Finally, I've got back to this journal. Some more interesting things to come, I hope!
I left Victoria and drove to Swartz Bay to catch the car ferry to Tsawassen, south of Vancouver, near the US border. Rather than take the Trans-Canada Highway back to Calgary, I had decided to drive back into the US and then drive east through Washington and Idaho to Whitefish, Montana, where I was planning to stay for a few days, with a colleague that I had worked with in Vietnam.
Since I would be passing through Bellingham again, I decided to call the Maritime Museum again and see if I could see their PACV (SR.N5) hovercraft. I was surprised that the female voice on the answering machine was English!
I left a message and while I was waiting to catch the ferry, I had a call back from Belinda. I explained what I wanted to see and she apologized and said that it had been sold and I would have to go to Chino to see it. I explained that I had already seen it and had been wondering how there could be two PACVs still extant.
After further conversation, I discovered that her father and her husband, Mike, had both been hovercraft pilots with Hoverwork and that she had known my father, when he worked there!
We arranged to meet in Bellingham for dinner.
The ferry route to the mainland goes through a Z-shaped pass called Active Pass - relatively narrow and with strong tidal currents:
Because of the schedule timings, the ferries often pass each other during the transit of Active Pass. I once motored a sailboat through there. Small craft only do it at slack-tide as there are some nasty whirlpools and overfalls during the ebb and flow. If the skippers are sensible, small craft also keep to the sides of the channel to avoid the ferries.
These days, the BC Ferries are the only large vessels allowed through the pass. This rule is due to a fatal collision in 1970:
After crossing the border at Blaine, I drove down to Bellingham and met Belinda, Mike and their grandson for dinner at a very nice seafood restaurant on a wharf, overlooking Puget Sound and spent a long time exchanging stories.
Belinda had met my father under very tragic circumstances. Her father had been piloting a hovercraft, being used for a shallow-water seismic survey, in Abu Dhabi. The survey was using dynamite as an energy source, and due to a mistake by the "shooter" on the back deck, the wrong charge was connected and the hovercraft was blown up and several people on the craft, including Belinda's father, were killed.
My father had told me about this accident but I didn't know any details. He was working in the Ryde HQ and Belinda was extremely complimentary about the way my father took charge of all the logistics and arranged for her and her mother to go out to Abu Dhabi and then organized her father's repatriation. Of course, my father wouldn't have dreamed of telling me or anyone else about his involvement. Typical ex-army stiff upper-lip!
Concerning the museum, they told me that because of the economic down-turn, they had had to temporarily close it and sell the PACV to the Yanks Air Museum in Chino. However, they still had an SR.N6, stored in a field, so I arranged to meet them next morning to see it. It turns out that this particular craft has a very interesting history.