I was just watching Discovery and there was an add for a show "KODIAK".
I had a flashback to 28 years ago.
I was young and stupid and freshly assigned to a ship home-ported in Alameda CA.
On my first trip we pulled in to Kodiak and had two days off.
I grew up camping and living in the outdoors but the biggest predator in Western NC was black bear.
See where this is going yet?
A somewhat outdoorsy shipmate and I decided to do a Kodiak camping trip.
Armed with seabags, tent, flashlights and not much else.... certainly no guns, we took off across one ridge and made it about three miles into the next drainage. Just about dark, which was just about midnight,..... we decide to camp. About the time we got the camp set up we started to see a lot of salmon carcasses and other assorted bones.
After a little research we discovered we were in Brown Bear central. We based this on the pie plate sized tracks going every which way and the piles of dung the size of small beavers.
Needless to say this was one of the longest nights of my life.
Right before I left the ship I "borrowed" a kit containing a freon air horn and a dozen marine flares.
About every thirty minutes we would hear bushes breaking and grunting, which would be followed by a 130 decibel blast on an air horn. Didn't have to shoot anything with a 12 gauge flare but that would have been an interesting twist on a stupid human trick.
I had a flashback to 28 years ago.
I was young and stupid and freshly assigned to a ship home-ported in Alameda CA.
On my first trip we pulled in to Kodiak and had two days off.
I grew up camping and living in the outdoors but the biggest predator in Western NC was black bear.
See where this is going yet?
A somewhat outdoorsy shipmate and I decided to do a Kodiak camping trip.
Armed with seabags, tent, flashlights and not much else.... certainly no guns, we took off across one ridge and made it about three miles into the next drainage. Just about dark, which was just about midnight,..... we decide to camp. About the time we got the camp set up we started to see a lot of salmon carcasses and other assorted bones.
After a little research we discovered we were in Brown Bear central. We based this on the pie plate sized tracks going every which way and the piles of dung the size of small beavers.
Needless to say this was one of the longest nights of my life.
Right before I left the ship I "borrowed" a kit containing a freon air horn and a dozen marine flares.
About every thirty minutes we would hear bushes breaking and grunting, which would be followed by a 130 decibel blast on an air horn. Didn't have to shoot anything with a 12 gauge flare but that would have been an interesting twist on a stupid human trick.
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