Chance Encounters

It was a chance encounter at a local watering hole. A former student from one of my high school English classes, 34-year-old Brian McCathren, was home for the holidays. He told me he was working for the Anchorage Fire Department and guiding a little for kings on the Kenai River. After some reminiscing and laughter, he invited me to Alaska for a black bear hunt, saying something about "pay-backs," and I was pretty sure that was a positive thing rather than some insidious plot to turn me into bear scat. Brian had been a good kid and he liked me well enough. I went home and booked a flight for the end of May.

A friend, Bob Aho, loaded three boxes of 130-grain, .30-06 Barnes X bullets for me. Though 130 grains is considered by many to be somewhat light for bear, Bob's load shot flat and hit hard with excellent penetration. Whenever the snow quit falling for a few hours that winter, I stepped outside my country home with my favored pre-'64 model 70 Winchester mounted with a 3x9 and took a practice whack or two at my 100-yard target. By March, I was consistently dead-on and two inches high.

Brian picked me up at the Anchorage airport on May 28, 2008, and began to enthusiastically outline our options for hunting. The one that interested me most was on Chickaloon Flats--the other side of Turnagain Arm, an eight-mile expanse of turbulent unpredictable and potentially lethal stretch of ocean separating Anchorage and the Chugach Mountains from the Kenai Peninsula. There was an old gas company cabin above Chickaloon Flats where we could stay while hunting. Any float plane or boat hoping to land there would hit an impassable half mile of mud before ever reaching solid ground. The only access was by hovercraft, and just coincidentally, Brian's roommate, Chuck Manley, had built one.

Eight hours later, having spent the rest of the morning getting licenses and gathering supplies, Brian, Chuck and I were on Chuck's hovercraft. Powered by two vertical airboat-type engines aft and two other horizontally-mounted engines which pushed air under the 30-foot craft, we were virtually floating above the surface as we sped toward Chickaloon Flats.

The air being driven under the hovercraft between two huge, fabric pontoons lifted it up, and the ride felt and sounded rather like traveling down a gravel road in a pickup. Chuck told me he had always been fascinated by helicopters, but he noticed that when they lost power, bad things happened. "If the power fails with the hovercraft," he said, "I'm only an inch off the ground, and, I've got a boat under me."

Turnagain Arm was relatively calm on the trip over. I had seen Turnagain at its worst on other trips to Alaska. It is famous for its bore tide, a four-foot wall of gray, frothy water that rushes violently in when the tide changes. When compounded with heavy winds, it is doubly treacherous. I was fairly certain I would not like to go swimming there.