High inside the Arctic Circle. 1966. The captain taxied the immense, majestic Canso flying boat into the frigid Foxe Basin arctic waters. We were leaving Igloolic, a fragile-looking settlement perched tenuously, like a tern’s egg, on a rocky island between the giant Baffin Island and the mainland Melville Peninsula. I would most likely never...
Seaplanes, Pilots and the Golden South Seas Pearls. Gold, silver, diamonds, precious stones, and pearls have been at the top of man’s list of the most sought-after and cherished valuables since man learned to forge these raw elements into jewellery. Pearls, however, have been the moonlight glint in man’s eyes since the beginning. “The...
A Good Neighbour – In Memory of Douglas John Silvester. For you, after you die, there is nothing. A void. A blackness. For the still-living, when you die, you still exist. The memory of who you were lives on. Who you were (a good guy, an ‘A’-hole, a craftsman, an artist) depends on what memories you impressed on...
The Potential of Seaplanes: Reaching Out to Remote Regions. One of the more questionable quotes I hear seaplane promoters use is that 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, suggesting that we need more seaplanes to fly to more places. While there’s a certain appeal to the notion that our planet’s vast...
Lorne Alfred Goulet left the Bird River farm at seventeen and enlisted in the Winnipeg Rifles to fight a European war. He fought his way from Normandy to Holland, was shot through the arm, evacuated to a hospital in England, rejoined his regiment, captured a pill box of Germans, won a medal, returned home...
On the day of our 40th Wedding Anniversary, Holly and I revisited Florence, Italy, the city we enjoyed so much on our European honeymoon. The first time we visited Florence, the curators had closed the exhibition to work on the housing, and we could not see the original 1504 statue of David by Michelangelo. Instead, we...
Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument and Custer National Cemetery JUNE 25TH 1876 134 years before the Battle of Little Big Horn, the French explorer Chevalier La Verendrye led a string of old-world Spanish horses into the Dakotas from somewhere down in Nebraska. The horses, left to run wild by the Conquistador Spanish two hundred...
Seaplane seaworthiness and how flying boats and amphibians can make a difference. The Pan Am Clippers are revered by those who care and are mostly forgotten by those who do not care about the flying boats. The Clippers, named after the tremendous romantic sailing ships of the early 19th century, were not one aircraft...
The Navy uses Ship Readiness to assess their ability to operate in the world’s oceans. You cannot find the definition of Sea Readiness in a dictionary. The Navy has an equivalent process called Ship Readiness, which involves assessing whether ships and crew are ready to operate in the waters of the world’s oceans. I...
A Guide to Operating Seaplanes in the Seas. In Flying Boats, Amphibians, and Seaworthiness, I defined the terms needed to understand the technical aspects of seaplanes. Now, I will discuss the definitions required to understand the essential technical aspects of operating in the sea. This means understanding sea states and how they relate to...
