Day 3: The Candy Pilot

Cessna 180
Originally uploaded by sasnook.

This morning when I awoke, Bill, Paul, Cole and Hyrum had already emptied the yard long before of the boats and fishing equipment that they had prepared for their halibut fishing trip. Other than myself, Angie was still at the house and we took the morning to go up to Abercrombie Fort to walk the dogs. It was beautiful and I got to know a little about Angie as well as learn more about Kodiak. I am already beginning to think about eventually moving up here.

Shortly after lunch, I met up with Chris again and we went up in his Cessna 180. This bright purple plane with Indians painted on the tail was what I would finally experience real flying in. We took off at the small municipal airport called Lily Lake. I wish you could see this runway. It sloped down into Lily Lake; a small narrow lake used by sea planes, and is no wider than a bike path. But we took off and flew to Larson Bay. It was an amazing flight. The entire time we flew at less than 300 feet above the mountain ridges and bays. It may not have been the smartest thing to do, but it was what I have always imagined flying to be. We flew over old fish canneries, Paul’s bear camp and Chris’s house, all of which can only be reached by a very long boat ride or by seaplane. We arrived in Larson Bay and about fifteen of the locals came up to the airstrip to see who flew in. After surveying some land for a hangar, we walked around the little town of Larson Bay and before I knew it we were back in the 180 fifty feet off the ground viewing bears and mountain goats, some which stood higher on the mountain than what we flew. I truly felt like I was flying and I didn’t want it to end when we arrived in Kodiak right as the fog moved in.

Moments after Chris and I got out of the plane I had an invitation to fly with him that evening in his Luscombe to Musch Bay to stay the night at his girl friends’ house. Excited to fly in his Lucombe on floats, it only took a minute for me to decide that I was going. So a few hours later, a cooler full of ice cream and a bag full of candy we flew to Musch Bay.

As I had mentioned, the fog had moved in, and although it had broken by the time we took off Lily Lake Municipal airport, the clouds still hung low among the mountains which forced us to weave around them and fly even lower to the island of Kodiak. On the way to Musch Bay we landed in a mountain lake and made a candy drop at a house that had five children among the mountains of Kodiak. We flew over the house to get the family’s attention and circled back around. With my arm fully extended out the window, there were five children on the deck and beach jumping up and down with excitement when we made the drop. Once again circling back around, we saw that the children had recovered the bag of candy and we flew on our way to Musch Bay.

Upon arriving at Musch Bay we were greeted by Jeanne, Chris’s girlfriend, and she promptly took us out to her beautiful organic garden to pick strawberries to have with the ice cream we had brought out. Her gardens were unlike anything I had ever seen, they were HUGE with everything you could imagine in them. Her house was beautiful too, a homestead that was built in 1921. So the three of us sat up talking until late in the evening about more flying stories as well as their life on the island of Kodiak. Among these stories I learned that Chris was no stranger to dropping things out of his airplane, in fact he had become known as the “Candy Pilot”. Chris had been making drops to people all over the island for years. He not only had dropped candy, but gold earrings, toilet paper, and on Christmas he would string lights on his plane and drop Christmas presents to the children on the island. These stories, among many others touched my heart and although I have always have had a love for aviation, they have made my passion even greater than it has ever been. Since I have arrived in Kodiak I crave to stay here.