Flying Goose chase
moncler outlet online ALASKA was certainly not short of geese. My first, surreal sight of Anchorage, from the cab leaving the airport, was a throng of Canada geese on the highway embankment, milling around a bedraggled man tossing them bread in the pouring rain.
moncler sale “They’re all having a bit of a pow wow ‘fore they fly south,” said my driver the next day, as we passed another flock grazing in a park. But I was on the trail of an discount moncler outlet altogether rarer breed. There were only 30 surviving anywhere, and Alaska was the only place in the world where you could still fly with them.
moncler sale outlet When is the plural of goose not geese? When we’re talking about flying boats. Gooses were what I was after, Grumman Gooses, and Kodiak Island, 40 minutes moncler jackets on sale south of Anchorage by 737, had two.
Sixty years ago the Goose was the state of the art in air travel. To cross the Atlantic, or fly to South Africa, India or Australia, you caught the flying boat. Imperial Airways’ “Empire” boats plied a leisurely five day passage up the Nile and across the great Rift Valley lakes on their way to Durban; Pan Am’s Boeing Clippers took off from Foynes on the west coast of Ireland and boomed above the waves to La Guardia in New York.
A boat that could fly. moncler jackets cheap An airliner skidding on its belly on to the water like a swan. Nowadays it seems a fantastic notion, mythical as a unicorn. Before the Second World War and the construction of moncler coats outlet concrete runways, however, airfields were just that: grass, easily moncler jackets kids transformed by the first monsoon into unusable quagmire. But for a boat that could fly, every river, lake and harbour was a ready made watery runway even if the aerodynamics of hauling a big bulbous hull through the air made for somewhat slow and ponderous progress.
By the Fifties the invention of the jet engine had finally killed off the flying boat, and the unique thrill of going to the water’s edge to catch your plane became a wondrous thing of the past.
cheap moncler sale But not quite… In the 3,000 page World Airline Guide, listing every single scheduled air service on the planet, I found a tiny category for “Flying Boats and Amphibians”. Just two remaining outposts: a Mallard flying boat that connected Miami with the Bahamas… and a little Alaskan airline called PenAir.
Kodiak Island was two days’ flying away from London, it had a mere hundred miles of roads, mostly unpaved, a single set of traffic lights and the biggest brown bears in the world. The best way to get around it, it seemed, was by flying boat.
cheap moncler coats The American https://www.moncler-jacket-outlet.com novelist Don DeLillo once reflected on how modern airliners afford such comfortable passage as to reduce the entire sensation of powered flight to “a rudimentary tremble”. This is not the case with a 1943 vintage Second World War seaplane. I knew that even before I set eyes on the Goose. That clattery rumble as it taxied over to the terminal for our 0845 moncler outlet uk departure to Port Bailey, Zachar Bay and Amook… Jets screamed and Cessnas whined, but they didn’t sound like this. The cabin was bare metal, ceiling a bilious custard yellow, and as we flew over moors and hillsides discount moncler jackets of silver birch at just 3,000 feet, nosing through the mountain passes, it became a capsule of drumming thunder from the two radial engines moncler mens squared up high like a boxer’s fists.
moncler mens jackets The first morning out with the Goose glowed with autumn sun, the white mountain tops sparkling cheap moncler jackets outlet like icing, and at Port Bailey, the first cheap moncler jackets stop out of Kodiak, the water in the bay was so calm that we touched down with the crisp whumph of a ski turning in snow. Bryan, the pilot, was winding away hard at a handle beside his seat. It seemed the wheels moncler jacket online we needed to drive on to the beach had to be cranked down by hand. “Old moncler coats cheap planes,” said Bryan. “Nothin’ fancy. None of that computer crap in them.”
buy moncler jackets moncler outlet online store Out here the flying boat is the local postbus, delivery van and taxi cab. Port Bailey was where Jim, the only other outward passenger from Kodiak, got out. He was up from Seattle to value some equipment at the salmon cannery.
At the next stop, Village Island “Oh, just moncler jackets mens another little place in the middle of ab so lutely nowhere,” explained Bryan we had some mail for moncler outlets usa two young women.
At Amook, Gisela, Steve and moncler jackets canada their young son Tyler clambered in, returning to Kodiak after a week’s bear moncler jackets outlet watching holiday. “We saw 40 bears on the first day!” said Gisela.
Finally, at Zachar Bay, another cannery salmon fishing was the main industry in moncler outlet online these teeming waters there was a delivery from J C Penney’s department store. “How many beds you got?” grumbled Bryan, unloading yet another duvet.
moncler outlet The moncler outlet location flying boat had hauled everything. At his lodge on the shore of Hidden Basin, a huge bearskin sprawled on the wall, Nick Brigman showed me his new “pride womens moncler jackets and joy”: a dishwasher. Had this really come by Goose? The look he gave me implied this was a moncler jackets for women silly question. Discount Moncler Coats At Zachar Bay, however, taxiing up out of the water, engines bellowing, the Goose came to a halt. Bryan was now thumbing through a little booklet. He then put it down and up the shingle we lurched. “Almost got stuck there,” he confided.
Those were tide tables he’d been consulting not a factor the John Lewis van has to reckon with. How long before the tide would have floated us off? Bryan gave me a bright look: “About three hours.”
Flying with the Goose on Kodiak made me feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, when he suddenly realises that no one is going to stop him driving along railway tracks or eating every cream cake in the diner: we moncler jackets outlet online can do whatever we want. The Goose had been chartered to pick moncler jackets toronto up a party of fishermen from Eagle Harbor, and PenAir’s chief Goose pilot, Fred Ball, suggested I show up a little early. “What do you need that tackle box for, Fred?” inquired one of the baggage handlers as we strode out to our flying boat. “Survival kit,” replied Fred.
cheap moncler On the other side of the mountains moncler outlet store he moncler outlet woodbury pointed at moncler coats for women an oval of water that looked no bigger than a hand mirror Miami Lake, said Fred and down we went. Once the Goose’s engines had died the only sounds were the tiny lap of water around its hull and an eagle pealing in the hills. Time for a spot of fishing. Within a quarter of an hour Fred was reeling in a 15 lb salmon. The imperturbable pilot glanced at his watch and thought we’d better go pick those guys up.
To a Londoner Kodiak was definitely, and rather delightfully, small town. In the Kodiak Daily Mirror the “Public Safety” column a moncler outlet mall digest of the week’s crime and unrest reported that “a loose dog was chased from a supermarket parking lot to its home on Murphy Way”. The schoolteachers hired boats during the summer vacation and made good money salmon fishing. Huge lolloping sea lions slumped on one of the jetties apparently they’d just taken it over, so it was theirs now. moncler coats sale I asked Bryan, the Goose pilot, why the single stoplight just flashed red all the time? It was broken, he said, and it was going to cost $20,000 to fix it: “so we decided we really didn’t need moncler outlet usa it that much.”
The Goose took me to places from where even the town of Kodiak seemed a vast metropolis. Had moncler jacket outlet they been less moncler coats remote accessible to road builders, runway graders, anything other than a flying boat whole communities would have settled there. Instead we circled in each time, banking above the shiny olive water, peering down until suddenly we caught sight of the tiny scurry of red that was someone’s waterproof jacket.
In my free time between flights I tried to track down another exotic attraction Kodiak’s tufted puffins, remarkable for weird blond ponytails reminiscent of Hulk Hogan’s. Eventually I found a flock bobbing serenely like a line of Captain Pugwashes in Middle Bay. But soon every trip in the flying boat seemed like going human watching: yes! down there! Definitely a very rare… person!
monlcer down jackets At Alitak, a cannery on the southern tip of the island, Bryan said to a white bearded man waiting to pick up the mail: “How’s the big city treatin’ you, John?” He meant moncler jackets men these deserted corrugated sheds and dry docked fishing boats where over the winter (the Goose had already hauled the workforce back to civilisation) John and his wife were the only residents for the rest of Official Moncler Outlet the year they lived far to the south on a lonely island. “I guess he just likes the wild life,” reflected Bryan.
cheap moncler outlet Nick Brigman told me he was now completely moncler outlet kids self sufficient out at Hidden Basin only that morning he’d hooked a 90 lb halibut. “You can have a million dollars in the moncler jackets bank,” he said, “but you’ve still got to stand in line at the grocery store. Moncler Factory Outlet My grocery store’s the front garden.”
The Goose flew me over mysterious dark spruce forests on Afognak Island to the north, gold sheets of water caught by the rising sun, and the bleak treeless moorland of south Kodiak. It wasn’t just that this lonely, empty flying was the antithesis of the teeming airports and crowded aisles most of us endure. Somehow flying from water to water makes the aerial part in between different.
moncler outlet store Walk inside an airliner and you take your land legs with you it’s just another room taking off. But when the Goose surged out into the bay towards open water it was like heading out to sea you were leaving everything behind; and when you felt the thrilling intermittent thud of water under the keel on touchdown and white suds clutched and chased across the window glass, you’d exchanged one enveloping but viscid element for another.
moncler outlet sale On my last afternoon on Kodiak Island I found the cabin of the Goose so full of wood 15ft planks, boards grazing the roof that Bryan and I could barely squeeze through to the cockpit. When we touched down in Kiavak Bay, an elderly man with rosy, weather beaten cheeks ambled down to meet us. Behind him was the skeleton of a small wooden cabin.
This was Andy who led goat hunting expeditions in the hills (the flying boat had brought in the first of the mountain goat population in the Fifties) and otherwise spent his cheap moncler jackets wholesale time building this house. He’d been at it four years already, said Bryan, and still there was no roof on the main part. Once in moncler coats for men a while the flying boat turned up with some more lumber.
cheap moncler jackets As we were unloading, Andy mumbled about how this year he really hoped he’d get the rafters on. His soppy labrador, lolling all over the planks, was the only other sign of life. A circular saw and cheap moncler coats for women a box of metal brackets came out of moncler coats for kids the Goose’s nose, and finally two large boxes of cheese. Andy looked at the lumber and mused, half to himself it seemed: “Guess I’ve got something to do for the rest of the day.”
Back on board the flying boat, the lone figure on the beach already small and receding, I said to Bryan: “In 20 years you can bring him a dishwasher.” I’m sure the Goose will still be around then.