you call them where you have people come together. Oh revival or not just it was just convention convention centers and stuff. So it was an audio professional audio company and I was working for them and uh and that's what I was doing when I well, I was working at the college too, but anyway, Martha and I got married, and then uh I I realized uh after we'd been married a few months that at the end of the month, you know, we'd have all our bills paid and I'd we'd have fifty dollars left over. You know. And I don't know, I just didn't grow up that way. That just did not feel good. Having fifty dollars left over? Fifty dollars left over. Every month, you know, we could have fifty dollars left over, but I was not used to that. I was used to making money and putting money a away, you know, saving money, and that was just too scary for me. So I had been offered a job in Olympia, Washington with these guys, and I turned it down and ended up going back to steel work because that's where I knew I could make money. So I ended up working in Sandy, Oregon for a company doing steel work. And um there's lots of stuff in between, but um after a while I got it at I saw an advertisement for in Dutch Harbor for McGone Marine and they were looking for an underwater welder. Now I had done commercial diving. Uh when I was at the shipyard, I had started diving and I was doing commercial diving for the shipyards for Dewamish and Marco and so the other shipyards. And most of it was just on scuba, just inspecting boats when they went into the dry dock to make sure things were lined up, blocks were set where they were supposed to be that kind of a deal. Sometimes I was retrieving tools that had fallen in the water, all those kinds of deals. Dewamish, they had a boat sink in the dry dock, and I had to look and see whether or not they could raise or lower the dry dock. The ship was going to interfere with it, that kind of stuff. But I had never done any underwater welding. Um and the guy who taught me how to dive was the the friend that had brought me down to go to college uh and work at Marco. Anyway, um, so I I wrote to Dan McGone and and told him I I said, you know, I I can dive and I can weld. I'm a certified welder, but I've never you know welded underwater. Ah, come on up, we'll teach you. If you can weld good, we'll you know you can do it. So that's what got Martha and I uh to Dutch Harbor. Um and that was what year? 1987. So we were married in April and we moved to Dutch Harbor in uh November. I moved in November. She I think she showed up near the end of December. Yeah. So that got us to Dutch Harbor.

Dutch Harbor And Underwater Welding

SPEAKER_03 1:05:22

And we were there, that's where we paid off all our school loans, bought a sailboat, had two kids. We did a lot of stuff in Dutch Harbor.

SPEAKER_06 1:05:30

So what because so you just started, you went up there as an underwater diver. Yeah, I went up there where did the refrigeration aspect come in?

SPEAKER_05 1:05:39

Oh where did where did or do we want to go to sailing the South Pacific first? Where did the timeline get to talk fast? We got plenty of time.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:50

I just I just I just want to know where we're at on the timeline here because there's well when Martha and I got when Martha and I first started seriously thinking about uh having A relationship besides being friends. We sat down and because we're we're trying to be realistic about it. We liked each other, but getting married was scary kind of scary. I had been in a relationship where I was going to get married and I had backed out of it. And there wasn't anything wrong with the girl that I was going to get married to. There was it it just something didn't feel exactly right. You know, she was a wonderful Christian girl. I know her now and her husband. She's a great mother and wife. But something wasn't quite right, and I just didn't know what it was until later. Later on I figured it out. But at the time I could not figure out what, you know, I just was hesitant. I just didn't know. And part of it, when you're that age, you know, you're people are the whole world is telling you what you should be looking for in a mate, you know. Oh, opposites attract, opposites don't attract, you know, do this, don't do that, you know. Just a a myriad of advice that's not necessarily even close to being good advice. And I didn't have anyone to really advise me that I that I knew well. Um my mom and dad had they had not divorced, but they'd had we'd had some serious problems growing up in the home. And um so I was trying trying to work my way through it. And so one of the things Martha and I did was we wrote, we decided, somebody had maybe suggested that we decide to write down the things that we thought we would like to do with our lives, you know, some some things that and so she wrote her list, I wrote my list, and we put them together, and it was amazing how many of those things uh lined up, you know. And that's I'm sure it was a God thing, you know, that uh that He brought us together. Um I'm I'm totally convinced of that. But some of the things that we want, you know, we wanted to live remote and we wanted to have a remote cabin, we wanted to go sailing, we wanted to see ocean sailing, we wanted to be on commercial fishing, you know, just just a bunch of different things that we we wanted to have kids, you know, those things. So um anyway, one of the things that um uh we had wanted to do was to sail, and that was a common thing that we had. And living remotely seems like we've lived remote a lot. Um so when we got to Dutch Harbor, um when I got there, the you know, the first thing they did was they wanted to see if I could weld or not.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:50

And so it's always interesting, you know.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:54

Uh so Dan gave me this project. We were working on this boat, the Arctic uh trawler, and they had an overboard chute where you would throw discards, but it it was near the waterline, so it had to be a watertight door, and so the box and everything had to be watertight. And so he had on his drafting table, he'd drawn up the shape of this because he'd gone to the boat and measured it, and uh he gave me this sheet of paper to build this waterproof, watertight box out of 3/8 plate. So I laid it out and it didn't come out right. So I checked the measurements again and the angles, and it didn't come out right. So I thought I must be doing something wrong. So I carefully, very painstakingly laid it out again. I I I because I knew this was some kind of test to see whether or not, you know, I I could actually work at the job, right? And so I finally went in and I said, Dan, I know this is a test, and I'm gonna fail it because I can't figure this out. I said, when I lay this out, it does not work out the way your drawing shows it, you know. Oh, give me that. So you can get to the drafting table. Oh, oh, that's because the thickness of the line. So his little drawing when I expanded it out, the thickness of the line was three-eighths of an inch, and one corner was off by three-eighths of an inch. But I knew he was testing me, he wasn't testing me, he just wanted me to build the silly thing, you know. Anyway, so when I, you know, after a little bit, I got, you know, I was a little bit of welding, he could see I could weld. And so I had to teach my, I mean, he would tell me what I had to do to do differently, but I basically had to teach myself how to weld underwater. He supplied the equipment and the machinery, and um I would go out every day and practice welding underwater. And uh eventually I got to where I mean at the end, the last project I did with him was I uh he made uh the front cover of International Maritime Magazine with the uh the raising of the Kiroshima uh it was uh uh uh tr what we call a tramp or it's basically a cargo boat that had gone on the beach in uh Summers Bay in near Dutch Harbor. And uh Crowley and the big companies had come to salvage it and it there it was when all the insurance money was all gone, there it still was on the beach. And so Dan devised a way to get it off the beach and float it again. But I ended up me and two other welders welded for a month solid overhead welding, repairing the patches on the bottom of that boat. So I you know I went from not knowing how to do it to overhead welding, waterproof, you know, watertight welding overhead. So yeah, it was and it was really good money. And Martha was my tender for a while because you want somebody that you can trust because yeah, I mean, we were doing we were working with explosives and uh guys would run you out of air. So so we were using a uh Kirby Morgan, which uh was it's just a soft uh wetsuit helmet with a plate and an oral nasal mask that you breathe through with microphones and earphones. And uh you have a little flip-down uh shield that you would use for welding. And um we you we do dip various different mechanical things underwater. We pull propeller shafts, we pull propeller propellers, but pull rudders, shafts, you know, repair holes, there'd be a leak in the boat, we would repair the leaks, those kinds of things. And um or we do inspections, and sometimes the your tinder was not paying attention and he'd run you out of air, which most of the time isn't a problem. But if you're underneath a really big ship like a sea land container ship, it takes a while to get back to the surface. Well, and you have to know which direction the go. Yeah. So that was one of the things I learned early on was to pay attention to the weld seams, because when you're you know, you only got maybe 20 feet of visibility, and you know, you can just kind of as you look around you in a circle, you can kind of see light out there, kinda, but you don't know whether you're swimming the 300 feet down the stern of the boat, or you're swimming the 40 feet to the side of the boat. You know, when you run out of air, you don't have a lot of time. Yeah, and so you you start swimming the wrong direction, you're you're not gonna make it. Yeah, you'll end up you'll end up being dead underneath the boat. So we I had guys that would run us run me out of air. Martha never did. Martha, you know, you want somebody who loves you to be your tendon. Yes, yes. So or the other thing, we would also we would blow wheels. So in the shipyard, they would heat uh the hub of a propeller. You know, you're you're on the dry dock, you put the propeller onto the end of the shaft with uh chain falls and stuff, and you have a big wrench that you're either using a crane or or some type of hydraulics to turn the wrench, but you heat the hub to get it to expand, and then you tighten the nut on the back to cinch it onto the taper. And so it's really tight. So then when it cools, is it tight? Right, yeah. And then a lot of times they'll have a keeper on the back of the nut, they'll weld the nut to the hub of the propeller to keep it from turning. You know, just or sometimes there's a locking bolts or it depends on how complicated. We were working a lot of crabbers at the time, so they're not nearly as complicated as the bigger ships are. Um but we would to blow those, we would take those off. So, how do you get this off? First of all, you know, you you got a four-foot wrench that's made out of steel, right, and it weighs like a hundred pounds, right? How hard can you paddle, right? So, you know, you had to come up with things like we we call them anti-gravity blocks. We would have styrofoam blocks that we would have taped uh with duct tape to the wrench. So the wrench was almost neutrally. You'd have to figure out stuff like this, you know, um to make it work. And so you get the wrench on there, and then uh you'd use a crane typically on the from the boat with blocks, get it centered so you could you would slide the wrench off the onto the end of the shaft and get it back onto the nut and then pull it with the crane, and you'd slowly break it loose, and then you could spin the nut off. But then you still got to get the propeller off the shaft that has been shrunk fit on there.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:48

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:49

And it just doesn't come off. So uh Dan uh was a powder monkey, he had his powder license, and what we would we'd use det cord, detonation cord, which is you know what they use to set off explosions, uh, like we've got a high X here in town. They they'll do explosions uh to bust up rock along the road and that kind of stuff. So they have detonation cord, um, which is a it's an explosive shock cord. But what we would do is we would wrap that, we'd have a cap, which is a capacitor discharge, that would go on the end of the debt cord, and that would be with electrical signal that would pop like a primer on a on a gun, and that would set off that cord, and it would go off almost in milliseconds, but almost instantaneous. So we would wrap this debt cord around the so here's the propeller shaft comes in like this, and here's the hub. We would wrap that debt cord in here as tight as you could, and then on the end of the dead cord, you'd have nylon, you know, fastened to the end of the debt cord, and you'd just do like a ton of wraps until you had a shaped charge, basically. Okay. Yeah, so you'd make a sh a shaped charge with this nylon type tape and you know pulled in there as tight as you could. Now, while you're doing this, you've got two electrodes that are you know set to set off this cap in front of your face, right? Those are supposed to be being tended by the tender, right? But when you go to swim to tell the tender you're ready to blast and you follow the cords down into the ocean into a like a crab pot with a zinc on it or something like that, you kind of start thinking that maybe this is not necessarily the best kind of profession to be working on.

SPEAKER_07 1:17:39

Anyway, there's just too many, too many things like that where how does somebody not pay at pay attention to that? You got somebody dealing with explosives.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:49

There's some pretty girl on the dock, they're talking to them, or they're talking about duck hunting, or you know, they're BS and you know. So yeah, you get that kind of stuff going on. And and this was early, early Dutch Harbor. Things have really civilized out now. You've got dive tenders, you've got you've got emergency diver, backup diver, you've got dive tenders now. Everything's just strictly by the book. Back then it was wild cowboy.

SPEAKER_06 1:18:14

So if the if the guy isn't dropping this overboard, the idea behind that is once you swim up and are out of there, they hit the button, it it sends off a discharge. It sends off the discharge, and with that shape charge, it blows that propeller off the taper. Off the taper or nut. It bounces on the nut. Okay.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:33

And then then it's loose, and then you pull it off. It's loose so you can go and pull it off. Except one time, one time I did that, and uh, we set it off, and it came back and it was still on there. Holy crap. Dan, so I said, Dan, it it didn't come off. We we need to put another. So, okay, here's here's another two feet. So you know, he calculate the circumference. You know, there's another two wraps. We put another two wraps on there, stretch it tight, and boom, set it off. Still didn't come off the taper. Dan, I think we need to go to to um I think we need to go to to three wraps. No, we don't want to go to three wraps. He's the powder monkey. He knows what he's doing. I'm just guessing. No, we don't want to go to three wraps. We don't want to do that. Three reps is not a good thing. What was happening was the hub was bouncing against the nut and setting against it.

SPEAKER_06 1:19:27

Setting it back.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:27

Yeah. He was spot on. We just backed the nut off some more and it bounced and stayed off. So but we used to we used to cut pilings too, wood pilings. You put debt cord around it and you cut those pilings right off. It's pretty amazing stuff. You get get to do all kinds of fun stuff. But but you realize that that probably wasn't the safest job. Even even I mean, I was making really stupid money.

SPEAKER_06 1:19:51

I bet you were.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:52

But you know. How long do you want to be around making stupid money?

SPEAKER_06 1:19:57

Yeah. You can only keep making stupid money if you're alive.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:00

Yeah. I lost I've lost a couple of friends up there, so diving diving accidents.

SPEAKER_06 1:20:06

So that that got you looking at what kind of things can I do on a ship that are a little safer?

The Fishing Boom And Refrigeration Work

SPEAKER_03 1:20:13

Yeah, actually, I got approached by um a guy who was starting a company. He had come from Sand Point. He was the he was an electrical administrator. He'd come from Sandpoint and was running the powerhouse out there. And he kept Dutch Harbor was like a gold rush at the time. So I don't know how many people are aware of the Stevens uh Magnuson Act. I don't know if you're aware of it.

SPEAKER_06 1:20:37

I know a little bit about it.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:39

So but prior to the Stevens Magnuson Act, there was uh the the United States had a 13-mile territorial sea. So once you got 13 miles off the coast, it was international waters. And I remember talking to guys in Kodiak, they had grown up in Kodiak, and all the time that they were growing up in Kodiak, I mean there was like an ocean of lights out there just past 13 miles. And what it was was all these foreign factory boats that were out there harvesting their uh tremendous seafood resource that was out there. America had no clue what was going on in the Bering Sea because we never participated in it. Um and at some point, you know, people in places of authority, Ted Stevens and I can't remember Mr. Magnuson, Senator Magnuson's first name, but anyway, they were informed of what the potential resource was. And so they extended the territorial waters of the United States out to 200 miles. And when that happened, all these factory vessels and fact foreign fishing vessels got pushed out, and this resource now was available for the U.S. and Alaska. We had no idea. Uh there was so much harvesting going on, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Russians, uh, there was so much harvesting going on. He had no idea the effect it was having even on salmon because they were they were catching anything that they caught, didn't matter, they they would keep it because there was a market for it. They were just basically any living organism, they were scooping it up. And when when they got pushed out the 200 miles, um the American fisheries started up to harvest those fin fish, and it was a gold rush. Uh there was just this resource that was just mind-boggling. And um there we didn't really have plants to to process the fish. We didn't know how to how to process the fish, we didn't know really how to catch the fish. Um so what uh the way it began was what they call a joint venture operation. And so American fishing vessels would catch the fish and deliver it to foreign processing ships that would pay for the catch. And that's how it began. So it was called a JV joint venture operation. And then at the same time they were building up um shore-based plants to pr to handle the processing. A lot of it was Pollock. There's huge, tremendous uh whitefish protein product uh in Pollock and uh feeds a good portion of the planet. Um anyway, so that was beginning, and it was it was mind-boggling how much money and resources were being thrown at it. So this guy from Sand Point knew he saw what was happening, and he decided to relocate to Dutch Harbor, Pat Hatch. And he was probably Pat Hatch was probably the first employer I've ever worked for that actually really cared about his employees, really took good care of him. And we worked hard for him too, but you know, he he was a great guy to work for. I really appreciated him. Um he approached me. I had met uh a guy, Jerry Downing, who is now the president of the company I work for, um and he had been uh the chief engineer at Greatland Seafoods, which was just starting up, and Pat had approached him because he he wanted to start a marine service company. So he approached Jerry, and then Jerry either knew about me or Pat had heard about me, and so they both came to me and were talking to me, and eventually we agreed on uh a wage and a salary, and I ended up going to work for Pat. Because I had I had had Jerry had a lot more refrigeration experience at the time, um, but I had electrical and in uh welding and some electronics, and so um between uh between Pat Hatch, who had been working on these boats in Sandpoint, Jerry and I, we ended up taking away uh a third of the entire marketplace in Dutch Harbor from like Harris Electric and Lundy. Um in pretty short order, yeah. But we we were clocking just unbelievable hours. Yeah, you know, unbelievable hours. So but yeah, that's that's how we got into it. And and you know, like guys that ask me, how come you know so much about refrigeration? Um and it's really I'm not a genius or anything like that. It's just like if you do something, you solve problems every day. Like a guy on a boat, he might have a problem with the refrigeration system once a season or maybe every couple of years, and he's got to figure it out. I'm doing five or six of them a day. So I'm getting educated continuously on what's wrong, what could go wrong, how to fix it, those kinds of things. So you learn you learn pretty quick. Yeah. So that's how I got into the refrigeration. And then, of course, I ended up with you know um working on factory trawlers and stuff. Um doors open and opportunities, the Lord presents you with opportunities, and I took opportunities.

SPEAKER_06 1:26:06

So you so you're working in Dutch, you're doing all this refrigeration work, doing all this boat maintenance.

Falling For Haines And Moving Southeast

SPEAKER_06 1:26:12

How do you come to Haynes? How does Haynes enter into the picture on that? Uh Wayne Short. Wayne Short?

SPEAKER_00 1:26:19

Who's Wayne Short? The Chichacos. The Chichacos. You ever seen that book? No. Oh my gosh, Doug.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:26

It's it's it's Alaska through and through. You need to I need to read that. Wayne Short, yeah. Okay. The Chichacos. So when I was uh when I was in grade school in Fairbanks, you know, uh I think it was fifth or sixth grade, somewhere in there, uh the we'd have an hour reading session in the instructor. We'd we we'd pick a book, you know. Early, you know, earlier classes we might have had, you know, in Inspector Brown or Encyclopedia Brown or something like that. I don't know if you remember any of those or um and this book was uh uh The Chochacos. Or maybe maybe I just picked it up in the library and started reading it. But it is the quintessential Southeast Alaska experience uh about this family that came to Alaska, I think there was three boys, came to Alaska, ended up in in Murder Cove, South Admiralty Island on a homestead there, and um they were seal hunting and bear hunting and deer hunting and halibut fishing and everything about it. So when I read this book, I thought, wow, that's where I want to be. So years later, the Chichacos drew me to Southeast Alaska. So it was uh Bartha and I, after we had uh our kids decided that we wanted to raise them someplace other than Dutch Harbor. Dutch Harbor, um, I mean, there's lots of kids, and there's a great school, lots of uh resources and stuff, but We wanted our kids to have a little more opportunity, so we decided to go somewhere else.

SPEAKER_06 1:28:05

Did you did you specifically target Haynes or did you come down and look at other places in Southeast? Yeah, lots of lots of places.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:12

So, you know, we looked at Kodiak, obviously. Well, I don't know, it was obvious to us. Kodiak, Homer. Um, and then we went we spent uh a summer going through Southeast, you know, from one end to the other with our backpacks, and this is before the kids, um, because we already were talking about coming uh to Southeast. And, you know, we stopped at all these places on the way and we came to Haynes. It was one of those gorgeous summer days. I don't remember what month it was, maybe June. It was just absolutely gorgeous. We stayed here by the park at Housing Land. Yep. We rented some bikes and we rode our bicycles all over out Letnikov and I mean Lutac and then out Letnikov to the Cannes and we thought, wow, what a gorgeous place. Wouldn't it be cool if we could live here someday? And you know, that's pretty much where we live. You know, it's pretty so those doors opened up too. But um then we went to Skagway and and I don't want to rank on Skagway, but we went to Skagway and there was like three or four cruise ships in at the time. And uh we started to go through all the crowds with our backpacks, and you know, I don't think the ferries left yet. We ran back to the ferry, we spent the rest of the time in Haynes. So Haynes pretty much, yeah. We fell in love with it pretty quick.

SPEAKER_06 1:29:28

And so you bought your property in '94? '98?

SPEAKER_03 1:29:34

When did we buy it? It's on that sheet there somewhere. I know we came here in '88. Martha and I first came here in 1988.

SPEAKER_06 1:29:43

Well, land in 98. Moved Haynes in 2002.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:47

Yeah. So we bought the land and that was part of that Letnikov um university subdivision. Yeah. So we bought that. Actually, we didn't um we bought it sight unseen. We had a friend here whose husband, she grew up here, but her husband was a pilot for Penn Air. And um we asked her to her brother or somebody to go out and look at, and they look at it, took some pictures and gave us gave us a good word, so we we bet on it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:30:18

That was after we were sailing. So I don't know how. So let's let's backtrack. You guys buy a sailboat. This is before Nick and Sasha. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:27

And you guys, much to Nick and Sasha's chagrin. Oh, they were probably specialists.

SPEAKER_06 1:30:32

You can't take us again?

SPEAKER_03 1:30:33

Yeah. Let's go. That's that that was that was a theme for many years. I could I could relate to that for them, maybe. They were like, how come how come you guys did all this before we were playing?

SPEAKER_05 1:30:43

I think we did all the cool stuff before we were. So we did you explain to them there might be a cause and effect there. Yeah. There's a reason.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:50

I think they Sasha finally came to realize that, you know, we Martha and I have had a lot of adventures, but the most important adventure we've had was having Sasha and Nick. Yeah. We stopped all of our other adventures to have Sasha and Nick. To concentrate on them. Yeah, yeah. And it was the best adventure we've had. So we're we're still having it that keeps going.

Buying A Sailboat And Learning Fast

SPEAKER_03 1:31:10

So um anyway, w working with Pat Hatch, we were making really good money at Aleutian Marine Services, and uh so we paid off both of our school college loans, we and we save enough money to buy a sailboat. And we looked for a while. How big a sailboat? Uh 10 meters, so it's like 30, almost 33 feet. Yeah. It was a steelboat. We'd looked at several, made offers on a few. Um we uh saw this in Seward. It was a Frenchman who owned it. It was um it was uh uh Chatam design, which is like a Bruce Roberts. If you're into sailboats, Bruce Roberts has built countless steelboat sailboat designs, and people buy them and then you know follow the prince and build their own sailboats kind of a deal. And Chatam in France was a similar kind of guy. And uh so this this was and I think that uh um I'm trying to remember his first name. His last name is Breton. Anyway, he um Gill. Gilles Breton. I I don't know whether I think he did build this sailboat um himself. Anyway, he was had it for sale in um Seward, and we went and looked at it in Seward and um bought it. And then so uh yeah, he was he was living on it at the time, and he was we bought it and uh I think we bought it in late fall, maybe something like that. And then um he was supposed to move off of it so that we could take possession of it in in the spring. And we also were scheduled we were running a tender uh and for Southeast, salmon tender for Southeast. Martha and I were so uh we were gonna sail the boat somewhere to Southeast and then tender the other, you know, the the 150-foot tender, and then we were going to take off from there. Well, we get there and Jill's still living on his boat. You know, so you know, it totally screwed up our schedule. So we, you know, we were pretty upset. His girlfriend that owned the boat yard there understood why we were upset, you know, and so she you know, try to moderate and mitigate the situation. He promised he would be off. He promised he would be off by August or whatever. Anyway, so end of salmon sea tendering season. So we when we came back to Seward, he was he did finally get off. He wasn't completely moved off. We still had to move him off. And um, but then the we f the engine wouldn't start, wouldn't run. He couldn't get it to run, we couldn't get it to run. So I said, well, we need to get a new engine, and this wasn't the deal. This engine was supposed to run. So he gave us some money, we negotiated a deal, we got some money for it, and but then not put the boat uh, you know, another season. Yeah. Uh so we got the engine in, but we weren't gonna leave in the wintertime. We ended up taking it to Soldovia and kept it in Soldovia for the for the winter, and then the next spring um we outfitted it in Homer life rafts and radars. And so, you know, I had I had um uh I think in 1983 or somewhere in there, I had been sane um with a guy, Tony Jones, out of Kodiak, and we were saneing in Prince William Sound, and I I had never fished before, um but I was really interested, and and we would I was doing the lead lines, we would um fish fish all day until uh the evening closure, and then somebody would run the boat, and that and I volunteered to run the boat because I wanted I wanted to learn. So I learned how to run the boat, read the radar, do the charts, do all that stuff. So I had learned all of that while I was seining, um, and a lot of that carried over, you know, into the sailing in terms of navigation, although you know, we had to learn celestial navigation, a bunch of stuff like that too. And this is the same time when GPS was just starting to displace Loran. The first GPS receivers like had three receiving channels. They could re talk to three satellites at a time, and and we had a Phillips, it could talk to six. We were like top of the line, you know. High end. But it was it was totally um GPS was totally new. You know, there was there were problems with the crab fishermen didn't like it in the beginning because Loran used time signals from fixed land stations, and your box was basically interpreting the time interval from the known time when the radio transmission occurred, and the time your receiver received it would tell you the distance, the distance, and so you would triangulate that way. It was very precise. Latin long, not necessarily correct, but precision of repeatability was phenomenal to within you know a yard. So these guys could find their crab pot strings without any problem. When they went to GPS, they'd be looking for these pots. They're they're here somewhere, you know, within 300 yards when you're in the Bering Sea and 300 yards and you're in 10 foot seas, it makes it pretty hard to find a pot. Anyway, so that's kind of where we were at with the GPS. We ended up putting all this stuff that I was familiar with that normally wouldn't go on a sailboat, but I I wanted the radar and I wanted the navigation stuff because I was familiar with it. So we get all that done uh in Homer, and then our our goal was to start sailing. And so we took a Hyat Hyanda, is that what you call it? No, that's not right. Took a break from uh hiatus. Hiatus, there we go. We took a hiatus from uh Aleutian Marine Services, they you know gave us our blessing that we were gonna leave and send us pictures, you know, and keep in touch, which worked out well because um we stopped multiple times and had to come back and go to work. If we would have had something, some just mediocre income, like if we would have had a rental and we were getting $200 a month, we could have kept going forever. Because when you're sailing, particularly in the tropics, your expenses are very low, but things do break. And you know, if you're saving your money, um you can bank up and then uh you're able to make those repairs and stuff. Anyway, uh we didn't have all that, so we would sail for a period of time and then we'd take a break and make some more money. So the first time you know we sailed to Southeast and then we sailed all around Southeast. We had taken sailing lessons in Seward, um, and sailing lessons were great. We did really good, but crossing the Gulf of Alaska with sailing lessons, oh yeah, that was a whole different deal. We ended up crossing the Gulf between two um gales, and uh so we we didn't have any strong winds, but we had these seas we had to contend with, you know. And uh we were not really proficient at sailing, and uh there was a lot of anxiety. And um it's funny because I as we were coming across, uh we got to what we what I know now were the fair weather grounds. And you know, we're crossing the ocean, we're looking for tankers or you know, big ships or stuff like that. And I I'm on the night watch and I start seeing these lights up ahead. Uh and I was looking at my chart, looking to it can't be land, you know. 50 miles from shore, and there's this like I don't know, 30 lights out there. There's all these boats out there. And it's the trolling fleet. I didn't know anything about trolling at the time. And there was a trolling fleet, and I went right through them, you know. Um, and then we ended up in South uh in into Alfin Cove and um we toured around through Southeast and uh spent the winter in Petersburg. I worked at the shipyard in Petersburg um that winter, and then we sailed. I guess you want to get to the good stuff.

SPEAKER_06 1:39:51

Where wherever however it takes you there.

Four Years Sailing The Pacific

SPEAKER_06 1:39:54

I mean, going from Petersburg to the South Pacific, did you sail the whole way? Did you put it on a barge for part of the way? Yeah, we sailed the whole way. Sailed the whole way.

SPEAKER_03 1:40:02

Yeah, so we basically we sailed from Homer to Auckland, New Zealand, a little bit farther. Uh uh. Yeah, but you take it in little bites, yeah. It's like climbing a mountain. So and and people would ask us as we were going, are you gonna sail around the world? Maybe. I don't know. You know, we we were kind of by when we crossed the Gulf, we weren't sure we were gonna sail anymore after that. The stress and anxiety was too much. But as we as we sailed around and motored around through Southeast, became much more familiar with the whole program, we got more confident. And then when we went to we went to Seattle Puget Sound, we spent some money. Now, this boat was this boat was way more equipped uh capable than we were. The owner had sailed, I think, four or five times around the Atlantic and one and a half times across the Pacific. I mean, the guy was a he was a solo sailor and he was a sailor. There was no question about it. You know, there's no reason the boat could go anywhere, and it did. I mean, he sailed from uh I'm trying to remember the name of the little community or little island um down by Papua New Guinea. Uh it's not Papua New Guinea, but there's another island group there. And he sailed from there direct to Seward. So the guy's the guy was a sailor.

SPEAKER_06 1:41:30

So I, you know, so the boat's capable, just whether the the captain and crew need to get to the same level as the boat.

SPEAKER_03 1:41:37

Right. So, but when we were in Seattle, we we had uh we talked to this uh some sail, you know, some crews sale, there's some really good sale companies, obviously, in Seattle. And um we talked about some of the problems that we were having, and they made suggestions on how to re-rig the and the the boom had some rot in it, and so we were concerned about it uh failing at some point. Uh aluminum was compromised in a couple places. Anyway, and so when we did that, we redid the main sail and the boom so that we had jiffy, what they call jiffy reefing, and it basically we had three reef points, and and a reef is when you reduce sail. So um you have you have full-size sail, and uh you would you would lower the sail down and collapse the bottom of the sail and then stretch it tight to its shape again, that'd be one reef, and then you would have another one, that'd be your second reef, and the third one. So uh when you set up for jiffy reefing, you basically have all of your lines, you have individual lines for each reef. You don't have to re-run, re-rove a line through the end of the of the clue to pull back on the sail because you already have a line through there. It's just slack while you're sailing, and then when you start to reef, you use those lines. So we we after we got that down, we could reef very quickly, and that was part of our problem. What what you don't realize is that uh on a sail, um when the wind, let's say you have you have uh six square feet of sail, which is you know isn't very big, six square feet of sail and you've got the wind blowing on it at 15 miles an hour. If you increase that, if the wind increases, what did I say, 15 miles an hour? If the wind increases to uh 30 miles an hour, it doesn't double the force of the sail, it squares the force. So yeah, uh the sailing has tremendous amount of energy. And um wind changes and square footage uh of sail area has a tremendous effect on the forces uh in but the boat encounters. And so you really to sail well, you really need to be able to reef. That's the key, to be able to change sails and reef and not just reducing sail, but it uh you know displaying sail as well if you want to keep up speeds. When we got done, we basically, if we were slowed down to five and a half knots, we set more sail. If we got to six and a half knots, which uh was basically our hull speed, we would reduce sail because we could go faster, but you end up you end up the boat is trying to make a hole in the water because it's going faster than the water can fill in behind it. And so it you know it's kind of like a a power boat before it comes up on the step. You got this big hole, and when you're pushing a sailboat past its waterline hull speed, that's what starts to happen and it becomes unstable. So you reduce sail to try and keep it with your waterline speed. Anyway.

SPEAKER_06 1:44:54

So what was your what was your longest point from point A to point B? How long did it? I mean, were you guys out of sea? 30 days. Yeah. Not seeing land, just yeah, 30 days.

SPEAKER_03 1:45:04

We left from Cabos. Well, actually, we didn't we we left from La Paz. Okay. La Paz on the Baja Peninsula, and uh we sailed to uh Hiva Oa in the Marquesas.

SPEAKER_06 1:45:18

So thirty Yeah 30 was was there a little bit of apprehension before that?

SPEAKER_03 1:45:23

Because that's well there you know, there kind of was. So you you know, and we we guys are both you guys are both doing this for the first time.

SPEAKER_06 1:45:31

I think it's one thing if if you have somebody in the group that's oh I've done this before, it's kind of that it takes it, but when you have two people that you spent a lot of time on the boat, but this is our first time going this kind of distance.

SPEAKER_03 1:45:44

Yeah, but you you know, we like we sailed from the Straits of Wanda Fuca out of Puget Sound. We sailed to uh Newport, Oregon. Okay. So in one of the things if you're sailing, and particularly, you know, the Oregon coast is oh, it's just gorgeous if you're on the beach. It's horrendous if you're out at sea on a sailboat because it is just a it's just a trap for boats. So there's so many v vessels have gone up on the beach there. There's not a lot of safe harbors in the Oregon coast and southern Washington coast. Um in fact, what's mind-boggling is uh I think there was I I'm not sure I got the numbers right, but I think there's like 435 charts for Southeast Alaska. Um and that's way more than the rest of the United States. Yeah. There's so much more coastline uh in Southeast Alaska. And and then Oregon and Northern California are are those places where there's really not a lot of harbors to to you go you go on long stretches. So what you learn is that you're actually safer at sea. So when we sailed, you know, we sailed from Straits of Guana Fuca to Newport, Oregon, and we were about 150, 100 between 100 and 150 miles offshore, and then again between there and San Francisco. And then from San Francisco, we the next landfall was Dana Point. But we went out uh into the Channel Islands in there as well. So you I mean we already were offshore. I mean, it's people are afraid, people are afraid of you know 20 feet of water, you can drown in four feet of water, you know. So once once you're off 150 miles from shore, uh it doesn't matter whether you're out there, uh you're not going anywhere ahead of the weather forecast, you know. So you're you're there. So by the time, I mean, you were right, there still was this apprehension, but we felt qualified by that time. One of the things that trick triggered our decision to depart, we were having a wonderful time in the Sea of Cortez. It was just absolutely wonderful. A lot of expats and uh cheap living, and we were in a beautiful sun, we were really having a good time, but we had a developed a friendship with a Swiss sailor, and uh he was saying, Oh yeah, I'm gonna go across someday, you know. I said, and so we were we would talk back and forth every other day, you know, we'd visit, and and and so we asked him, I said, Well, how long have you been in the Sea of Cortez? Oh I think seven years now. So seven years.

SPEAKER_01 1:48:27

We're out of here, Marlin. We gotta leave, we gotta go now for a leave.

SPEAKER_03 1:48:32

Yeah, that's pretty much what it we realized, you know, it's too easy to get just lulled into staying there. It's I mean, the Sea of Cortez is a wonderful place. So we set we set sail and um uh we we got involved in a search and rescue for uh a lost uh man overboard uh on the uh Ravia Hiero Islands, um which are um southwest of the tip of Baja uh Cabo San Lucas, and uh that delayed us for a little bit trying to help with that search. And that was it was pretty sobering and and depressing because you're we were in about 25 mile per hour winds, so we had like five foot C, six foot C somewhere in there. Um and you're looking for somebody who fell overboard and didn't have a life jacket. So you know you're you're kind of looking for somebody's shoulders and head sticking out of the water. It's not not good at all. That's tough. Yeah, not good odds. So that was sobering. Um but we had talked about a lot of these things. You know, if you're gonna go do something like this, you really need to you need to be sober about it. There wasn't anything Martha could sail the boat by herself, and all of our decisions about our equipment were based upon whether or not Martha physically. Could do it too. The length of our little inflatable launch, the size of our outboard, all those things, you know, we could have been served better by a little bit bigger inflatable boat, a little bit bigger outboard, which we swamped the boat several times, you know, going to the beach because it just wasn't big enough for surf. But we made those decisions because Martha could operate that by herself. And it's just you just have to be sober about it because you do people get lost at sea. And we we talked about that. We didn't obviously didn't want that to happen, but we knew that was a real possibility. Uh and we lost some friends. Um as uh you know, we we knew about people that had been lost, we knew about somebody who had been lost and then actually got picked up, which was amazing, and then we just before we got to New Zealand, there was somebody we had only met him once, but he had he ended up on the didn't make it, he ended up on the on the beach. So it is a it's a reality, you know. Uh ocean sailing is a romantic idea, um, and it is some people like ocean sailing for the solitude and being on the ocean. They they love the journey. Some people like the destinations, you know. Everybody's a little bit different.

SPEAKER_06 1:51:17

What did what did you guys take out of it? Was it more the journey or was it the destination or mix of both? Or just I think just an adventure between the two of you.

SPEAKER_03 1:51:25

It was a it an adventure, you know, and we had said that you know, if we hey, if we run into paradise on the way, we we may not come back. You know, we may just stay. So we were kind of open to anything. Um I think for us in the end, uh we enjoyed the destinations far more than we uh enjoyed the traveling can be pretty mundane. You know what, the some interesting things. Uh one thing that I have told people from the experience is that it is shocking where you can go in the world with a bathtub, a stick, and a rag. And it's really, I mean, that's that's an exaggeration, but not a whole lot of an exaggeration. It's truly amazing. Amazing where you can go. You know, there was guys after World War II that were stranded, Australians that were stranded in South America, and they built a boat and sails and sticks, and they sailed home. You know, they they were able to go home. Nobody was coming to get them, so they they did it, you know. It is it is kind of liberating mentally to realize you I mean, it's just amazing how where you can go if you know how to sail and you could like build a boat, you can go almost anywhere on the planet. It's it it is really uh a liberating realization. You know, it to you can talk about it, but to actually realize it, to to know it, uh is a different kind of feeling.

SPEAKER_06 1:52:57

Go back five, five hundred a thousand years and more, and the boats that they were taking all over the place, and just the the discoveries that they were making, and yeah, it just is water's a great method of transportation, and it it's also a scary one. If if if if you know what you're doing and you're careful about it, yeah, you can you can see everything, but one thing goes wrong or one thing breaks unexpectedly and can be gra greatly different uh uh outcomes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:53:32

Well, there's a saying, um I can't I can't do it justice, but something about there are no agnostics at C or something like that. Um there are some amazing things that you know that you see that you uh uh so I'll just uh you know, one, there were times when we were terrified, we weren't sure we were gonna make it through the night. A couple of a couple of times for sure. Um but then there are other things that you see that are just almost unspeakable in terms of the effect it has on you. And and the one I'll I'll share with you is um you know you've probably seen these satellite images of uh some low and and these spiral clouds, you know. You know, you see these little strings of clouds in a spiral like a spider web, you know, around this low. And you're you're looking at this satellite picture. Well, when you're sailing across the ocean, those are lines of clouds, and they're like lines of cumulus clouds. And so I I had we Martha and I would alternate. We always had somebody on watch. So we had what we called the the the night watch or the what do we call it? We call it the evening watch and the night watch. So the evening watch uh would be from six to midnight. Let's see, is that right? Uh no, from from noon to six, and then somebody would take it from six to midnight, and then somebody would take it from midnight to six in the morning. And so I had I had the uh midnight to six in the morning uh deal, and it was a full moon. It was perfect sailing conditions. Uh so it was blowing about 15 miles an hour, between 15 and 20 miles an hour. Nice sea, not big heavy seas, and it was a full moon, just a brilliant, bright full moon. And so we had these lines of cumulus clouds, towering cumulus clouds that were going by, and we were sailing through these lines, right? And so the first couple of times going through here, we I hadn't quite figured it out. So I'd have to I'd have to douse sail because it we'd get into the updrafts underneath these cumulus clouds, and it would be too much wind, we'd have to douse sail. And then you get out the other side, and you didn't, you were, you have to put more sail up. But I eventually learned how to steer the boat so that I would catch the the wind as it was not too intense, but heading up into the clouds. And so we were shooting between these clouds, timing it and shooting it between these clouds. So you had this, you had this, you had the stars and these bright clouds with the moon shining, and we were doing this, you know, so much fun, uh, just scooting along. And then we had phosphorescent. Have you ever seen phosphorescent? Yes. So I had no idea that it wasn't you have it in the tropics. I'd seen it in Kodiak fishing. Okay, so that was totally cool. So I'm, you know, you got this fantastic sky that's got these white, puffy, moonlit clouds with stars behind it, beautiful moonlight on the waves, and you're scooting along, and you look behind you, and you have this jet stream coming off the back of your boat, like off your rudder, right? Just fantastic. But then I get into a school of jellyfish. Okay. A cloud of jellyfish. So I it's I mean, it's it was so wild.

SPEAKER_06 1:57:27

Um is that something that you'd like to wake Martha up and say, you've got to come up and look at this? No, I I didn't.

SPEAKER_03 1:57:34

I should have. But you look down and you've got the jellyfish, you know, and it's phosphorescent, right? Oh my god. So the jellyfish are glowing in the ocean. You got a trail of like a rocket behind you. You got these jellyfish phosphorescent glowing in the ocean. You got these moonlit clouds and the stars. It was oh, it was so magical. It was it's not anything you can think about ahead of time. So, you know, there was there's moments like that that you just cannot. It's just a gift from God, just amazing. Very, very um yeah. You know, that that that that there alone by itself, that memory, you know, kind of makes it worth it. But we had we had a lot of fun. We went to Marquesas and Tumoto's, uh, Cicety Islands, the Cook Islands, Tonga. I mean, you know, that that's we could go on for hours and hours.

SPEAKER_06 1:58:36

I don't know how to how long did you guys spend sailing? How many years? We went four years, four years it was broken up, it was broken up coming back in. And so at the end, was it just like okay, we're time to have kids now, time to go home? Was that kind of a cutoff on that?

Generational Trauma And Becoming A Dad

SPEAKER_03 1:58:50

Yeah, so I I had I had been afraid to have kids uh because of my childhood was physically uh abusive childhood. And it had a real uh impact on me. I was afraid of being my dad. And it had an effect on my siblings. You know, we've we all we all came out of it differently. You know, there's that song, I think it's a police song, Don't Stand Too Close to Me. You know that song? Yep. Well that song has real meaning to me because you know, one of us would be in trouble. You did not want to be standing too close to them. To the person that's in trouble, right? Because then you then you were gonna get beat too. So it's just you know, it just a not a not a good and you know, part of part of why I wanted to kind of tell my dad's story is that he he he started the war when he was 15. You know, he went to hell. He went through hell. Um and and that's you know, some of the reason that he got messed up. It's not really an excuse, but it is a reason. And I've forgiven him for it. But it did have a real harsh effect on us siblings, you know. We're not nearly as we we're not really close. We talk to each other maybe once a year or something like that. We don't have Martha's family, you know, they're always talking to each other, text. That's not my family. My brother in Dutch Harbor and I are the closest because we we work with each other, you know. But we our family suffered. The next generation suffered for that. And I was afraid as an adult that I that I really shouldn't have kids. So it took about 10 years before I felt like I had enough courage um to venture into having a family. And um blankets. And that's why we quit sailing, because we just had decided that we were it was Martha was, I think, uh she was at the age where the uh healthy childbearing years were starting to be in decline, and we decided, yeah, that's right. We were between we were between Tonga and in New Zealand, and we said, okay, you know, it's time to time to go have our kids.

SPEAKER_06 2:01:21

So I guess the the the struggle you're talking about there is it took a long time for people to recognize the damage war was doing to because they come back and a lot of them, a lot of them were coming back injured, and you can see that physical injury, yeah, the mental trauma that that's from things you've seen, the way that you know being a POW camp, that can't be a pleasant experience, being on the run at 15, you know, trying to trying to make sure you're you're not caught and can't can't even imagine that. But it it took so long for our health professionals to catch on that that was happening. But I think it was also a commendable for you that you saw that and you wanted to make sure you were trying to make sure that you weren't a lot of people just carry that on. Yeah, they're not they're not working on that, they're not recognizing it. And like you and I had talked before about when Cesare and I talked about generational trauma getting carried on, and it's it's hard to break that pattern. Yeah, it is. But I think the first step is recognizing it.

SPEAKER_03 2:02:33

But even recognizing, you know, I I think uh uh before with this interview, I was thinking back about my dad, and you know, you know, we had broken bones, I mean uh serious physical abuse. Um I uh I think you know, I uh looking back, I had a short temper. You said you talked about you having a short temper. I I I had a short temper and I and I would yell and scream and lose it, you know. And I think that sometimes we don't realize, like you were talking about, the effect you have on the people around you when that happens. But I remember, you know, like you like I said, you know, don't stand too close to me. When my dad was losing it, you you you wanted to leave, but if you left, you drew attention. Yeah. You you you wanted to disappear is what you wanted to do. Um so when you when you have a temper, it does affect the people around you. And I know that I, you know, I have I had a temper, I still have a temper, but nothing like earlier. And I regret that for my kids, because I'm sure that they got to experience at least some of the anxiety that I did, you know. So hopefully they'll do better than I did. That's what we always hope for.

SPEAKER_06 2:03:59

We always hope the next generation does a little bit better. Yeah, and hopefully we can show them enough of the things that that we learned that held us back, yeah. That but all you all you can do is share your story, share your memory, share your lessons, and then part of it's up to them to figure out how they're gonna adjust with that or or take that forward. And it's all different. It's uh everyone's different. That's something like we talked today too, because I I can't remember the book that I read recently. I I went home and I looked and I couldn't remember which one it was. But they're talking about because you you'd mentioned this earlier today when we had talked about you and your siblings not really having that much in common with how you were raised. And so and the the author of this is like no two siblings have the same childhood. They're like, well, you're raised by the same parents, but their parents are at different stages in life when each kid is is born and they're gonna react differently to them based on the stresses they have at that time, the good things that are going on that time. So no two childhoods are ever the same, even if you got the same house, the same parents, the same it's it's all different for all of us.

SPEAKER_03 2:05:05

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The real the relationships are different. Yeah. And we bring to that our own personality too, so our reaction to things. Before I came to the interview, I I reviewed an email that my sister had uh sent me or sent Nick. Nick forwarded it back to me so I could review it. And it was interesting to me that she had a lot of the details about my dad's experience, you know, his history, um, but not a lot about my mom's history. Now she she heard those things too, probably, uh-huh, but I have way more details about my mom's history, stories about, you know, her in the convent, uh, you know, her climbing, different things in her day-to-day life. And it was because um I think certainly my sister had a closer relationship with my dad, or a safer relationship with my dad than I did. Uh, and I I had a safer relationship with my mom. And so it's interesting that um she retained a lot of the history that I've lost. I had to look it up, like where was my dad born, you know, things like that. Uh so just same, you know, we're only a year apart, same house, you know, different experiences. So it is it is interesting. We are all unique. I like to tell people about kids, you know. They're all different and they don't come with a manual. Every one of them is different and they don't come with a manual. No, and I think you know, that's true for all of us. We're all different, and we react and respond to things differently, and it affects our lives and those around us differently.

SPEAKER_06 2:06:56

So yeah. Well, I I think you and Martha did a great job with Sasha and Nick. My interactions with them, they're both wonderful children, and now we like biased.

SPEAKER_03 2:07:10

You know, we really we love our kids, you know. We homeschooled our kids, so we spent we spent a lot of time with them. And uh, you know, and and then we went commercial, we had a commercial fishing boat for a while.

SPEAKER_06 2:07:22

And yeah, so that was gonna be the next thing. You bought you're you're in the marine industry, you go sailing for four years, you come back, you come back to Dutch, right? After

Business Burnout And A New Role

SPEAKER_06 2:07:32

the sailing.

SPEAKER_03 2:07:32

So started a business on my own in Dutch at that point. Okay. Because Pat Hatch had had um before we went sailing, he was starting to he actually uh he was an electrical administrator. So like we did the cars in Ketchikan and we did the cars in Juneau. And we did the cars or Eagle in, I think we might have done the one in Homer and we did the one in Dutch Harbor, the electrical of it. So he he was his business was taken off more and more towards big shore-based contracting. And when I left, Jerry was the only guy remaining that was doing, we we would try to bring guys in, um, but Shoreside Electrical does not translate as easily as people would think to marine electrical because marine electrical is so broad. I mean, you you have elect I mean yeah, you have DC, AC, digital, you have high voltage DC, low voltage DC, you know, it's just everything, and it can all come into a one box. Uh so it and so it's a little bit different. Uh whereas shore-based electrical, unless you get into a production factory like automotive production or something like that, is far more uh linear contained. Um anyway, so he was having a hard time getting uh maritime uh technicians, and he ended up shutting that down. When I came back, I asked him if he wanted to start up again because I'm here I am. He said, No, I I want you to start a business and I'll I'll support you and help you. And and so I did. I started I started uh coastal enterprises there and pretty much took up right where I'd left off. So so that's what we did uh until until we decided to to leave Dutch. But it it got to be too much too. Uh I would I would leave, I'd get up like at six in the morning, and I would come home around lunchtime. Um maybe I would eat, or maybe I'd eat you know somewhere else. But most I was coming home to touch base with Martha, give her a list of things that we needed to order, parts, and then I'd be back like at eight or nine o'clock at night, and then we would do invoices and stuff. So that was seven days a week. That's what it was. It was just way too much, way too much. So after a number of years doing that, I mean, we we would go on a family hike and we'd have people cutting across the grass looking for me, you know, to come and and when you when you personally know people, you know, it it's not just a customer that rang you up, hey, I'm kind of interested in knowing if you could help me. No, I mean when you know the guy, you know his wife, maybe and his kids, you know, and his his fishing season is gonna crash unless you can fix this for him, it's really hard to say no, you know. And it just got to be too much. Um so I ended up I ended up shutting down the business and I ended up managing a tugboat company instead, a tugboat company in Delta Western. So uh that's what I did the last bit while I was in Dutch Harbor. And then we came here.

SPEAKER_06 2:11:03

I remember knowing you when you came to Haynes because you'd come into the sports shop and everything. And uh then when we were looking at getting putting in food center clothes, right? Clint talked us into putting in the meat market and stuff, and I've got everything laid out, trying, I got Rocky Eckman's doing the construction in the back and everything, good stuff. And I can't, I'm trying, I'm calling people in June. I was like, hey, I need somebody to come up, set up this refrigeration stuff. No callbacks, yeah, no, no, no. I'm like, frick, I don't know who we're gonna do this with. And I was talking to Stoney Hurts, he's like, Why don't you get Mike? I'm like Stoney had come and worked for us at uh trackers.

SPEAKER_05 2:11:45

He's like, I was like, Mike who? He's like, Mike Kobeak. I said, He's a refrigeration guy. He goes, Yeah, he's a really good refrigeration guy.

SPEAKER_06 2:11:52

I was like, I did not know that. And so I called you, and you're like, you're like, Yeah, I'll help you out with that. And I remember because you were You had to go back to Dutch, and for I think it was pretty much three days straight, you were over there minimum 20 hours a day. Yeah, I can't remember what we were doing. Trying to connect everything before you left because it was going to be a month or two months before you came back, and you're like, I'm going to make sure you're running before I leave. And so you're up in the ceiling. I was trying to be here as much as possible. I knew nothing about how to help you, other than maybe hold a pipe up and say your attic, your famous attic. But just that willingness to like, hey, I'm I'm gonna make sure this is done before you guys leave, or before I leave, that stuck with me for for years.

SPEAKER_03 2:12:52

Well, and that's kind of how it was in Dutch Harvey. People, you know, people really depended on each other. And and if you if you crapped on somebody, that was they wouldn't have anything to do with you after that. And that doesn't mean you know you sometimes you have problems, you just can't do it, or you that's different. But when you abuse someone, that was the end of the relationship. And in in the fishing industry, everybody talks.

SPEAKER_00 2:13:17

Oh, without a doubt. Everybody talks.

SPEAKER_03 2:13:19

You know, so you it is a community. When we were sailing, I was we were in New Zealand and we went to look at a at a tall ship, thinking maybe we'd be able to go out on a sail on a tall ship, you know. And uh we went up there and they weren't taking anybody uh but Ian Howden was there, who had been sailing, uh had been sailing on another boat that were we were you know different boats but f fishing together in Prince William Sound in 83. And here he is, you know, all the way across the planet. So you it's it's a it's just interesting how how closely we're all connected. So yeah.

Family Trolling And Raising Capable Kids

SPEAKER_06 2:14:02

So you buy the island girl. Oh, buy the island girl in 2006, you're gonna go trolling. Yeah. And I think if I remember correctly, part of the reason you wanted to do that is you'd loved fishing before, and you thought this would be a great way to pass on a skill set. You could work with the kids, you could be in the summer, do a family adventure.

SPEAKER_03 2:14:23

Well, one of the things that we noted while we were sailing, we didn't have kids, but we we, you know, when you are ocean sailing, you run into people that are going the same way. They might leave a couple of days ahead of you or a couple of days behind you, and you just keep tabs on each other. You call each other on the radio, see how you're doing, get position fixes and stuff. In case somebody has a problem, you know, you might be the closest boat, you know, to go back and help or do whatever. They may be the closest boat to you. And in the course of getting to know all these different sailors, we've we ran into families that were sailing. And we were just amazed. Here, here you'd have like you'd have like a 14-year-old boy or a 14-year-old girl, and they were they were doing the whole night watch. They were setting sails, navigating, doing the whole thing, running the whole boat. Everybody else is asleep, trusting them, because and they know how to do it. They can do it. You could give them a boat, they could sail from Australia to New Zealand. No problem. They know how to do it. And yet you would see them with younger siblings or other young kids, and then they would be kids, and they were playing and having they were kids again, you know, they could be very responsible, but they were still able to be kids. And that was just kind of magical for us. So we really thought, and of course, you know, Sasha and Nick are saying, yeah, well, how come we didn't get to do it, you know? We haven't got the commercial fishing boat working rather than saying the data zero.

SPEAKER_08 2:15:56

But anyway, we saw that.

SPEAKER_03 2:16:00

We saw that, and we, you know, we decided that, yeah, we wanted to have have a boat and have our kids with us on the boat. And uh there's a lot of things you, you know, fishing that you besides the practical navigation and maintenance and responsibilities and stuff, um, there's a lot of uh things that you learn about yourself in terms of you know discipline and and knowing finishing a job that you have to you you do, nobody's gonna let you off the hook, you know. You gotta finish your your shift, you've got to finish your job, you gotta do this. And when everybody's working, everybody's there, you can't go far off. So there's there are really good um life lessons, I think, that came out of that. And but we we didn't we didn't uh you know, I I bought a 54-foot boat because I wanted to make sure they stuck with me for a while, you know, instead of a 32-foot boat or something like that. I got one I figured was big enough that they would be comfortable on, you know. Um and so I did make a deal with them though, and that deal was that we would take one day off a week, which is controller.

SPEAKER_00 2:17:14

What?

SPEAKER_03 2:17:17

Yeah, no, we take one day off a week, and every every week at least we would take one day off, and we would just go to the beach and we would do whatever the family wanted to do. We go hiking, uh, we you know, go berry picking, we go deer hunting, we do whatever, you know. And we also tried to fish, we tried to see as much of Southeast as we possibly could, and there's a lot to see. Um but we we gave it a good shot. Um so you know, we I think we went to all the hot springs. Um, you know, we've been to all of the cool little coves and stuff and caves that we that we'd heard about, you know. Um so it was a it was a it was a it was a fishing venture, but not, I mean, we we paid our bills and stuff, we didn't get rich fishing, we weren't hardcore fishermen. Uh, but I think we had a really good adventure. Family adventure. Yeah, I think it was great. And there were times when I thought, oh my kids, I'm sure they hate me for taking them fishing, but later on, you know, Sasha in college, she would write an essay about so when you're trolling, um uh you've got wires that are going down from a rig on the boat down into the water, and and the boat's moving through the water and on a on a on a nice uh what we call it uh a typical southeast day. It's kind of foggy and maybe drizzly, rainy, but it's not blowing really hard. You know, the boat would be sailing along, and uh those lines would be singing because they're being drugged through the water and they're they're under tension and they make sounds. And Sasha wrote one of the most beautiful essays uh about just that whole thing, the water dripping, and it was just just beautiful. She captured that moment. And there it's moments like that, they're kind of magical. I don't know. For me, the the they're very spiritual uh times when you're doing something in it and it there's just so much beauty in everything that seems mundane, but there's there's you like the line singing and the the water dripping. I don't know. She just did a fantastic job of capturing that, and that made me realize that she saw some of the things that I saw. And Nick too, you know, they they really they hated eating salmon because we ate lots of fish. But now, you know, are you guys are you bringing some fish down? You know, you know, I think you can have too much of something for a while, but yeah, yeah, no, they they really enjoyed it. So I really enjoyed being with them. It was great. And when when they decided that they were done, I was done because fishing with a hired crew is completely different than fishing with your family in good ways and bad ways, you know.

SPEAKER_06 2:20:15

So one of the main reasons you did it was for the family time. And if you don't have the family time, move on to the next one. Well, I really enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_03 2:20:24

I sometimes think I tell Martha, I'm keeping watching these these uh permit prices. Maybe I'll retire.

SPEAKER_05 2:20:30

Retire trolling? Yeah, but she's shaking her head going.

SPEAKER_03 2:20:34

She's not she's not giving up the garden. I'll be all by myself. That was the thing Martha really loves the garden, and she really that was the thing she missed uh while we were trolling was the garden. She missed the garden. But we had uh courtesy of uh Norm Pillen, we had these um giant battery boxes, they were about three foot by two foot and about uh probably two foot high, black um plastic boxes. They were actually battery boxes for locomotive railroads. Uh locomotives, uh railroad locomotives. Um they uh locomotives run on 32 volt, and uh our friend Norm Pillen had uh a 32 volt system on his tinder, and he ordered some batteries and he ended up with these boxes that they came in. And you want you want these? Yeah, we took them.

SPEAKER_01 2:21:25

So we put those up on our flybridge with soil in them, and they they would have we had a we had salad, fresh salad every night. It was crazy.

SPEAKER_03 2:21:37

Because it was that black, that black plastics just absorbed the heat, uh-huh, and that soil was really good, and so you know we had we had fresh salad. Fresh salad every day. It was pretty nice. We pull up next to the tender. Wow. Whoa. Can we be your crew? Yeah, it was pretty nice. So so she kind of got to bring her girl. Got a little bit of garden with her. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 2:22:03

So when when was it that you decided to finish the last part of your pilot's license and start flying again?

Finishing The Pilot License Later

SPEAKER_03 2:22:10

Uh I was after we sold Island Girl. Okay. And the kids were older, you know. One of the reasons I didn't get back into it was because I was concerned as a dad of having uh an accident and then having a family with young kids and a widow. So, I mean, uh that's just how my brain works. I uh I think about those things. Um So I waited until and you know, there's there's lots of families that have commercial pilots and they have kids, you know. There's a so there's you know, there's nothing I don't know there's anything logical about it, but that's just how I looked at it. I thought I'd wait. So after the after we got rid of the island girl, that's when I um decided I wanted to fly, finish my flying stuff. So I I had started out in 77 flying little Citabras, and uh had this is you know, this is back when everything was paper charts, it wasn't GPS, um and you were all using VOR radio navigation and stuff. And you know, Alaska's pretty big. Not you know, now with all this satellite navigation stuff, uh I mean it's so easy. But in those days, you know, you had a piece of paper and you kept track of where you were, and there are places in Alaska that if you just like somebody you were you were asleep for two hours and you woke up and the guy next to you wasn't around anymore, you wouldn't know where you were on the map because it just looks the same, you know. And I don't mean it's flat, it could be hilly, but it's one hill after the other hill. Where am I, you know? Um so you you really had to when you navigated, you were you were looking at the chart, uh, you were paying attention to the section of what was going on. And then the other thing, like if you're if you're going a long distance cross-country, you might leave on a VOR, which is a uh VHF omnidirectional beacon, a radio. Uh you can leave on a on a radio that is uh a frequency specific to a compass rose angle. You can leave on that, and then you're headed for, let's say, Ruby, and somewhere across the expanse from Fairbanks to Ruby, um, you might lose the radio signal altogether. You got nothing. So now you're flying on uh dead reckoning, you're holding a course, you hopefully have figured out how much wind drift and stuff you got going, and you keep going for a while, and you have your radio tuned, hoping to get the receive signal from Ruby on the VOR uh for a period of time, and then you know, poof, hey, there it is. It worked, you know. It works great unless you're in the soup, you know, and then navigation in the soup back then was a little bit trickier than it is today. We got so much electronics now, it's amazing. So anyway, I I decided I you know I'd I didn't have enough money to finish back then, but I really loved flying. And uh so I went down and got my pilot's license down in Sasha had started college then. So um uh we we had a connection to Moscow, Pullman, and uh while we were down there visiting with and uh you basically you can you can get a pilot's license in Alaska. You know, there's nobody in this town that's gonna instruct you, so you've got to go somewhere else. And as soon as you go somewhere else, now you are paying for room and board and hotel, and you're also paying for the days you're paying room and board and ho or hotel or whatever you've got set up for the days you can't fly because the weather's crappy. And the weather in Alaska isn't always good. What? Yeah, it's shocking, isn't it? So, you know, the smart money is to go someplace like Arizona or in my case, you know, where you've got you know 300 days of flyable weather a year. So every day that you're paying for a room and board, you're also making progress on your pilots program. So that's why we went down there. I went down there, and then uh I got um got my pilot's license in 2014 and got to know some of the guys on the field there. When I was growing up, um, you know, there you had super cubs were, you know, there there were citabras and super cubs. Um I knew our family, you know, we talked about my mom being a CPA. My mom knew Al Wright of Wright's flying service. Okay. And they were close friends of the family. And um we would trade, you know, like a hunting uh trip or something like that for doing the taxes or something like that. And so, I mean, I knew Al Wright when I was a little kid, and uh I knew Bob who ended up taking over Wright's flying service, and he's s since now he built it up to the company it is now, and then he's since sold it. But um at I think at that time it was just Al and Bob that were flying, and Al had a little Citabra, and Bob was flying the helio courier, and uh and Al was guiding as well, so um that was kind of the program. But those were kind of unusual aircraft. A lot of people had 180s or 185s, uh citabras. Cubs were not the big, I mean, they were around, uh, but they weren't the big rage that they are now. They were good airplanes back then just like they are now, but they didn't have the you know cult following that they have now. Anyway, but I grew up, you know, hearing about 180s and 185s, and so when these guys at the airport um had one, he had actually two 180s and he wanted to sell one, and I pfft I I there's no way I can afford that plane, you know, forget it. Um but he made it work for me. And so I ended up with his 180 Old Yeller. So that was the the first plane we had. And uh we flew that up um through Canada. Uh Nick and I and in Old Yeller and uh Keith and um drawing a blank here now. I can picture him. He's a friend of mine, not good with names sometimes. Anyway, um they they flew the other plane. So we flew up through Canada, we flew all through Alaska and then down to McCarthy and came across the Bagley Ice Field and down the coast and came back. It was a great trip. It was a really wonderful trip. Um, so that was kind of the beginning of that

Fuel Loss And Ditching In Lynn Canal

SPEAKER_03 2:29:04

plane. And then uh uh let's see, that was 2014, so uh a little more than a year later, we were flying back from Juneau, and uh we we had l what I calculated to be 47 gallons of fuel when we left Juneau, and that's kind of what the fuel gauges showed. And somewhere between Juneau and Eldred Lock Rock, we'd lost all that fuel. And we started I started seeing problems with the fuel gauges uh earlier, but I you know it it didn't dawn on me that we had a fuel leak somewhere, something fuel was leaking somehow. Um so I assumed that we had a problem with the fuel gauges because Nick tapped on it and then the fuel gauge moved, so I thought we have an electrical problem. I was checking. But that wasn't the case. We were losing fuel and we lost well, what would be about 47 gallons in 30 minutes and quite a bit of fuel. And we ended up having to ditch the plane.

SPEAKER_06 2:30:07

And it was you and Nick and Martha Nick and I, Martha, and Victoria Hansen.

SPEAKER_03 2:30:12

Victoria Hansen. Yeah. They had Nick and Victoria were just coming back, and Martha were just coming back from uh doing a college um you know visitation visit trip. Right, yeah. And so I picked them up in June 0 and we we put their bags on what time of year was it? This was fall right now.

SPEAKER_06 2:30:31

November. November, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 2:30:33

Yep. November 4th. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 2:30:37

So you have to ditch the plane.

SPEAKER_03 2:30:39

Yeah, to ditch the plane. So it was snowing. It was blowing about 25. And uh I don't know what the temperature was, but I I think it was in the twenties. Uh you know, maybe the upper twenties. Blowing hard relatively hard and snowing. And um we had a low ceiling, so I wasn't very high. I was I just started uh we'd gotten past uh Point Sherman, so I was able to start climbing. We'd been down about a thousand feet or a little bit lower. And so we started able to climb. We got to about 1,500 feet, and we're about halfway from the far side across to Eldred Rock when the engine died, and I tried restarting it and it would not start. So it you know it sputtered and that was it. So there's you know, if you go by the textbook, um if you're ditching a plane, you're supposed to land into the wind. And if you have ocean swells, they're supposed to go parallel to the swells, you know, which would be perpendicular to wind, but the swells are different than swells are different than wind waves typically. So but you know, I'm look I'm looking straight ahead and I see Elder Rock, and it's a frothing white shoreline. There is no way we are getting out of the water there. Yeah. And there is no way I'm getting to um Sullivan Islands too far away. So we turn around and go downwind, which is what you're not supposed to do, but we turn around and go downwind, and I'm trying to get as far as I can along the shoreline to get to someplace where people could see us, you know. Uh I was in search and rescue for a while, and I know how hard it is to um spot things sometimes. And you people people when I tell the story here, people wonder, well, how come people couldn't see you? Because we had, I think we had yeah, three or four planes went by and we had uh a boat that was about a fishing boat that was about a hundred yards off the beach and nobody saw us. And people, how how's that possible? But you know, I remind them if you're on the ferry and somebody standing next to you sees a deer on the beach and they're pointing at it and they're describing where that is, and you still can't see it, you know, imagine what it's like when you don't have anybody doing that for you. You know, you're looking. And the other thing is that people typically, when they're looking, they're they're looking ahead and out to the sides. They don't typically look back. And so, you know, we had we had ditched the plane, we had about a hundred and fifty yards swim in water that was you know, probably I don't know, 36, 38 degrees, pretty cold water. Martha didn't make it to the beach, she drowned. And uh so Nick Nick grabbed me and helped me get to the beach, and then we there's so there's three of us, three adults. I mean, you know, Victoria's a young woman, but she's an adult. So there's three of us, and we can barely lift Maria. Enough in the surf to keep her head from, you know, protect her head. That's how exhausted we were by the time we got to the Well, because you're fully clothed.

SPEAKER_06 2:34:10

You got your winter some winter clothing on, right? Now it's totally saturated from being in the water.

SPEAKER_03 2:34:15

And you and you've been swimming thirty-eight degree water for 15, 20 minutes or something like that. You know, your things aren't working, your muscles aren't working. But I was shocked at how I mean I can pick Martha up. I I could barely we could the three of us could barely hold her upper body up high enough to keep her head from banging on the rocks, you know. So we got her got her um out of the surf and then um we did CPR on her and she came she came back. So that was the first miracle. She came back, you know, and um she probably she might have been in the water five minutes, drowned for five minutes or something. It's hard to say, I don't know. It's funny because when they were in the hospital they asked all these questions and they were probably trying to determine whether or not there was brain damage or was this worth you know pursuing. I never even thought about that because I've been around cold water all of my life, and I'm so familiar with the mammalia diving reflex and cold water drownings that five minutes is nothing. You know, they've they've resuscitated kids that have been under the ice for 45 minutes with no brain damage. So there's the weird things that happen. Um anyway, so but she we revived her, she and she was um disoriented, but she was coherent. And uh so we're soaking wet. We I tried to get the survival bag out of the airplane, but it was too it was too much drag. I couldn't swim with it. And Martha thinks that she probably didn't make it because she had her camera, she didn't want to let go of her camera and it was fouling her up. Okay. I had to take my raincoat off because it was slowing me down. Um so um we didn't have any way to start a fire, we had nothing. And uh I carry I carry in my pocket here now. From now on, I have a waterproof, you know, big lighter deal. So if we'd have just if we'd have just had fire, we'd have done so much better.

SPEAKER_06 2:36:24

How how long was it from the time you guys estimate from the time you guys hit the water till somebody was picking you off the beach? I think it was about 40 minutes. Forty minutes. Something like that.

SPEAKER_03 2:36:37

I think that's right. And is that Coast Guard helicopter coming? No. So um so I'm I'm not gonna if I went back and looked at my notes, I probably would be able to get things really accurate. So doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be exactly accurate, Mike. Yeah. I just, you know, I I try to I I try to be uh try to be accurate. Um so I think it was 40, 45 minutes, something like that. And no uh so we had you could tell people were I did get a May Day off and told them we we're at the slide for the local fishermen who know where the slide is. Just north of the shore. We're on the yeah, we were on the north end of the slide. And I was pretty sure that was the slide, but I didn't know that that was the slide. You get because you know when you first get to town here, people talk about you know, sunshine and flower mountain, they talk about all these things, then you ask them, start to ask them where it's at, then they kind of they kind of button up. They don't they because these are all places that you know we know, you know.

SPEAKER_07 2:37:42

If you don't know where it's at, we're we're gonna tell you about it, but we're not gonna tell you where it is.

SPEAKER_03 2:37:45

Right, yeah, it's kind of a weird phenomenon this town. Anyway, so I I'd known about the slide and I'd heard the slide referenced, and that was probably the slide, but I didn't know that. And I wasn't going to say we're by we're gonna make it to the slide if I was that that wasn't the slide, because then everybody'd be looking in the wrong spot. So the only thing I could tell them was that we were on the you know east shore of the Linn Canal, and that uh we were we were I was gonna try and make it to this beach uh that I could see up ahead. Uh-huh. And and that's all I that's you know all the time we had. So it you know, it we were only uh in the air for what was it, a minute and a half after the engine died. So there's a lot of things to try and do in 90 seconds. About 90 seconds, yeah. So there's a lot of things you try to do in nine, you know, besides trying to start the airplane. Now you've got three other people you're responsible for too. And uh you've never ditched an airplane before, you know, so you're you're trying to keep trying to keep you're trying to make the the very best decisions you can with an inevitable outcome. You know, it's kind of like you've probably done this before where you're driving in winter icy conditions and the car starts to slide, and you know you're gonna go into the ditch, or you know, or somebody pulls out in front of you and you know you're gonna hit them, but you try to mitigate where you hit them. You know, you you do the best you can with what you have, trying to make the best outcome, and that's kind of the situation I was in. So I had I told everybody, I didn't tell them we were gonna flip. Nick, Nick knew we were gonna flip because Nick and I had talked about this because he was an aspiring pilot as well, and we talk about you know what as a pilot, you're always trying to figure out you know, if the engine died right now, that was one of the funny things about the guys when we were flying up. They would, you know, this is what you always ask young pilots, you know, okay, if your engine died, where would you land now? You know, so we're talking on the radio, you know, looking around, you're trying to, well, where would you go now? You know. And so I get a lot of that flying up, and then we were flying across the Begley Icefield. I said, Okay, Keith, if your engine died, where would you land now? Radio silence crickets, because there is no place to land. Just giant crevassas and you're 13 miles across, you know. There's just some places in Alaska. There isn't a place. There isn't a place. Anyway, but you we Nick and I talked about if we had to ditch, you know, would we would we crash in the rocks and the trees or would we ditch the plane in the water? And and we had decided already that ditching the plane was probably the safest thing. It would have been better if I would have been closer to shore. But I was afraid I was gonna catch a wing and cartwheel or do something crash up on the rocks. And I I w, you know, if I ever have to do it again, Lord willing, I never will. I will definitely try to be closer to shore. Um anyway, but and you pop the doors loose so the doors aren't don't get stuck in the jam. So they're they're loose, the wind's holding them closed, and then uh you have everybody hope have their hand on their seatbelt. Don't open your seatbelt, but have it so you know where it's at. And uh everybody got out of the plane.

SPEAKER_06 2:41:00

So what's that like?

SPEAKER_03 2:41:01

So you you hit and just catch a wave and yeah, so I uh you know you got waves and they're they're moving away from you because you're flying downwind. I mean, they're you're moving faster than they are, but they are traveling in the same direction. And because I had the bush wheels on there, I actually you know I I came in as slow as I possibly could, and I think I skipped three or four times. I think by the time I finally settled into the water, I was probably only doing about 30 miles an hour. Okay. So compared to like 70, so you know, 70 miles an hour hitting a wall of water, you probably blow the windscreen in. So uh I was really thankful I was able to just keep bouncing and bouncing and finally I got I don't know, I didn't look at the airspeed indicator because I was focused on trying to keep the plane under control as best I could. And then uh and then you know we just flipped over right away. As soon as the front wheels dug in, we flipped over right away and stopped. So everybody was out of the airplane and standing on the wing, which is now down in the water about a foot or so, and I'm upside down, but my foot is caught on something, and then I can't. And you know, my head's in the water, I'm trying to get up, and I finally end up having to take my shoe off because I can't I must have broke a rudder pedal or something. The shoe got caught up, you know, something broke, a cable or something, had a hold of my shoe. I couldn't get it loose, so I had to kick my shoe off. So everyone's fine. Nobody's hurt, nobody bruises, no nothing. You know, great ditching, worked great. But now we gotta swim. Yeah. And that's what got us. It was the environment that got us. Yeah. So, you know, Martha drowned, we were able to resuscitate her, and now we're hiding behind these rocks. And the rocks, we're at low tide, so the rocks are chocolate brown, covered with uh, you know, the sea grass or whatever. And we're hiding behind the rocks because it's blowing 25 or more. It's really cold and we're soaking wet. And I've got Martha, I've I've got Martha, I'm trying to hold her close to me to try and share my body heat with her as best I can. And we're huddled down behind the rocks. And, you know, uh Nick and uh Victoria are trying to look for resources, you know. Can we start a fire? Is there anything we can, you know, can anything. There's they're looking around and and they're waving. If somebody comes up, they'll jump up and wave. But you know, you can't stand out there and look for planes. Oh, there's one, let's wait till he gets here. You know, you're freezing, so you're staying down behind the rocks as best you can. And then when you hear a plane, you jump up and you try to attract them. But like I said, you know, when you're looking for somebody, you're kind of looking like this. You're not looking behind you. And so when we hear them, you know, we'd jump up, but they would be parallel to us or just passing us when we'd hear them, and they wouldn't see us. And, you know, they were they were down on the deck, you know, less than 500 feet. We knew they were looking for us, but they just never saw us. I was wearing brown, Martha was wearing brown, uh, I can't remember what Nick was wearing. I got all I got high viz. High viz at all your Liz would be proud of me. I got high viz stuff all over the airplane now, you know. Uh but uh Victoria had a white and and blue uh down or you know, synthetic jacket on, and that is what so you asked who you know who found us first. The Coast Guard dispatched. Um but one of the things that I just uh am so thankful for with Tempsco right uh from the get-go, they do not wait. You know, if you have a search and rescue, the state of Alaska is the controlling entity. And um so they're the they're the on-seen the IC, what do they call ICS? They're the ones that control the activity. And so if you're gonna participate uh in a search, you get their authorization to spend money, fuel, pilot expenditure, that kind of stuff. Tempsco doesn't wait. They hear a problem, boom, they go. They're gone. They're gone. If they don't get paid, they don't get paid. They go. So and that's who found us.

Rescue, Hypothermia, And Hospital Miracles

SPEAKER_03 2:45:27

You know. They took off with that uh uh 500, Hughes 500. And it was okay, so here I am, right? Uh uh here's here's the pilot. I got three people, I got my wife who is becoming, you know, and when we resuscitated her, you know, we were asking her questions, she was coherent, she was getting mad because we were asking her questions and she was, you know, what do you guys, you know, you're starting to irritate me. But now she's not being coherent and she's slowly dying. And I got two people around me that are dying and there is nothing I can do. I have d exhausted everything I could do. I've got nothing. Everybody that was in my care is dying. My and if it would have been Sasha, I'd have been losing my entire family in one fell. I I I had no nothing left. It was all up to God. It was God's mercy that saved us. That was it. There'd been a lot of planes that have gone down.

SPEAKER_06 2:46:29

And uh anybody that's lived in Haynes for any amount of time, it's it's it's less frequent now with the new navigation that you're talking about. But yeah, growing up, the number of times that we've lost pilots and passengers and sometimes you never find them, you know.

SPEAKER_03 2:46:45

And they never found my plane because it sank. It didn't it didn't float very long, it sank pretty quickly, you know. And it and it you know, it flipped upside down and then the tail was kind of towards the beach, and so as it sank, it just flew it just flew out into the deep, you know.

SPEAKER_06 2:47:00

So when Tempsco found you, were they able to land there and get you in the chopper, or did they have to wait for the Coast Guard to airlift you up for that?

SPEAKER_03 2:47:08

Those guys came and they were about 50 feet. And you know, we just had watched planes go by and a boat go by, yelling and screaming. And you could you could see the back door on the deck open. I mean, uh, you know, they were a hundred yards away. Uh but they they they weren't looking behind, they came down and then they turned around and they they went back. They just didn't see us, you know. When that Hughes 500 came over, I think Eric was the pilot, came over, and you know, here's another plane. And this and they're low, and we just barely heard them in time to jump up, right?

SPEAKER_06 2:47:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 2:47:47

When they banked, they banked so hard, ah, you knew you knew they saw you. That really made the difference right there. Anyway, so they came around and then they they landed. The nice thing about that helicopter is it's got a pretty tall uh mast on it, so they could land inside and it's small so they could get down between the rocks. And so, you know, they they came um and uh uh shortly after they got there, I think the Jayhawk came and they landed farther down the beach where it was a little bit more open. And um they wanted to get Sasha and Victoria and Nick because you you typically you get the young people because they don't have the body mass and they're you know they're usually the ones that suffer most from hypothermia. But I told him, I said, no, she's drowned, and you know, we resuscitated her. So they got her, and I couldn't even walk at that point. Um, so I'm trying to remember the other guy that's should have remembered anyway. He picked her up and carried her to the helicopter, and then he stayed on the ground. I well, maybe he did. He they went over to the Jayhawk, and uh the medic from the Jayhawk jumped in the Hughes 500 and they raced off to the hospital, and then they got the Jayhawk over uh and balanced it, you know, at a at a spot on one skid, and then we they got us into the helicopter and we flew back over there.

SPEAKER_06 2:49:17

So you, Nick, and Victoria went in the Jayhawk?

SPEAKER_03 2:49:19

Yeah. And then they landed us on the on the runway uh by the fire department, and they had an ambulance there. And uh it was really nice because as soon as the ambulance pulled up, you know, I looked across and there was uh one of the EMS guys there had a phone. I said, Can we borrow your phone? And uh he said, sure. And I handed it to Victoria and I said, Call your mom and dad, tell them you're okay. Yeah. They had they had not even known they didn't even know. Yeah, so when she called them, they didn't know it. She just said, Yeah, we you know we were all fine. I mean, you know, and then about five, ten minutes later, the newspaper was knocking at the door at their house. So that was a blessing as well, you know. I I wouldn't want to have been the parent on the receiving end of that. Anyway, so that worked out well. But when we got to the hospital, Martha um they were they were doing CPR, and Martha, what had happened was when she came, so she drowned when we resuscitated her. Then they got her to the uh ER room, and I think FAA called Matt and asked him to check and see if my plane was here. And uh, you know, he saw he saw the car here and he knew the plane was gone, so he, you know, reported that the plane was was missing. The plane's not here, this is not a false alarm. And then he called um Rose, who was in charge of the ER at the time. And so Rose knew we were coming or had an idea that we might be coming, and so she brought people back to the hospital in case we came. Anyway, so they so they did a a process on Martha called lavage, I think is what the term is, is where they circulate warm um what's it just saline, yeah. Warm saline into your body to resuscitate your core temperature. And my recollection is that they told me that her core temperature was 73 degrees when she showed up. So when she when she came in, um they they got her on a GERDI and they started to take her vitals and she coded, right? I mean, she got into the ER room and she her heart stopped. Boom. So they were working on her trying to do CPR and get her going. And so um they were gathering uh microwaves and saline from all around the hospital and bringing it down the ER room. Normally in a lavage system, it's a recirculating system. So they they put warm fluid into warm fluid into you, it comes back out, they recover it, and it gets warmed again, and they just circulate it that way. Well, they didn't have anything sophisticated like that. So they were taking saline and warming it, and then just it was just pouring out on the floor. And they were they were gonna run out of saline, you know, at some point. But they they did CPR in the fire department there, the did CPR, took it taking turns for 35 minutes, kept her going. Finally, her heart started again. She warmed up enough, then her heart started again. So that's twice, right? So then she's she's doing better. Um, and you know, they keep looking at me, you know, should what do you want to do? I said, what do we have to do? You know. You know, it wasn't until much later that I realized that they were asking me, you know, should we keep going? You know, because that never even entered my mind. Of course we should keep going. Um Sasha, I mean, gosh, she keeps saying Victoria. Because I, you know, I I had this horrifying realization that it could have been Sasha. Not that Victoria is not important to me, she's like a daughter to me, too. But Victoria and Nick, they were doing okay. I was checking on them, but I was mostly just staying there watching Martha. And um, so she started her core temperature started to come out, but the guys that were bag masking her were having a hard time. They're heart having a hard time getting her to take air and getting harder and harder to squeeze the bag. What was happening was as her organs had gotten so cold that they were starting to um inflame. Um there was they were watching her CO2 levels. You've got to watch CO2 levels because that'll affect the kidney. And they were they was those were those numbers were okay. Um, but she was starting to get inflammation of the organs, and what was pushing up on her diaphragm, and so her organs were expanding and collapsing her lungs, and they were they were just barely able to get enough air into her. I mean, her oxygen level was like at 80, 79, 78, 80, and they were just trying to keep it there. Medivac finally shows up, and um they they can't take her because she's she's not stable. They can't put her on an airplane in those conditions. She's never gonna make it, you know. And so um they were trying to figure out what was going on, and they realized it was compartment, what they call compartmentalization, and uh they had they had some fancy instrument that they had not used before, and they were trying to figure out how to use it to actually measure the difference of the pressure to see what was going on, you know, in her uh abdomen versus her thoracic cavity. And anyway, there was fortunately there was a internal surgeon there, and uh she finally walked up to me and she said, This is what we think's happening. Um I think what we need to do is open her up and relieve that pressure in her abdomen. And so what that's what we think you should do. Let's do it. Do it so they did. So Martha tells this story. She she's conscious now, okay. Uh her her she's trying to breathe, but she's not getting enough air, so they're bag masking her. She's conscious now. They take her upstairs. I think they take her upstairs, they take her up to the surgery room, and they bring her in, and um her vitals are so borderline that they can't anesthetize her because they're afraid if they anesthetize her, um her nervous. System will just shut down. And so they tranquilize her. Meaning that she no, they don't tranquilize her, I'm sorry. They paralyze her. So what they do is the it it there's not a numbing effect, they just keep your muscles from doing everything. So she got to she's awake. Awake, and she gets to experience them cutting her open. She can feel everything. She's she's she's saying, she she told me the other one, she's trying to yell, it hurts. I can feel it, but she can't. She can't. She can't. Her muscles are totally. I don't remember the exact terminology, but they couldn't they couldn't put her up, make her unconscious because they were afraid that she would crash. And so they just they just made her paralyzed so she couldn't move. None of her muscles could move, you know. So they cut her open. Anyway, she had a uh out-of-body experience too, which um was, you know, I I'm a poo-pooer, but you know, she talked to the doctors afterwards, and she was able to recite things um that they were talking about not within hearing range of her. So yeah, and she had this idea that she was she she saw herself from above looking down at them working on her, and saw them pulling her intestines out. They were and she they so they did all the stuff. She couldn't see this stuff because she you know, she had the sheep, but it pulled her intestines out and they were looking for any damage and stuff, and then put things back together and taped her back up. Yeah. Anyway, she as soon as they cut her open, boom, her O2 levels just shot right at your face.

SPEAKER_06 2:57:44

Yeah. So then they met her to Seattle.

SPEAKER_03 2:57:47

Yeah, metavector to Harborview. And and uh I think we were there a total of two weeks, maybe a little bit less. But it was really strange because you know, Harborviews, they've got three towers. There are two two tall ones and uh, I think a shorter one. And uh, you know, it's a learning hospital, so you've got people coming by on a regular basis. But um there would be a group of students or a doctor or somebody from another tower that would come up and they would be talking about this is her. Really? People would come over because she was recovering so rapidly that they they couldn't believe how fast she was recovering. Um, so they would people would come by and say, This is her, look how fast her look at her charts and stuff. They were they were uh you know, they were just amazed at her recovery. So she did really well. Praise God. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 2:58:46

And then you went and bought another plane.

SPEAKER_00 2:58:48

And went and bought another plane.

SPEAKER_06 2:58:50

Was that hard? Is that a hard decision after going through that?

SPEAKER_03 2:58:54

I don't know. I don't you know, I think intellectually it wasn't hard. It was hard the next time I flew. Yeah. I it didn't fly that plane. I flew a I flew a plane that I had flown a lot at 172. But it was a it was it was a controlled panic um flying. I it it just not just being terrified that I I'm not doing everything I can I'm supposed to do, you know. It was really how how long did that last? About an hour. And then from then on you haven't had that? No, I uh I about an hour and it was kind of okay, and then uh towards the end then I landed. And then uh I I think I went up the next day or a couple of days later, and then I was fine after that. But you know, it is one of those things that um there's there's a lot going on in an airplane. I mean, I mean people fly airplanes all the time, but um you're kind of working in four dimensions, you know, you got up, down, left, right, but you've got time too. So you it's not just turning, you have to turn in a time, you know. I mean, I don't know how to it it there's lots of things that can can go wrong if you're not paying attention, you know. You're there's there's mixtures that you have to make adjustments on, and and you're cow on my plane, you know, you got cows. There's there's a lot of manual things on my airplane that you do that are taken care of on other airplanes automatically, and so you have to kind of be paying attention. There's lots of ways to screw up flying an airplane, I'll just say that.

SPEAKER_06 3:00:37

But I've I've lost numerous friends and numerous people I know in airplane crashes. I've also had you and one other friend that walked away. Yeah, he was he was uh the other one was in he he had some injuries that took him a while to recover, but he's back, he's back flying. It's something that he he loves. And I just I I don't know if I could do that. Yeah. After being it is hard for me to find out passengers. There there it is. The pass the passenger thing is really hard for me. Yeah. That's what's hard for me is the passengers. Uh I went flying. You took me flying after the crash. Yeah we went and looked for that valley my dad was looking for with all the goats and had a great time.

SPEAKER_00 3:01:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 3:01:23

That was fun.

SPEAKER_06 3:01:24

It was. It was a great flight. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 3:01:27

Yeah, it's the passengers. Um it's the innocent, you know. You you get in an airplane and you take off, well, you know, you're it's like going ocean sailing, you know. You you if you're doing it, you should understand some of the potential risks and hazards and that kind of stuff, and it's an intelligent decision that you've made. You've balanced these things out, you know. But uh a lot of times passengers are to completely unaware, and it's a it's a common thing, you know, uh, to fly. And it's, you know, it's a wonderful thing.

Why Alaska Demands Respect

SPEAKER_06 3:02:06

I I have a love-hate relationship with flying. There are days like that flight with you. Absolutely love it. There's days when it's bumpy and you can't quite see and stuff, and it's just I've had too many flights between here and Juneau that were just what wasn't enjoyable. And it's it's it's one of those that part of me is like, well, you look at all the aviotics they have now that make it so much safer when you're in the plane of knowing your terrain and everything, if weather comes in, if it the ability to fly in Lynn Canal now compared to 30 years ago is so phenomenally better. Yeah. Um, but yeah, just there there are there's been more than one time when I've been flying either on the way to June or on the way back that I was like, I wish I did not get in this plane.

SPEAKER_03 3:03:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:03:02

Oh, I can say the same. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 3:03:05

I I I've I've been in a a situation in in my in the 185, I was by myself with a bunch of moose meat. Um and I was coming back from the Alaska range and uh trying to work my way east. And uh I was up, there was a lot of low clouds, and there was some icing conditions, so I just went up and uh I was gonna go into Tok, but as I'm getting closer and closer to Toke, I see that um the clouds are towering higher and higher. And I'm I'm probably at 10,000 feet, and I can look ahead of me and I know that they're 15,000 feet or whatever, and it doesn't look like I'm gonna find an opening there. So I had to go back to places because I could see before I could see places where I could get down and then circle and drop down below the clouds to get uh below the clouds, and then I I did make it into Togue. But yeah, the icing conditions were horrible. Um they don't they're not always uh as predicted. Things don't always weather's never a hundred percent like they predicted to be. Yeah. You know, we were talking about Dutch Harbor. Uh so in November of 1987, like it was I think two weeks after I got there. Um there was the a 1987 November storm, as this they still talk about. I think they had predicted like 45 mile per hour winds, and it turned out to be 70 plus sustained. And I was listening to I was in in Dutch at the radio uh to the sideband 14 May Days. Three boats went down.

SPEAKER_06 3:04:59

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_03 3:05:00

Yeah. And that's you know, just because um things didn't go the way they were supposed to go, you know. Yeah. So yeah. Alaska's a great place.

SPEAKER_06 3:05:14

Well it I mean it it you know, I think I think we've said it on this on this with other interviews that it's it's an amazingly beautiful place and there's so many opportunities up here, but if you make the wrong if you make a small mistake, it the consequences consequences can be huge. Yeah. Yeah, it can be very unforgiving. Need to be very respectful of the of the of the area.

SPEAKER_03 3:05:39

I try to tell young people that come here all excited and enthusiastic, you know, when they first move here about all that. There's a amazing amount of things that you can do here. And I try to remind them that there's amazing ways to die here, too. There are. Not not to discourage people from going out and adventuring, but you gotta use your head.

SPEAKER_06 3:06:00

Because I think it's res respect for the respect for the territory, respect for the mountains, the weather, just that what you're getting into. Yeah, it can be amazingly fun. There's a ton of adventures to have. Yeah. But the ones that have the most respect for Mother Nature are the ones that are gonna come back. Sometimes. Sometimes. Sometimes sometimes it's you know sometimes it just isn't gonna happen.

SPEAKER_03 3:06:21

Uh Joe Vogler, when we were uh talking about going mining when I was right out of school, we were talking about uh bears and you know being careful. And and uh, you know, he issued me a rifle and a sidearm for while I was mining. So I and he said, You make sure you always have that rifle. You keep keep the side arm you all the time and make sure you don't get too far away from that rifle, you know. And then he told me a story. He said there was a there was a little old lady, and he rattled off her name, and she was in her late 70s. This so this is back in 77, I don't know. And she was doing um she was doing a color, uh, she was doing taking notes to do a color book of the wildflowers in Alaska in the tundra. And she had been, she had been out by herself, little bells on her ankles, little old lady doing paintings or drawings or whatever she was doing for four or five years, never had a problem. Young guy, young biologist, comes in fish and game, he's getting sent out, he goes through bear training, he's in the field for less than an hour and he's killed by a bear. You just you know I think I think that our we have our time, and when it's our time, it's our time. So but that doesn't mean you go jumping off of buildings because you don't think it's your time either.

SPEAKER_06 3:07:53

So that would probably hasten that it is your time even if you don't think it is. Right. Yeah. So what what have we missed? Oh gosh. So here's a different question for you.

What He Hopes They Remember

SPEAKER_06 3:08:11

30, 40 years from now, your grandkids holiday dinner with Nick and Sasha and their their families getting together, and they're talking about Grandpa Mike. What would be what would be the best thing that they could say about Grandpa Mike that I loved them?

SPEAKER_00 3:08:33

Yep. That was one thing that I did um try to make a point of is making sure that they knew I loved them.

SPEAKER_03 3:08:45

Try to because I didn't hear that a lot growing up and I wasn't really sure if that was the case. But I think it's important that you tell the people around you um that they're important to you. And not just your family, but you know, people that are important that that um like we were talking about some of the people you're gonna interview, you know. It's a good thing that people people know that they are valued and that they are important. That's the whole message of Jesus is that we really are important to God as individuals.

SPEAKER_00 3:09:28

And I think that's the most important thing we can share with each other that we are valued and that we are important, and we mean something. So hopefully that's what they'll remember about me. Maybe you'll be around to ask them. I don't know.

SPEAKER_05 3:09:46

No, that's a that's a ways in the future. I don't know. Uh hopefully I am. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:09:51

I don't know if I'll be in 30 years. If I am, boy, they might be pushing me in a in a chair or something. You know.

SPEAKER_06 3:09:59

Well, I can attest when you put wheels under somebody, you can move them wherever you want. Yeah, whether they want or not. Whether they want to go there or not.

SPEAKER_05 3:10:07

They got wheels under them, but it's you're pretty much in control. Yeah. There. Yeah, they don't have much to say about it. Got a little experience. So that's good. That's good for you to be wanting them to know how much you love them because they'll listen a little bit better.

SPEAKER_03 3:10:21

Well, I I told I told my kids uh, you know, because I waited a long time and I wish we would have had kids a little bit earlier because I could have been in better physical shape to enjoy them. Um but I told them, I said, yeah, you know, it's a good thing to to wait until you're ready to have kids. But don't wait so long that uh you're they're pushing you in a wheelchair when they're graduating from high school. That's not a good that's not a good formula.

SPEAKER_06 3:10:46

That doesn't there's downsides to that as well. Yeah. Yep. So well, thank you, Mike. Thanks. I appreciate it. I appreciate you sharing everything. Yeah, there's a lot of good stuff there, and uh and no, I just I appreciate our friendship over the years and yeah, you and Martha great uh great pillars of our community in my mind. Well, you know.

SPEAKER_03 3:11:15

Let's see, how long is that? 24 years now. I I'm starting to feel like I'm a local.

SPEAKER_06 3:11:24

Yeah, I I know people have been here longer than that that still struggle with whether they they feel like they've been fully accepted.

SPEAKER_03 3:11:31

I I think part of it is that the there are people who have lived here for so long, you know, multi-generational. Uh this is a community where people come and they stay, you know, if they can. And sometimes financially they can't. But I I remember when we were in Dutch Arbor, we we um we were we were moving to Haynes, and uh I'm trying to remember that uh he was a teacher that was out there. Ray um big guy. He came here and was a teacher here for a while. I can't remember his last name now. Ray Chapin. Ray Chapin, yeah.

SPEAKER_06 3:12:12

Anyway, you get a fellow teacher, he knows these things.

SPEAKER_03 3:12:15

Yeah. Ray Chapin. Anyway, uh and you know, we came back and we were just, you know, we heard that they were looking at a potential job here, and we just rant and rave about Haynes. We just loved Haynes. And um, I think he came down for the interview or whatever, and and uh was back in Dutch Harbor, and he said, I I don't understand it. You know, the economics just don't make sense. Why would why would anybody be w wanting to move to Haynes? And I said, I said, dude, people don't live in Haynes for the money, they live in Haynes because they love it, you know, and that's really what it is. That you don't you don't live here because you're gonna get rich here. No, you live here because you love it here. And they did move here, so yeah, and I think they loved it. So it is a good place, it's a great little slice of America. I mean, in its full spectrum. Full spectrum. In a little town. Kind of find it all here. Kind of find it all here. Yep, yeah. So it's a good town. This town, like you said in one of your other interviews, you know, it is moving. And we certainly felt it with our plane incident. How people come together in this community when when there's a hardship, like you, you know, you talked about with the slide, and you know, people people rally together. People, I think, know people fight about what's important to them here, and that's what probably makes the uh you know, the politics as turmoil tumultuous as they are. Uh people are passionate about um how they feel about things, but I think they're also passionate about each other, and that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing to have in a community. So pizza lemon by yourself out in the woods.

SPEAKER_00 3:14:12

Done that. Anyway, thanks for having me. Thanks for joining us. Appreciate it, Mike.

SPEAKER_06 3:14:18

Okay.