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6 Ranch Podcast
6 Ranch Podcast
Vietnam War Stories and Dory Fishing
Meet Lee, Mike and Jeff. They have interesting life journeys, and I felt grateful to get to hear them. Lee, a Vietnam-era helicopter pilot tells one of the most interesting stories I have ever heard: Your parents randomly showing up across the World to hang out with you while you are in the middle of War. Storytelling Gold. We also chat Dory fishing and how great the Oregon Coast is.
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I woke up about 3 in the morning and I thought we're getting mortared and my mom and dad are here and I ran across the compound yelling mother and somebody was awake to hear it because I got into my hooch and I shook my mom and dad Are you okay, are you okay? And they said yes, god damn it, go to bed. So that story is still being told by my friends at various places.
Speaker 3:These are stories of outdoor adventure and expert advice from folks with calloused hands. I'm James Nash and this is the Six Ranch Podcast For those of you out there that are truck guys. They make bomb-proof drawer systems to keep your gear organized and safely locked away in the back of your truck. Clothes, rifles, packs, kill kits can all get organized and at the ready so you don't get to your hunting spot and waste time trying to find stuff. We all know that guy. Don't be that guy. They also have a line of storage cases that fit perfectly in the drawers. We use them for organizing ammunition, knives, glassing equipment, extra clothing and camping stuff. You can get a two drawer system for all dimensions of full-size truck beds, or a single drawer system that fits mid-size truck beds. And maybe best of all, they're all made in the usa. So get decked and get after it. Check them out at deckedcom. Shipping is always free. All right, gentlemen, we're sitting here on the oregon coast looking at a big rock covered in bird shit. Where are we at? Who am I talking to?
Speaker 1:Well, you're talking to Lee Chambers. My family's had a house here in Pacific City for 103 years 103 years and a long time ago my dad took me up that rock when I was, I think, 10 okay and during the war that rock was used as bombing practice, and when my dad first went up there by himself right after the war, it was covered with bombs yeah, a bunch of unexploded ones, probably no, not a little.
Speaker 1:They're little cast iron things. They had a shotgun shell in them and a hollow tube up the back. We got one up at the house and when it would hit it would set off the shotgun tube and set out a puff of smoke. So they knew they got a hit. Okay, that's how they knew. And there were bombs all over up there then and they're very small, just little practice things, and they're all gone now there isn't a single one up there. They rusted out god so fast. Even ours, which he saved right after the war, is pretty rusty yeah and, uh, they're gone.
Speaker 3:When I, when he took me up there, I was looking all over for bombs and there weren't any I was in uh, north carolina bear hunting last December and we went over to the Maritime Museum at Bogue Inlet in Moorhead City we're right next to Moorhead City, maybe, and they had a museum there where they had been bringing up a lot of the stuff that they'd found from Queen Anne's Revenge. Blackbeard's ship that sunk there in the inlet was scuttled there in the inlet, but they also had the facility inside the museum where they were restoring all of that stuff. And their process for stopping that electrolysis was very interesting.
Speaker 3:I wish I could speak more about how they actually did it, but it wasn't enough to just pull a cannon out of the water and spray it with some fresh water and and stop it, otherwise it would continue to corrode, like what you're talking about yep but I like, I think a lot of, uh, a lot of boys that don't grow up, I I kind of thought the piracy looked pretty cool to me and then seeing, uh, seeing the actual munitions that they were using, I don't think it would be good it wouldn't be cool it.
Speaker 3:No, the one that that had the biggest impact on on me to look at was I didn't know where barbells had come from. You know, I thought that that had always been a weightlifting thing, but it was actually two cannonballs that were welded together with a shaft in between that was built for taking out rigging and masts and things like that Sometimes a chain in between. Sometimes a chain too and I think about one of those coming anywhere near me would make me no longer want to be a pirate.
Speaker 1:It wouldn't be that much near me would would make me no longer want to be a pirate. It wouldn't. It wouldn't be that much. I think a lot of those preservation techniques that you're talking about were pioneered by the vasa over in sweden when they recovered the vasa almost intact. But they had the same electrolysis issues with all the metal in the ship and it isn't a matter of just spraying it, although they sprayed it for, I think, something like 30 years and that's where all the cannons were built was in sweden too, so sweden built.
Speaker 3:They were the only place in the world that could build the cannons, so they built them for whoever had money and they sort of had this like neutrality stance, but also like we're going to give all of you guns have a nice day.
Speaker 1:Let us know how it works, yeah yeah, jeff, how about you?
Speaker 4:uh, how about me? Like, where am I from? Yeah, who are you? What are you about? Well, um, we've had this house in pacific city for about almost 25 years. Um, I'm originally a Salem boy, so our family started actually came to Oregon in 1848. Kind of came up the coast and ended up in the Southern Willamette Valley and then sort of migrated north into the Salem area.
Speaker 3:So did they sail here, or? No, they came overland, yeah. So that would have been the very beginning of the Oregon Trail.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah exactly, and so, and, and the reason I remember the date is, I think, the 49ers. They discovered gold in California and, true to family form, instead of taking a left where the gold is, my family went right, went north and there's no gold.
Speaker 3:But but they grow stuff. Yeah, thank goodness right. Oh no, kidding.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and then I've been in Salem for at least three generations and my great-grandfather had a music store in Salem. My grandfather worked for a bank in Salem, my dad was in the airline business, in the travel business in the Salem area for a number of years and I spent a little bit of time doing that myself and then kind of went into a few different industries after that. But I'm kind of thankful. In high school I started drifting the Nesducker River, which is just right out the back door here, and kind of discovered Pacific City through floating the river. It's also how I met Lee was over the gunwale of a drift boat.
Speaker 3:Oh really.
Speaker 1:Yeah, forty years ago, that's true.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it has been 40 years it has been. Yeah, I was working on a boat in my yard and he wanders down the street and comes up on the other side of the boat and said Hi, I'm Lee Chambers and I'm building a dory to go float to Colorado just three doors down. Come on down and have a look.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I built a boat from scratch, yeah, and I didn't know what I was doing, so I picked people's brains. Why is the seat here? Why isn't it three inches forward or three inches aft, sure? What is the dynamics? How high off the bottom of the hole should the seat with my ass on it go. Yeah, why are the oar locks placed where they are? And I was building a boat from scratch, out of fiberglass, I mean I was a glass dory a glass, okay, dory, and which?
Speaker 3:is a lot less common for for river dories well, yeah there's a weird distinction naming issue.
Speaker 4:Uh, in in the pacific northwest we refer to as a drift boat. Yeah, and the same boat, except decked, is referred to as a dory right in the colorado river country and and in the snake and salmon and stuff like that too.
Speaker 3:yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4:So he's building for want of a better term a dory.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:When, in fact, the stuff that we fish with out of here is a whole different design, but also called a dory.
Speaker 1:So I'm building this out of fiberglass which I've never worked with before, from scratch. I'm building this boat. I'm building this out of fiberglass which I've never worked with before, from scratch. I'm building this boat. I'm picking people's brains, and Jeff was my neighbor. He was half a block away and we became friends and I got him involved in the thing and the next thing, you know, he went with my wife and I down to Colorado for a month and took the boat down. How'd she do? Well, let's see, there's a. There's a kind of a kind of a mixed, mixed opinion about that. But did we, did we flip on the first trip?
Speaker 1:yeah yeah I think we went over in crystal. Yeah, crystal is the place to do it. Yeah well, we went over in crystal and uh, my jeff went out one side, I went out the other side. We swam ashore and my wife just bobbed on down the river and went through rancid tuna and and the river just spit her out and she got up on a rock. It was an interesting time but the boat held up very well. It was completely hatched and decked in watertight compartments and oops, let me turn this off.
Speaker 4:The boat went five miles down the river upside down by itself. Yeah, underwater, yeah.
Speaker 1:But we found it, flipped it over, bailed it out, spent an interesting night at the next campsite rebuilding the front hatch had been torn in half and I had enough fiberglass and everything. I rebuilt the whole thing.
Speaker 4:We were on the river the next day we lost some gear and about 10 cases of beer.
Speaker 3:Oh a tragedy. Did you find it like Eddie Dowd as he went down the?
Speaker 1:best story is that one of the things we lost was a half a gallon of gin.
Speaker 1:And it was in a big bottle and it left the beer and the coat and everything. So four days later I get up early and I walk out into the river. I mean it's dawn and it's still dark where we are. You can see the sun starting to hit up there. And I walk out in the river and I'm taking a leak and something hits me in the leg and I look down and it is the intact bottle of gin in an eddy. It came around and hit me in the leg. We drank that gin.
Speaker 1:That was an amazing thing I mean you about have to at that point yes yeah, it's meant to be so then we came back from that trip and I rebuilt the boat and we took it again in 1992. 92 was the next time we took it. Yeah, my first trip down there was 72, before they had permits or anything, and I was on a trip for two months. We just trip down there was 72 before they had permits or anything, and I was on a trip for two months. We just stayed down there and got resupplied at Phantom Ranch and wow, that was a long one, but it kind of sparked me. I knew I wanted to build a boat that was really designed to do that, to go underwater and so I did.
Speaker 3:It's fun. I guided whitewater on the Grand Ronde, snake and salmon for a long time and I distinctively remember the first time I saw a dory crew come down the salmon and we were scouting the rapid. And you know we're guiding clients right. So we're in big rubber boats, Yep. And I saw this crew of gals come down in wooden dories that were all painted beautifully, they were double-ended, yep, very elegant boats. They all had sliding seats and they they slicked through those rapids without taking a drop anywhere and it it was like the river was wearing them yeah instead of you know me on a you know 24 foot gear boat with 36 inch tubes and 20 foot oars, and you know it was.
Speaker 3:Everybody was just fighting for their life against each other and slamming into those waves and you know kind of clubbing the river to death it. It was just so graceful and elegant. It was a really incredible thing, and there is something about the way these boats have been built in Oregon that allows them to do that, and the eye that people have for how boats interact with water here in the Northwest is distinct from everywhere else in the world, is it? In a lot of ways, I grew up here, so I don't know.
Speaker 1:I grew up in a full boat. Are you familiar with the term full boat?
Speaker 3:No.
Speaker 1:It was a German craft now called a Klepper craft. Okay, but it was called a full boat when they were originally built, and F-O-L-B-O-T and they are a rubberized canvas hull.
Speaker 3:I have one.
Speaker 1:With wooden dowels and, and yeah, wooden deals. Well, that's what I grew up in yeah, I.
Speaker 3:I have an old klepper that I think is from the 50s yeah, yeah, I'm sure it did, although they're still making them yeah and my dad had two of them and he had one a little motor for one of them.
Speaker 1:He had a sale for one of them he had. He had a little motor for one of them. He had a sail for one of them.
Speaker 3:He had everything People have crossed the Atlantic in those things.
Speaker 1:I'm surprised my father didn't. They're really phenomenal.
Speaker 3:I had mine when I was stationed in North Carolina and paddled it out through the surf and tumbled it in the waves and it stood up to all that, even though it was already 50 years old at the time.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:Yeah, pretty incredible boat.
Speaker 1:You want to be in a good head space when you start assembling it, especially if you Well, you get the two halves together and then you join them right here and you push down and if you've done it right, it goes yeah.
Speaker 3:And it's perfect, and if you haven't, then you have to go find somebody and some epoxy and start making it make sense again, it's a different deal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Well, that's what I grew up in, and they would fit in two bags.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And.
Speaker 3:We're using it to paddle out shark baits in North Carolina. Really To get baits out past the breakers and and drop them off.
Speaker 3:And then we're fishing for for sharks off the beach, which was a great time. I'd started out swimming my baits out because I I didn't have a boat or kayak or anything and I'd catch bluefish and swim them out and drop them. And one time I dropped a bait and as soon as I turned around and started side stroking it back to the beach, I could see my rod was going and there was already a shark on it. Dang it.
Speaker 3:So I I wasn't like thinking about the shark, I was thinking I'm gonna miss this fish, you know. So I um hauled, hauled bud over to the beach as quick as I could, um set the hook, missed the fish and reeled in. I still had half of a bluefish there that was kind of kicking around and I thought, well, that's still a pretty good bait. And I swam it back out there and dropped it. And as soon as I dropped it the rod went again and I ended up getting back and getting the shark landed. But I was also like man if one of my Marines did something as stupid as this I would light him on fire, you know.
Speaker 3:Like.
Speaker 1:I would be so mad if I saw one of my marines do something this ridiculous I was like all right, I, I gotta, I gotta figure out a kayak yeah but the, the clipper and and full boats that we're in are so much more stable than a canoe or or um any of the little fiberglass boats I mean, it was stable.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You could get away with murder in it.
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Speaker 1:He owns a dory.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so they actually started out as double enders, much like what you saw on the snake.
Speaker 1:And they were rowed out.
Speaker 4:There was no motors involved. A lot of them were two-position, two-rowing positions, and so there was two guys, four oars, and one guy would be the steering guy and the other guy is just horsepower.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4:And they'd roll them out to the rock and go fish. Yeah, and then same thing they did row back through the surf sometimes they'd row all the way up to cape lookout, or oh yeah, and how far are we talking here?
Speaker 1:well, it isn't so far, but you were going against the set of the ocean, so it was a long row up there, probably what eight, it's, it's 10 miles, okay, 10 miles exactly from the rock and then you could fish along it, because it sticks two miles out to sea, so there tends to be some good fishing around it and then you could ease back without rowing, so you could get back here and then use your energy to get back in to the surf, if you were lucky. Yeah, and it wasn't foggy. It was not easy.
Speaker 3:Now there's a Norwegian lumber ship that wrecked out here at one time, right? Do you guys know this story? I do not no, and a bunch of homes were built out of it.
Speaker 1:No, I do not.
Speaker 3:All right, I'm going to have to do some more research before I talk about it too much. But a family friend has a home that was built out of this ship and basically it sailed out of British Columbia. It had some troubles near the mouth of the Columbia. They abandoned ship. It ghosted for a few days and then shipwrecked somewhere near here.
Speaker 1:It's not the Peter Iredale.
Speaker 3:No, no, I don't think so that wasn't a lumber ship.
Speaker 1:I don't think.
Speaker 3:But it scattered lumber all over the beaches and that still happens and and people uh, built like a dozen homes out of it and including some wood that came off of the ship itself, and a family friend has has one of these homes. It was built out of both the ship and its lumber and, uh, he gave me a, a cleaver and a giant wooden mallet.
Speaker 1:Um, that came from that ship well, that's wonderful, but I never heard of it and me neither.
Speaker 3:That's I thought I'd heard most of the stories around here and I think it shows up at real low tide sometimes, but I I also think it's somewhat north of here. Anyhow, I think about that mallet, and it was certainly used, uh, for hammering that cleaver through me, but it also would have been about the right tool, uh, for slamming wedges into holes in a boat that were leaking, and I I like to think that you know somebody was was slamming, uh, slamming cloth or wool or something into holes in that ship with wedges until they're like you know what. I don't even like this job.
Speaker 4:They tossed it into the building.
Speaker 2:I'm going ashore. This is not a career for me.
Speaker 1:Honestly, I hadn't heard that. I've heard a lot about wrecks.
Speaker 3:Yeah Well, I'll do some more research so I can speak about it better. But dories here in Pacific City kind of talk me through it.
Speaker 4:So average dory is probably 20 to 22 feet long. They've got a bit of a rake in the bow, which is very similar to the dories that you were talking about, where they were double-enders. They used to have a rake at both ends so they curved up Rake, like something you'd use to scratch up leaves. No. A curve in the bow, An angle.
Speaker 3:Okay, so they're lifted in the bow and in the stern.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and the lift in the stern kind of went away when the boats became square stern dories. So they got rid of the pointy end at the stern and they became square enders.
Speaker 1:And were they square ended for power? They were square ended to put a motor on. Yeah Right.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so they started out with wells inside. So instead of hanging a motor on the outside or the stern of the boat, they built a well or a hole in the boat that was elevated on all sides so water didn't come in and they'd hang up outboard there the boats are designed. The launch here is significantly different than everywhere else. Dories in Pacific City are launched through the surf, and so you've got a dory on a trailer, you've got a launch rig, you drive down to the beach and essentially you back that dory into the ocean, into the surf. You've got a man that'll turn the dory around to point into the ocean, into the surf. Uh, you've got a man that'll that'll turn the dory around to point it bow first into the surf, and so they'll hold the dory while either people get into it or the driver of the launch rig will park and then come back down climbing the boat, and so every day that we launch here, you're launching through the surf. Okay, uh, some days there's no surf, other days it's five, six foot kind of surf.
Speaker 4:So sounds like timing is important timing is very important, uh, engine starting is equally important engine.
Speaker 1:Starting is number one on my list, yeah, it, it um it's.
Speaker 4:Here's one of the rules that everybody learns eventually, and that is that you only launch in a surf that you're willing to row back through.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Because if you get offshore and your engine quits, somebody will give you a tow back to the edge of the surf if you've got to get there, but you've got to row this 20, 22-foot boat back through the surf Right, and so that becomes sort of the yardstick by which you measure your, your days If you're not willing to row through it, don't go out in it. Yeah, Um, but they're. They're very stable craft. They are very, very seaworthy.
Speaker 1:They're flat bottom.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's a flat bottom boat, so you choose your days, okay.
Speaker 3:Is there any kind of reverse?
Speaker 4:shine on them or anything like that or is it a square edged?
Speaker 4:shine. It's square well they're. The sterns are square. There's um.
Speaker 4:Most of the dories built from the 70s on have a bit of an angle to the stern. So if you're in a following sea it will pick the boat up and it's kind of a leftover design from when they were double enders and it really makes a huge difference. It doesn't take much of an angle to help get that boat up. When it is following sea or you're coming in the landing routine here, essentially you get offshore. Most guys essentially will take a look at the beach and say, okay, if you've got passengers, you agree on where you're going to land. We have a lot of hazards here coming in A lot of surfers down there because it's a great place to surf.
Speaker 4:We've got people on the beach. I mean it's dogs and kids and strollers and people playing on the beach and people walking on the beach, vehicles driving around which are launching or landing, and so you kind of pick a place and you have to stay between waves. So waves actually doesn't look like it, but they're moving pretty fast and so you've got to stay on the back of the one in front of you. You don't want to jump off a four or five foot wave because the landing is bad, and then you slide this boat up on the beach and the idea is that if you can get it to a place where you can put your trailer under it, then you're golden. If it doesn't get far enough onto hard sand, then you hook a rope on it and tow it a little further up into harder sand. The trailers here are sort of a special design where you essentially back the trailer underneath the boat. So the boat's sitting on hard sand, you back it underneath it, the trailer uh, is it's.
Speaker 4:It's hinged in the middle, if you will and so the rollers slide under the boat, it gets about halfway on and you crank it up and then hopefully you can get all this crap off the beach, because without killing a tourist. Yeah, or getting stuck, which it happens all the time. It's fluffy sand. But it's a bit of an adventure just to go fishing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it sounds like it and yeah, I think timing with all things is important. I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about Vietnam, and then we'll do a little mic swap here and tap you out. So what service branch were you in? I was in the Army did you want to be in the Marine Corps and couldn't? I was.
Speaker 1:I was drafted I was drafted and when I got to my flight class of 250 people, I was the only draftee there. Everyone else had enlisted in the Army to go fly helicopters and I just got drafted and took the test and they said we'll make you a helicopter pilot so had you gone through college I had about uh six quarters. At that point I had not gone through. But okay, but you're at, you're in school I had done some, but then I'd been in the merchant marine before that I went.
Speaker 3:I was close to a Well, you're close to one right now, I know.
Speaker 1:I didn't want to go to school, I wanted to travel. My whole family are traveling people. They just every generation just travels. So I wanted to do that too, but I couldn't because there was no, there were no options. In 1965, when I graduated from high school, you were drafted or you were in college. There wasn't anything else. There was a little bit of gray area which I found, which is if you were in the Merchant Marine, you were draft-exempt while you were in the Merchant Marine. And my dad had spent World War II in the Merchant Marine, who happened to be friends with the then the now head of the union in Portland, and he got me in.
Speaker 3:Is this the Merchant Marine Academy in New York?
Speaker 1:No, no no, no, just when you join the Merchant Marine. Well, it was really weird during Vietnam. It was catch 22. You couldn't get in the Merchant Marine unless you could get a letter from a union saying they'd hire you. But you couldn't get a letter from the union saying they'd hire you unless you had a Z card. And you couldn't get a Z card unless they gave you one at Government Central. So in essence you couldn't get in. But this union guy wrote me the magic letter that said he'd hire me and I got on as the lowest paid man in the ship. I was a wiper it's down the engine room.
Speaker 1:I cleaned up engineers messes and I ended up strangely enough, we're leaving from seattle and then we went to Japan and then we went to the Philippines and then we went to Vietnam and sat there for a month at Newport Docks in in Saigon, and because I worked in the engine room and we weren't running engines, I had nothing to do and I was getting paid double time, double time just to be there. So I had a great time. I got to know a lot of the Vietnamese and, um, I even got into the food and uh, so what year would this have been?
Speaker 1:that was 67 okay so then I come back and I start school again, but the draft board said, uh-uh, you had your shot, and they immediately drafted me okay and I ended up at fort lewis and I took all the tests and, uh, I was in basic training and I'd done five weeks of basic training, broke my leg, pulled out of basic training and sat around for two months with a cast how'd you break your leg? I came roaring out of the barracks like everyone else with weapon yeah, backpack, uh-huh boots looking crispy, hit the ice, oh did one of these beautiful numbers.
Speaker 1:It was later described to me bang. I just broke it instantly. So the day they took the cast off, I, uh, I walked back to the, to the uh cadre and as I walk up, the first sergeant leans out and said hey, you idiot, you got orders for flight school.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you suck at walking, but you can't take them and I said what do you mean? I can't take them.
Speaker 1:And he said well, you're on a medical profile. You can't stand, walk, jump, da, da, da da. And I said I want to talk to the CO and the CO said, well, he'd love to get rid of me. He said you've maxed out all the tests You've done, fine, but he said there's one test that I can't pencil you through, no matter what, and that is the live fire exercise, where you get underneath the deal and they shoot live bullets over your head at night and set off bombs and stuff he said well, there's one of those happening tonight, though I'm going to send you out there in the medic truck and you can watch.
Speaker 1:So I did. I went out in the medic track, we drank coffee, watched these guys crawl under this stuff came back next day I got a, got on a plane all by myself private e nothing. Never finished basic training or anything, went to uh, fort Walters, texas, and started flight school.
Speaker 3:See, I love that. They identified that you could watch ground combat element do their thing from a safe place and they thought this guy's born to be a pilot.
Speaker 4:I know.
Speaker 1:Well, that was weird, I was, yeah, it was amazing.
Speaker 3:Are you regretting this yet? No, no.
Speaker 4:No.
Speaker 1:I get to flight school and I'm sitting there in the barracks all by myself, because I got there early and these five huge buses pull up outside and they empty out all these guys and they're all in military shit and I'm just sitting in this barracks. It's about 105 out. It's texas, for christ's sake. And I'm watching these guys and I'm thinking, well, what are they all doing? And they got harassed for five hours. They're sitting down in the hot sun doing push-ups, getting yelled at and all that. I'm watching the whole thing. These are my future. So I was meant to be a helicopter pilot. Oh, that's awesome.
Speaker 3:So did you fly a Huey? Yes, I did, great aircraft.
Speaker 1:They're wonderful.
Speaker 3:Continue to be.
Speaker 1:I swear I could fly one today and I have not touched the controls of. I've flown in a lot, but I have not touched the controls of a helicopter since April Fool's Day, 1971. That's the last time I touched one. And I did that illegally, because I flew down to the IG Farben building in Frankfurt, out-processed from the Army, and then flew back as a civilian yeah, you know, but that was the last and then flew back as a civilian in yeah you know, but that was the last time I flew I was talking with greg about this on the way over.
Speaker 3:For me it was palpable when the vietnam era pilots started to retire and get out of aviation like the. The feeling of aircraft changed, whether it was commercial aircraft, private aircraft. As your generation retired from flying commercially, it changed aviation forever.
Speaker 1:I think it did.
Speaker 3:And you were the best helicopter pilots that will ever exist.
Speaker 1:I think that's true and you know, um, when I was in, when I got to vietnam, I, like everyone else, was a peter pilot, a co-pilot for three months approximately, and then I was made an aircraft commander and that rank is gone. They don't do it. They haven't used it since, people tell me, in the late 80s they got rid of it. And being an aircraft commander is a different whole thing from being a pilot in charge aircraft commander. I we can and did tell generals to have a nice day, but we aren't going to do that.
Speaker 1:We're going to do something over here yeah and you had to right because it was your life and your crew and and your decision. And you got up in the morning and every single twitch of a muscle, the controls and your brain, and three radios and an intercom and a colonel trying to tell you something in the back and a major yelling at you from the ground, all of that happens simultaneously, yeah, and pretty much all day, even if you're bringing donut dollies or beer or one time 2,500 pound chunk of ice out to a fire bay. And by the time we picked it up we got it slid in and kind of strapped in and got out to this fire base. Most of it had melted all over us. So it was a kind of a cool flight. It it was fun.
Speaker 3:Which is probably about 700 pounds over your load limit. Yeah. We didn't even think in terms of load limits, sure, all the gunships were over max. If it fits the ships, yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh jeez. I was a slick pilot.
Speaker 3:That was easy compared to being a gunny that, that radio piece that you're talking about, where you have your intercom and then three radio channels occurring simultaneously.
Speaker 3:That was the same thing in the tank yeah, and you know, my my experience is as a tank commander and tank platoon commander is very similar in a lot of ways to what you're talking about and the closest thing I can compare it to uh, for people who haven't had that experience is you'll see it on like superhero movies, like whether it's Superman or Batman, and where they can hear like all the voices simultaneously and have to somehow distill all of that traffic and understand it and be able to run a switch back and forth for who you're talking to and be able to run a switch back and forth for who you're talking to.
Speaker 3:Even thinking back to having four conversations simultaneously and running a switch for who I was communicating with, that seems very overwhelming to me right now.
Speaker 1:It is.
Speaker 3:But once you get into it you can actually do that while operating an incredibly complex machine. For me, if I stopped doing stuff with the tank, it just kind of sat there. You stop doing stuff with a helicopter and it's going to keep moving.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Huey's didn't have any provision for letting go of the controls you were always although I flew a lot with the stick between my legs- Sure, that's why they put it there, and you always had an ashtray. I mean, think about that. That didn't exist anymore.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We had an ashtray on both sides and we would just talk it through. And if you had a good co-pilot and he um, you could learn a lot. You could teach a little and learn a lot yeah, I understand.
Speaker 3:You got a a special visit one time while you're in vietnam I did.
Speaker 1:My folks came to visit me and people people who should know better have called bullshit, but all my friends that were in my unit got to spend two days with my mom and dad, so they know what happened.
Speaker 2:And you had to know my mom and dad.
Speaker 1:I mean I told you we were a traveling family. I didn't think a thing of it. My mother was an ex-Army nurse. She ran the emergency room at Salem General Hospital. When I was a kid growing up, my dad was a salesman of the machinery that does everything to plywood and particle board and stuff except actually lay up plywood. But everything else was part of the stuff that he sold. So he sold it all over the world. He would go down to Gaboon and design two plywood plants or something, and so they went everywhere and they were on a trip around the world and they they were going to angkor wat in cambodia, but angkor wat had just been overrun by the kumaruj, and so they were down in the hotel talking to the concierge and saying, well, where should we go next? And he said, well, why don't you go to Vietnam? It's a very pretty country. And they said, well, we know about, there's a war there because our son is there. And he said, well, go visit. So they did.
Speaker 3:How did they know where you were?
Speaker 1:Well, we'd been writing letters, believe it or not.
Speaker 3:And.
Speaker 1:Dong Bichon is right where I was stationed. It was right across the bay from Cam Ranh Bay. It was on the inland side, and so my dad, they flew in on Air Vietnam, which was an airline God help you if you got on it, but it was an airline and they flew into Saigon and my dad called me I and he said how do we get to where you are? And I said I don't have a clue how you get here. I couldn't figure out how he figured out how to talk on an army radio, I mean on a telephone yeah and.
Speaker 1:But he found me that that was my father and I said but if you can get the camera on bay, I'll have a sergeant show up with a jeep and pull you over here. But I had to fly. I had to fly the whole time they were there. We were short on pilots and I couldn't go get them. They were 150 miles away in Saigon. I could get away with a lot, but probably not that. So I said, if you can get there, well, he went over, apparently, and went to the Air America desk which was around and said we need to get to Cam Ranh Bay. And I'm sure some specialist for spooks looked at this man and his wife he's in a business suit, she's in a black cocktail dress and said I think this might be a spook. So he put them on a Queen Air and they flew all around Vietnam and ended up in Cameron Bay.
Speaker 1:And so the next day I was out flying and I didn't have any idea what was going on. And about 4.30 I come in on final and I look over and here's my mom and dad just waving as we come into the heliport. And we spent two days. The second day we had the Korean I don't know what. You'd call it showgirls and band and Mustang Sally and the whole thing. Once a month we got a group into the officer's club so we had this group come in and there was a little drinking and then we all went to bed and then we got mortared. And we only got mortared once a month.
Speaker 3:Okay, that's how you know to change your calendar.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, but they timed it with. Maybe they didn't even know about the Korean band, I don't know.
Speaker 1:but my folks were asleep in my hooch, my roommate and I had moved out and I stayed in a room that had air conditioning and somebody came in and said mortars, mortars and shook me and I went okay, and I went back to sleep, except do the whole thing yeah, um, it's the right thing to do yeah, but about three in the morning, after it all dies down and it's crap going on for a while and then it all dies down and I woke up about three in the morning and I thought we're getting mortared and my mom and dad are here and I ran across the compound yelling mother, and somebody was awake to hear it because I got into my hooch and I shook my mom and dad are you okay? Are you okay? And they said, yes, god damn it, go to bed. So, um, that story is still being told by my friends at various places.
Speaker 1:But, um, the next day I loaded my parents in the back of my Huey and I flew him from Cam Ranh Bay to Nha Trang low level, never got higher than three feet off of highway one. All the way up there doing pedal turns and grinning like a Cheshire Cat because it was fun to turn and look at my mom and dad and there they got two suitcases between their legs and they're strapped in in the middle and then there's two machine guns sticking out. And there they were just few and I dropped them off at air america and they talked to somebody into another flight and went on around the world.
Speaker 3:They, uh, they wrote interesting letters about that trip, though it was fun that is one of the most amazing war stories I've ever heard in my life. It is amazing.
Speaker 1:And so far. I published that story in the Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association newsletter. I wrote it up. My sister said you've got to write that up.
Speaker 2:So I did.
Speaker 1:And I said at the end has anyone else had this experience of having your parents there? No one has ever had it. They've had colonels and generals who came over to visit their sons and daughters well, mostly sons in Vietnam. And the number one problem of my mother's visit, would you care to guess what it was Finding her a bathroom.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, there are no ladies' johns in vietnam.
Speaker 1:I suppose not but we would, we figured out, we would post guards and clear places out whenever she needed it.
Speaker 3:But yeah, it was fun. I'm glad that my mom hadn't heard that story before.
Speaker 1:She'd have been there right she would have showed up in shirgazi, afghanistan, and I would have been like right, she would have showed up in Shugazi Afghanistan and I would have been like oh no, it's fun Embarrassing.
Speaker 1:No, it wasn't to me. My parents are gas and all my friends, all the pilots in our club. I treated them like the great folks they were. But interestingly enough, we shared our officers club with a with the 10th battalion aviation battalion, which is a lot of colonels and generals and stuff. They were over our unit but they shared our, and not one of them, not one of those colonels, generals, walked over and introduced themselves to my mother or father that's weird it is, but everyone thought they were spooks oh gotcha, and if you're a, spook it.
Speaker 1:It isn't good for your career if you know spooks, I guess yeah so they didn't.
Speaker 3:They didn't do it, but all my friends had a great time yeah, well, sir, um, thank you very much for your service to our country, and I had more fun than anyone has any right to have, I had the best job in Vietnam.
Speaker 1:I was the best ranked chief warrant officer is God oh yeah, nobody knows what you do.
Speaker 3:Nobody knows who's in charge of you. They don't, yeah, you can dress however you want. Exactly, you can go into enlisted haven of you. They don't, yeah, you can dress however you want exactly you can go into, haven't? Had. Haven't had a haircut since the previous war.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah you can go anywhere yeah um, my roommate in vietnam, a guy named jim bankston, from minnesota and and still a close friend, became the first w5 when they created the rank. Yeah, he was on the first set of orders as a w5, which is kind of cool yeah, and that's.
Speaker 3:That's godlike status. Oh, that means this guy knows more about this subject than any other human in the world.
Speaker 1:That's yeah, and jim pretty much does. Yeah, he, uh.
Speaker 3:I lost a tail rotor once and, and jim was behind me lost well it broke okay and um that have anything to do with flying three feet from the ground no, no, no.
Speaker 1:We were up at 1500 feet and I was half asleep. We were coming home. We were coming and my co-pilot happened to be an aircraft commander, but he was flying as my co-pilot because we were short of co-pilots. His name is Gator Green and he died last week which is why I remembered it.
Speaker 3:Sorry to hear that.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I am too, but he'd had a tough last five years. But Gator's flying. I'm listening to AFN, completely spaced out. I'm as close to asleep in a helicopter as you can get and we're 15 minutes from home Late in the afternoon, Everything's fine. Bam, bam, bam, bam bam and the whole helicopter goes like this in the air and we're doing 90 knots. So it shouldn't be able to do that, but it did it. It went sideways and we're doing 90 knots, so it shouldn't be able to do that, but it did it. It went sideways and Gatish says you got it, You're up guard and hands me everything. I'm just barely coming awake as this thing's coming unglued and Jesus, that was a long 45 seconds to the ground.
Speaker 3:But so what do you do? You can't auto-rotate without a tail rotor.
Speaker 1:Well, you can, but what I ended up doing? I kept trying to input forward speed. Okay, More speed means more wind going past your aircraft, which means that that tail can't move sideways.
Speaker 3:So the tail boom is trying to keep this straight. Yeah, the tail boom is trying to end this straight.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the tail boom is trying to and the tail fin up there. Yeah, so I'm trying to get more speed, but every time I input something it feels like it wants to turn turtle and go over.
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 1:So I put some in and I take some out, and I put some in and I take some out, and finally I'm feeling defeated by the whole thing. So I bottom the collective and just put the nose straight down and I am one of the few people that has seen 160 knots indicated in a Huey Red line's 120, and we were at 160. And the came down fast is to put it somewhat understated. We were 1500 feet and I don't know, and I it came out of that and I just started pulling back and we were staying straight.
Speaker 1:My fear is spinning because if you spin, it throws your body out towards the bubble, you wrap yourself over the controls, you've essentially lost everything, you've got no ability to fly, so I don't want to spin. I'm scared to death but I don't want to spin. So and I also want to be real near the ground when I start spinning right, because then I that's just a fall and it just came out of there so smooth and there were rice paddies everywhere and there was a dike and for reasons I don't quite understand, but I think it was just sheer fear I said, well, I'm just gonna set it on the dike, and I did, and it sat down on the dike and it kind of went like this for a minute and then the dike collapsed and I rolled upside down and I thought, hell, I have now survived a tail rotor failure and I'm going to drown because I'm underwater, my sides, I know and so I get unbuckled and I turn around and the crew chief, he got unbuckled and we swim up to the top and aircraft's on the side.
Speaker 1:So I climb up through the top of the cargo area and I look out and here's a whole bunch of Vietnamese with machine guns running towards me. I thought, oh shit.
Speaker 3:Yeah, out of the frying pan into the fire, yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm screwed. And then I realized that one of the guys running was a black Vietnamese. In other words, he was a black NCO. They were a rough puff force and they'd seen me go down and they were there. But what started that story? As I tell you, jim Bankston, my roommate, happened to come out of PO POL behind me by about five minutes, and this all happened very, very quickly. But Jim was right there. He landed next to me almost as soon as I touched down and we were out of there.
Speaker 3:So you're one of the reasons that we have the helo dunker as a training standard now.
Speaker 1:The what.
Speaker 3:The helo dunker. Do you know about?
Speaker 1:that. No, I don't know what the helo dunker is.
Speaker 3:Well, it sounds like you do. You get inside a helicopter body and you strap in and it spins you around a few times and then drops you upside down in the water and you get to unbuckle.
Speaker 1:Thank God they didn't do that to me and swim out of it, and everybody hates doing it. Oh God, I would do, and I think we probably have to because of you. Well, as a trooper, you'd have to, but hell, where you were, there was no water.
Speaker 3:There was at times yeah, okay. So it kind of depends uh, those a helo dunker, that's a new one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, those those water.
Speaker 3:Um, those wadis go all the way up into the himalaya. Yeah, and in the springtime there's tremendous flooding and some flash flooding that starts hundreds of miles away sure and there there was a tank in a previous deployment that got washed away, trying to cross one of those wadis I can imagine, wow, yeah, I can imagine how that water comes down there well, I I think we're going to switch gears, we're going to bring Mike on here and we're going to talk about boats some more.
Speaker 1:Good, can I give these to Mike? Absolutely, and thank you.
Speaker 3:Thank you, sir. Great stories, thank you. Okay, what's your last name, mike? Mike Laverty, l-a-v-e-r-t-y. Are you a Doryman? I am, yeah. So we're going to talk about Dories and I want to hear some stories. So we talked about launching off the beach and coming back to the beach, talked about what the boat is About 22 feet long, what's the beam like?
Speaker 2:It can vary. I mean it's getting bigger. You, you know, I think I'm at 72, maybe okay so 72 inches yeah, but I mean most aren't that big, traditional.
Speaker 4:Well, we I mean jeff can answer yeah, they started out much narrower like four foot, four foot, yeah, yeah and then mine's about a five and change-ish and they are getting beamier, yeah, um, and and longer I mean they're.
Speaker 3:They're getting to be bigger boats so what came first, the dory or the panga?
Speaker 4:good question. Yeah, um, dory's have been fishing out of here for 115 years. I don't know the panga panga, yeah, because that narrower beam with the big bow rake.
Speaker 3:That sounds very panga-like.
Speaker 2:It does yeah.
Speaker 3:Very much, so yeah which you know I've got a love-hate relationship with those boats because they're very waterworthy, but I've never been in a wetter boat. You know you're taking waves everywhere you go and spray. They're just a really wet boat. Everywhere you're going it feels like they are. Yeah, how are the dories for?
Speaker 4:that you know. It depends on which version you're in. Yeah, generally they're a fairly dry ride, unless you've got a big crosswind, yeah, and then it just doesn't matter.
Speaker 3:Sure, you're going to get hosed on one side or the other, and do you have the ability to trim them at all?
Speaker 4:You do, and you can trim fore and aft and essentially you move people around. If you're going to trim side to side, gotcha. They are fairly touchy from that standpoint.
Speaker 3:In a 22-foot boat. How many people are you seating, plus captain?
Speaker 4:You know, if it's just a sport boat captain plus four people is plenty. Yeah, We've got a number of charters that go off the beach now and they'll take six passengers, they'll be a captain and frequently a deckhand. And is that a 26, 28-foot boat? Oh, some of them are 20, 22-foot boats, really.
Speaker 3:That's a lot of people in that space.
Speaker 4:Oh, it looks like bowling pins. They're just stacked in there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it is, that's, uncomfortable.
Speaker 4:But they fish them and for them, I mean, it's a really economical platform to use, and if they can get six people in there at 300 bucks, a whack sure and fish till noon.
Speaker 2:Yeah, twice a day some days yeah yeah, all right, so why dories? Well, good question. But I mean, back back to you. Guys were talking about dory, the dory start, but uh, I mean my understanding was when they quit allowing netting in the river in the early 30s, that pushed them out over here to where they could launch. Okay and so.
Speaker 3:So people just took their river boats and decided to head to the ocean.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then did some modification because they couldn't be where they were Right.
Speaker 3:So, but.
Speaker 2:But why dory fishing? I mean, I got into it for a couple of reasons. One my wife brought me to PC, even though I was familiar with PC growing up in Newport, but I had never dory fished. I'd done a lot of fishing but never dory fished, and I quickly figured out that I was a long ways from Garibaldi and a fair amount from Depot Bay.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And that was pretty good. You like that.
Speaker 3:I like that Dude. The rivalry in these coastal towns is blowing my mind.
Speaker 2:Well, it wasn't so much rivalry, although you know Lincoln City is kind of the armpit of the world.
Speaker 3:Everybody hates on Lincoln City. From my perspective, coming from the eastern edge of Oregon, I've spent very little time over here on the coast and I'm going to sound ignorant, but one part of the coast looks pretty similar to me to the next and the towns kind of all seem to have the same kind of shops and you can buy your saltwater taffy here or your seashell wind chime over here and um, when we were at the fish cleaning station last night in uh in newport, we're asking about how long it was going to take to get up here to pacific city and uh, this you know 100 000 year old woman who was uh cutting up these, these tuna goes. Well, you're gonna have to go through seven miles of hell. I was like well, that sounds bad. What are you talking about? And she's like Lincoln City, poor Lincoln City, it's just getting the rat.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's well-deserved. It's well-deserved, they earned it. They don't fight it too much.
Speaker 3:I'm cool with it Okay, all right. Okay, so it's a different kind of boat. You launch off the beach, but I'm still trying to figure out why you would do that rather than in something that's more modern and conventional I mean, I think there's there's a challenge aspect to it.
Speaker 2:It's more of a you know kind of a pucker factor, for sure yeah, for all the launch and landing launch and landing and and. But you have. You know, you had less fishermen. Yeah, you know less people too.
Speaker 3:So those two attractions were so the tradition is important as well.
Speaker 2:Oh for sure, yeah, respect the tradition and figuring out how to do it and go through your learning curve of being stuck and breaking stuff and crashing.
Speaker 3:Is there a dozer around for when people get stuck on the beach?
Speaker 2:We wish. Yeah, they can't get there fast enough. Yeah, because you know everybody's filming you nowadays, so it doesn't take long to you know to get harassed.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But everybody. That's the funny thing about here. Everybody chips in to help people. You don't sit there long, Right, yeah, which is really cool.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it is a really unique thing about this particular fishery. I think in 115 years of tracking it we've lost three fishermen here that have been either lost at sea or passed away out at sea. That's very safe.
Speaker 3:Yes, it is very safe.
Speaker 4:And the other part is that if you have a problem out here, you can get on a radio and the closest dory will show up. You may have never met him in your life, right. We will go tuna fishing and end up 50 miles offshore and there'll be a bunch of dories out there and if somebody needs to get towed home's going to tow you home. Yeah, um, it's, it's get all of the people home safe. Right, that's it, and everybody here, uh, has a huge amount of respect for that rule.
Speaker 3:If you will just get the humans home safely it's much the same in hell's canyon with the jet boats yeah because there's no cell service, there's no roads, um, there's no seto, there's no coast guard.
Speaker 3:so if, if something happens like you have an obligation and and an obligation that you feel good about to lend whatever assistance you need. Uh, the the main difference in hells is that you have the rafting element as well, and you know, especially the newer rafters really hate jet boats. Right, they're loud, they don't care about gravity. You know they hate the jets until they, you know, get a hangnail and then they're, you know, waving their arms on the beach like Hell help help right, which, again, the jets are, you know, happy to help with, but I I really love that about especially remote waterways.
Speaker 3:If you're talking about an inland lake or something that that environment isn't really there, but if you're talking about the ocean, talking about a remote river, canyon, people are really there to have each other's backs yeah, and I'm sure it's similar.
Speaker 2:You, you know, you've got your friend Jimmy who you know his motor may not have been running very good the last week and you're like, you know nobody wants to go out there 30 and turn around because you know he wasn't ready or wasn't running top leg. So you know there is some vetting sometimes before we get out.
Speaker 3:Yeah, how are these Dories powered today?
Speaker 2:Most of them with four strokes of anywhere from 70 horse to 150s, depending on the size of the boat. Okay, so relatively light power, relatively light it doesn't take much to move a flat boat, as you know, right, and so not a whole lot.
Speaker 3:And then, how many gallons of fuel will you have on board?
Speaker 4:If you're fishing near shore, you'll burn six gallons of fuel maybe. I mean, if you drive, as we talked about earlier, up to, say, lookout or down to Cascade Head it's a 10-mile jaunt you might burn seven or eight gallons, very efficient. Look out or down to cascade head it's a 10 mile jaunt you might burn seven or eight gallons. So very efficient, very efficient. That's another good reason. Yeah, yeah, they're, they're pretty light boats. I mean 3 000 pounds, maybe 3 500 or something if they're loaded. Um, so it's, it's a very efficient boat to run around in. If you get crappy weather, the mileage goes down significantly because they are flat and you can't go fast and you're just grinding through stuff. Yeah, but yeah, I think the average right now is probably about 115 horse, unless they're bigger. Boats like mike's is a bit bigger, but yeah, that's plenty of horsepower I burned twice as much gas as he did last in a trip.
Speaker 2:So I was like what?
Speaker 3:yeah, yeah, we, we ran out yesterday and had, you know, two 200s on the back of a boat and uh, yeah, I mean a hundred mile round trip just of getting there and back, plus all the putting around during the day, go through a lot of gas oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:What kind of speed did you get out of that boat yesterday you know, on the way out we were doing, you know, 23 miles an hour to start with, and then we we kind of hit some some rougher water and had to slug back down to 12. On the way in we were doing over 30, wow, um, and it had laid down a lot in the afternoon. Of course it's following seas on the way back in Right, and that boat is 26 feet and it doesn't have much of a V in it, so it rides the backside of the waves really nicely. It doesn't heel into them at all, it doesn't bow down into them at all. So we were able to really cruise on the way back in. We got back in an hour and a half. Wow, nice, yeah, yeah. And everybody was ready for that too. So after a day of diving for albacore, trolling and then kind of getting beat up on the way out there, it was nice to be able to just scoot and get back home. Yeah, sure, yeah.
Speaker 4:How fast do you guys run On a good ocean? It's 20, maybe 25 miles an hour. I mean it's got to be greasy flat. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Which is plenty fast. Oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah, but still, if you're going 50 miles, it's a couple hours of standing there, driving Sure, while your buddy's sitting in the chair and back in sleep.
Speaker 3:Yeah, bean bags yes.
Speaker 2:I'm team bean bag for sure. Walmart cheap bean bags that stink and go away at the end of the year.
Speaker 4:Yeah, folding chairs, folding chairs. Yeah, I can't get those guys to be too comfortable back there.
Speaker 1:Sure, I got shit to do they can't get those guys to be too comfortable back there sure I got shit to do.
Speaker 3:They can't be sleeping. What is the best? Eating fish? Uh, here in the oregon pacific lingcod for me.
Speaker 2:I but it's, it's a I like it all, so so, but lingcod's probably the family favorite yeah, lingcod for me too, yeah, and, and it is family favorite yeah, we get.
Speaker 4:There's a variety of fish here. I mean year round you can. You can catch a few different varieties of sea bass. We've got lingcod. Uh, halibut is a seasonal fish and it's a couple miles offshore here and you're in decent halibut country. We don't get giants, but it's a decent fishery. The giants don't eat as well.
Speaker 3:Right yeah, For my money. If I'm going to eat a halibut, I want it to be a 30-pounder.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 3:I'm not a huge halibut guy. I think halibut is for people who don't like fish.
Speaker 1:You know it's the potato of fish.
Speaker 3:It tastes like what you put on it Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I've heard you say that before.
Speaker 3:And when people are like, oh, I love halibut, it's like, well, you love nothing Like that, tastes like nothing. Yeah, has a nice texture.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that tastes like nothing that has a nice texture.
Speaker 3:Yep, no, I would agree. The lingcod, I agree, that's good table fare.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I call them. You know, lingcod's, the new steelhead is what I call it, so it pretty much is.
Speaker 3:And they're dragons. That's a scary fish yes, I want to spear one, real bad, bad. I'm surprised you haven't already I don't get out here to the coast, that much you know. I again talking with greg about that, because he was he was surprised I can probably be from enterprise to hawaii quicker than I can be from enterprise to here.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, yeah well, if we can get a salmon shark on the salmon, we can surely get a lingcod over there somewhere near you. Right, yeah, yeah Right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, the mystery continues with the Salmon River, salmon shark.
Speaker 4:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3:I continue to hear all kinds of stories. Yeah, people have different beliefs.
Speaker 4:So we were talking about this the other day, that, uh, knowing that you're just deep into the spearfishing thing, uh, we've got a buddy that does some spearfishing here and cape, lookout, it's a, it's a big wall, I mean it's it is a cool place to be and apparently he's he's done some spearfishing up there.
Speaker 2:Spearfishing up there yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's a fellow Doryman, okay, and I don't know how deep is he spearfishing, not that deep, I mean 30 feet probably.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Not very deep 30 feet's nice, yeah, because it takes 10 seconds to dive 30 feet, so you're there really fast, that's for you, though, right?
Speaker 2:No, just about anybody.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so about about one meter per second is a normal normal dive dive rate and with the fins that you wear in free diving that's just kind of what it ends up being.
Speaker 3:And whether you're new to the sport or old to the sport, that's just kind of a normal descent rate. But what's nice about 30 feet is that if you're weighted right, that's about where you become neutrally buoyant, so you don't have to fight to stay down there. So if you're less than that, that can be really appealing, like, oh, I only have to drop 15 feet, um, to shoot a fish. Well, as soon as you get there, if you can't find something to hold on to to keep you there, buoyancy is trying to pull you back up. Your fins are sticking up and it's kind of tough. But at 30 feet, if you can just, you know, do those extra five kicks, then you can just kind of lay there and relax and you can scratch on the reef or grunt, or you know, kick some sand up and you can wait a few seconds for a fish to come and check you out and shoot him in the face. Good on.
Speaker 4:Yeah, you guys are using, I mean, really long fins, yeah, yeah. What's the advantage to that?
Speaker 3:Well, it's a mechanical advantage. So, yeah, the fin blades that I'm using are I mean the total fin is about three feet long Wow, that I'm using are I mean, the total fin is about three feet long and I keep my legs as straight as I can not as straight as I should and uh, kind of treat them like popsicle sticks. I'm I'm mostly just kicking from the hips if I'm doing it, right, and it takes very little movement for me to to move a long ways. And think about the fish in the ocean. Right, if you see a real long or broad fin on a fish, uh, it's going to go faster than the ones that don't have much in the way fin at all. Right, puffer fish isn't going to set any kind of speed records, right, but if you look at the long sickles on a tuna or something like that, like, they can really scoot and move. So it's just a mechanical advantage.
Speaker 2:Makes sense.
Speaker 3:The disadvantage is that you become a little bit less agile for turns, but typically all you're doing is hinging over at the waist on the surface, dropping down until your fin blades are in the water, starting your kick cycle, do your descent and then getting to the bottom, laying there and just trying to not think dangerous thoughts, because fish are pretty aware of that. And yeah, you know I've talked about this before, but I didn't believe it for the longest time and my buddies from Hawaii would be like no, it's not like snorkeling, you're not just covered up in fish Like the little mermaid, it's as soon as you load that spear gun, everything changes. And I was like that's, that's such crap. Like I can't believe you guys are saying that out loud. But here I am saying it too. But here I am saying it too. And there's been times in water that I know has never, ever been spearfished, that I can be swimming along and there's just fish everywhere. I'm like, all right, this is a good place, I'm going to do a drop.
Speaker 3:And as soon as I pull back the shaft on that pole spear or load a spear gun, they just go like a covey quail and they're so good at sensing when a predator is around. You know they make their living knowing when they're in danger. And in the water I, I, I'm confident that they can feel, uh, a heartbeat. I think they can feel when your heartbeat changes because it's making a physical pulse in the water. And I think that there's just something about fish that lets them know like, hey, this thing is now a danger. And as you spend more time underwater you'll see things like sharks cruise past fish and fish are completely comfortable and don't change their business at all. And then you'll see other times where and a predator moves in and is actively hunting and those fish hide like they just get out of there. They know, they know the difference.
Speaker 3:I've also seen that with uh, with coyotes and deer. Right, I've seen deer in fields where a coyote can cruise through hunting mice, deer don't even pick their heads up. And I've seen times when the coyote comes into through hunting mice, deer don't even pick their heads up. And I've seen times when the coyote comes into a field and all the deer run out the other side of it, wow. So I I think that it's in every prey animal to know when they're in trouble and if, if they don't have that, they get eaten. You know, the dumb ones die first.
Speaker 2:Kind of like a wily guy. Wily guy down here at Sporty's type of thing. Sure, I get it yeah.
Speaker 3:And we have that sense too. Like I think everybody's had the experience of seeing a person show up that's not acting right and you haven't talked to them, you haven't communicated with them at all.
Speaker 2:But just by their body language.
Speaker 3:You're like, okay, there's something wrong with this one. I'm going to body language. You're like, okay, there's something wrong with this one. Um, I'm gonna keep some distance. Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah, uh. So what does the the season look like here? Do you fish all year long?
Speaker 4:uh, some guys do. Yeah, I know, mike. I don't know if you've done 12 months I've got 12 months in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, nice, it's difficult, obviously.
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 2:It's cold. Yeah, the cold aspect is okay, but it's worse than an aluminum dory, obviously, but it's just when you can go.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. So the weather just gets worse. The weather yeah.
Speaker 4:And it's the surf that is the divider for us Right.
Speaker 3:And the ocean can be flat. Y'all aren't afraid to get rained on.
Speaker 4:No, no, we're all steelhead fishermen, so rain, cold doesn't matter. But if the surf is bad, I mean, you can see beautiful flat ocean. But if you've got a big swell rolling in, you're just sitting on the beach looking at it.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:So in February, yeah it's, but boy, there's some nice days.
Speaker 4:And the fishing is great and from where we're sitting you can see where we're fishing. I mean it's you can go around the rock and go catch limits of bass and lingcod, so it's not far. How's the crabbing? Crabbing is seasonal right now. It's really good. I mean you can throw a pot out and end up with a limit, sometimes two in a pot. It's excellent. And it's not far either. I mean, from here again, you can probably see some crab floats out there. How deep of water is that? It's about 70 feet at that rock, okay, and so, depending on just on the other side of the surf, it's probably 40, maybe 45, something like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, probably the best Dungeness location there is.
Speaker 3:Really.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think between you know can you edit some of this sure?
Speaker 3:yeah, yeah, yeah commercial, commercial, when you say best, you mean like the worst, like the, yeah, yeah, yeah, people should not. I was gonna.
Speaker 2:I was gonna preface it as as to you know the area from like off. Uh, you know down below Hecate Head down below. You know Cape Lookout up there. I mean it's just the whole central coast as far as the sand and stops.
Speaker 3:We were diving for them in north of Seattle last month and it was so much fun it was 40, 50 feet of water.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we're, we're grabbing them and you know they they kind of juke you out down there and you got to chase them around and the guys I was with were diving with gauges and you know they've got a lot more bottom time than I do and they'd gauge their crabs out while they were down there. I would just get down, grab one head to the top and then realize it was female or it was too short?
Speaker 3:yeah, I think I picked up like 20 crabs and I didn't get a single keeper, but it was so much fun. My goodness, it was fun. Yeah, they're fast, aren't they? They are pretty fast. Yeah, yeah, but, uh, but you can get them you know, yeah, he's gonna yeah, I'm wearing big gloves and I'm not afraid of him.
Speaker 3:One of my favorite things, though, living in North Carolina, was when friends would come out to visit and they were used to dungies and we'd catch blue crab. And blue crab are incredibly fast and very strong and will pinch you seven times before you know what's going on, and the Oregon guys were used to big, slow dungies where they can just like pick them up, and if you reach for the back of a blue crab, he's going to spin around and go chop, chop, chop.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow, yeah.
Speaker 4:And.
Speaker 3:I would never warn people about that, you know that was good entertainment.
Speaker 2:Oh, I'd be a victim. Yeah, I'd be a victim for sure. And they're little, so people are like what?
Speaker 3:What's happening. Yeah, Great, and they're a good-eating crab. But I mean, it's pretty tough to beat a dungy.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:We had one at a restaurant in Newport a couple nights ago. Gosh, it was just amazing. Such a treat. You know Such a treat. Yeah, looking forward to going home and canning some tuna and I think I'm going to dry age some of it too, really, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4:How do you dry age?
Speaker 3:tuna. I'm going to treat it just like venison. Yeah, I'll do an equilibrium brine, so I'll weigh it out and then add in salt and maybe some prog powder, based on the weight, and put some herbs on it. I'll I'll vacuum seal it for 10 days, two weeks, and then wrap it in cheesecloth and hang it up in my podcast studio until it's lost 60 of its weight and then slice it up like prosciutto and see if it tastes good or if it kills me are you gonna do a whole fish or are you gonna do I'll probably just mean gut and gild or whatever do a me.
Speaker 2:Are you going to do a whole fish, or are you going to do gut and gild, or whatever you can do some loins.
Speaker 3:A whole loin. Yeah, I mean we've got everything cut into loins right now. Got it? Yeah, yeah, and I think I'll pull a loin, pull one of the top loins off, so it's got some less fat in it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:For sure, but For sure. But we were eating some of those toro loins last night raw at the cleaning station and the fish cleaners were looking at me like I was a crazy person. But man, that's good, really good. Yeah, albacore is underrated.
Speaker 2:It's terribly underrated, terribly.
Speaker 3:And I think people have just eaten canned albacore from Safeway and they think that that's what it is, and I mean it. It's a real tuna and it tastes wonderful it is yeah, yeah, very underrated, very much so I agree. Yeah, what? What is the earliest time that y'all remember people going for albacore here in Oregon?
Speaker 2:for me it would be, you know, just after the 4th of July. I mean years.
Speaker 3:Oh, years, because it's not an old fishery.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can remember, as a kid growing up in Newport, them bringing them into the docks for sure when I was a kid Commercial guys. Yeah, For sure. I mean we know they've had canneries for a long time, but that's the earliest time.
Speaker 4:I can remember. So my dory was built in 1977. Okay, and I bought it from the second owner of that dory and it was a dory set up for commercial fishing, mostly salmon. But I also inherited a whole bunch of tuna gear, a bunch of really old feathers and great old lures and stuff and I would guess, just based on that, that it was in the 70s that that boat was being fished. At that time it was built with an inboard-outboard Okay, it was a Volvo, as which most of them had right.
Speaker 4:Yeah, there was a period of time when that was the ticket Totally and it's a very reliable setup and for beach landing it was somewhat bulletproof. They were just heavy duty outdrives 270, 280 outdrives that you could just drive them up on the sand and they'd be fine. But I I believe that boat was tuna fished shortly after it was built, so in the 70s yeah yeah, yeah, that's still a young fishery Well, and that was that was commercial fished.
Speaker 4:Yeah, uh, sport fish. I don't think there was a huge sport fishing push until the internet, um, and then it just became this thing that just blew up. Yeah, um, there's a site I fish site that has got some guys that really started kind of in the central coast Newport area that started doing stuff.
Speaker 3:I think there was guys sport fishing, but not not a lot, yeah it's a long run and you've got to drive over the top of rockfish and halibut and salmon a lot of the year. Yeah, to get out there and, from a commercial standpoint, if you're guiding like you don't drive over the top of fish, that you could just kind of no like stack into the boat for your clients and use less gas and make more money right, and there were no cell phones, right, the electronics were marginal.
Speaker 4:sure, uh, it was a compass driven fishery. Yeah, um, and particularly out of pacific city, you, you want to hit this beach, you don't want to just kind of end up on a beach somewhere. So it was a whole different thing. I mean, coming here in the fog and you can't see the rock, you can't see the Cape. It's really nice to have that screen with the little breadcrumbs and say there's home, but you turn that off, holy crap.
Speaker 3:I was running my jet boat up on the Kootenai River, northwest Montana. We were trying to catch a state record rainbow trout because the previous record had been caught there. So we'd go out during the day and we'd scout these riffles and try and spot fish and we'd guess where those fish were going to go out and hunt. When it got dark we'd run out at night and anchor you know, like 300 feet above them and then, um, walk you know big lures back down into these runs. We ended up catching some monster bull trout but we we did not get the big rainbows we were looking for the first night out on the river, about three o'clock in the morning, super cold, january, right. Um, super, super cold, like all right, we've had enough. Um, and just as we went to start pulling anchor, we see fog roll off lake kookanusa and come over the dam like a horror novel and it set down on that river and I kicked on my lights and it was just a wall of white.
Speaker 3:You know it's like well, that's not going to work. So I go to my fish finder and look at my gps and I'm looking at the line that I'd set earlier that day, um, where I grounded the boat once oh man and I. I saw that spot so I knew about it, but my line was also overlaid on a map and in some places my line was going over land.
Speaker 3:I was like well, one of these two things is wrong so do I trust the gps line or do I trust the map? Or do I stay out here until 10 o'clock in the morning when the sun comes back up, or freezing to death? It's like I'm just going to trust the line. And I had to be on plane because it's a jet boat and we're on a shallow river, so I'm going fast downstream and it's not that big of a crick anyways. So I just treated the little boat icon on my GPS like it was a video game and just watched that and throttled up and down. We went and it worked fine. It was super scary but it worked. So we just did it again the next four nights in a row and it was fine. But yeah, god bless modern electronics for stuff like that, oh man.
Speaker 4:Yeah yeah, sometimes scary shit is kind of fun, sure yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, yeah, trying to spear albacore with blue sharks cruising around and being way offshore and doing something that you know just hasn't been done all that much.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I'm still amazed that you guys did that. That's awesome.
Speaker 3:I think it's going to happen more and more. I think that this is just the beginning of it and, as people start to figure it out and get on it a little bit better, it's a tremendous, tremendous opportunity for people to get out there in the water. You're not going to have to dive very deep, the water temperatures are relatively comfortable, it's relatively clear, the shark situation isn't that bad, unless a great white or something like that shows up. And you know, there there's a lot of fish, there's a lot of tuna out there, and if, if, you can get on them when they're near the surface and develop your own techniques for how to, how to keep those fish there, uh it's, it's a real opportunity. It's a real opportunity to have a heck of a good time with a spear gun.
Speaker 4:So you guys spent on average, a couple hours to get there, yeah. And then you gotta, you gotta find some fish in any quantity that you can get them boiling at the boat. And so you've got maybe six hours fish in any quantity that you can get them boiling at the boat, and so you've got maybe six hours. And you said you did a bunch of learning, yeah, what was working, what was not working. And so by the end of the day you found some stuff that was working pretty good, and then it's time to drive home. Right, if you got another day and started with the techniques you ended with, yeah.
Speaker 3:Winner Totally. You ended with, yeah, winner totally. But also, like at this stage, I've got a year to think about it right before I get a chance to go try this again. Yeah, and you know we're we're going to war, game this out in our minds a lot and next year, when we come back to try it again, it's going to be a totally different set of gear. We're going to go into it with what we learned this year and you can never count on on two days of weather to be able to do it.
Speaker 3:But you know, if we could, if we could do it back-to-back days, that'd be awesome. Um, because then you don't have to have to spend as much time the next day finding fish. If we could figure out how to spend a night out there and start first thing in the morning, that'd be great. Uh, that that would extend it a lot. But no, I I think it's, it's. It's a pretty cool opportunity and there's so much of this out there where you know you don't have to go to some crazy exotic location to have a tremendous experience. You might just have to pioneer a new way to utilize the resources that are all around you.
Speaker 4:I agree yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 4:So, a year from now, plan on a couple more days to come here so we can get you out in a dory. I would love that. It's a great experience.
Speaker 3:Yeah, great rush.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And they're pretty boats. So much of what has happened, whether it's vehicles or really anything, we've lost a value of aesthetic. Um, you know, modern rifles I, I, uh, I I point a finger at a lot of times because they work wonderfully and they do things that guns couldn't do 20 years ago. But they're ugly as sin and you know, if they do end up in people's wills, folks are going to look at that and be like what in the space age is that, whereas you know, rifles that were built a century ago were gorgeous. Right, they're beautiful and and these dories are an example of a really beautiful boat that's very efficient. It can do something off of the beach that nothing else can do. It can run 50 miles offshore, it can work inshore and it's got a tremendous history that you guys are a part of. I think it's amazing.
Speaker 4:It is an amazing fishery. The heritage here I mean, like I said, it, goes back over 100 years. The interesting part about the lines of the boats today they haven't changed a lot, yeah, and they're making some really great boats out of different materials. Mine happens to be a wood boat that's encased in fiberglass, so it's kind of two boats sandwiched together. Mike's boat is an aluminum boat but it's got the same lines, so from a distance you look on the horizon and you see a dory. You may not know what it is. I mean, a lot of guys can recognize boats around here. They're making some boats. Uh, they made fiberglass boats also. There was some harveys and crowns that were fiberglass. There's a gentleman making some boats here that are also fiberglass. There's some carbon fiber, but if you look at them again at a distance, it's the same shape and it's a very elegant boat. Whether it's made out of wood, whether it's fiberglass, it's carbon or aluminum, it's the same design that works so well.
Speaker 3:That's just being recreated in different materials if folks want to experience this, is there a commercial outfit, an outfitter here that you guys endorse and trust?
Speaker 2:Sure, there's lots of them.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Name one.
Speaker 2:Mark Lytle with Pacific City Fishing, I believe is one. There's Oar Angling with Kyle Doyle, there's 15. Josh. Putnam, josh Putnam, there's 15 guys here working and all of them are really good, Good.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, for folks who are interested in dory fishing, look these fellows up and book a trip and come out here and experience it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Please do.
Speaker 3:Yeah, spend your money and go home.
Speaker 2:And don't go through Lincoln City.
Speaker 3:All right, gentlemen, thank you so much for your time and your stories.
Speaker 4:Appreciate you very much.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having a beautiful place to sit and do a podcast. Yeah, beautiful home. Thank you for coming bye, everybody. I just want to take a second and thank everyone who's written a review, who has has sent mail, who's sent emails, who's sent messages. Your support is incredible, and I also love running into you at trade shows and events and just out on the hillside when we're hunting. I think that that's fantastic. I hope you guys keep adventuring as hard and as often as you can. Art for the Six Ranch Podcast was created by John Chatelain and was digitized by Celia Harlander. Original music was written and performed by Justin Hay, and the Six Ranch Podcast is now produced by Six Ranch Media. Thank you all so much for your continued support of the show, and I look forward to next week when we can bring you a brand new episode.