It might seem like I’m a reckless pilot who takes foolish and unnecessary chances, I am, but I at least put a little effort into planning the dumb things that I do. The owner of the Stormin’ Norman told us that he received a position report from the ships EPIRB beacon via Coast Guard every six hours and could get a new report just prior to take off. The ship was supposedly drifting east at three knots so using a little Kentucky windage I should be able to put a Latitude Longitude into my GPS that would get us close enough to their position to find them in the open ocean.
The next problem to address was how to drop a fuel pump from a moving plane so that the crew of the disable fishing boat could retrieve it. The owner actually had put some thought into it. He’d put the pump into a hollowed out Styrofoam fishing net float about the size of a beach ball and attached to the float was about fifty feet of nylon rope that the crew could use to snag their prize. In addition to the actual float to be dropped he had another one the same size that we could use on a practice drop. One of the things we really had going for us was because the 182 was a jump plane it only had one seat for the pilot leaving the rest of the cabin floor area open. That would make moving around inside the aircraft and dropping the floats much easier.
While we were planning this our friend Rocky the owner of the hanger we were operating out of offered to let me use his new Garmin GPS that was bigger, newer and just plain nicer than mine. Always one who likes shiny new things I gratefully accepted Rocky’s offer.
Not wanting to miss all the fun my partner John decided to join us on this little adventure so he and the owner climbed into the plane and sat on the floor with the Styrofoam floats next to them, ready for action.
I input the fresh position report the Stormin’ Norman’s owner got from the Coast Guard into the GPS, taxied onto the runway, took off and headed out to open ocean. Two hours later as we arrived at the location where the GPS said the stranded boat should be but all we saw was empty ocean. I wasn’t terribly surprised, the ocean is a big place and based on an hours old position report and a wild guess on drift speed and heading finding a sixty foot fishing boat bobbing in the waves would be tough. I started an expanding grid search while keeping a close eye on the dropping fuel gauges, I figured we had about an hour before being forced to abandon the search.
