You know how you'll have an experience that is so bizarre that you're sure it must be a dream? That's exactly what ran through my mind on the riverbank a quarter mile below the Bering Glacier on Prince William Sound, Alaska, where I was stuck with my Cessna 185 on floats.
The Bering River drains Bering Lake, the melted glacier pool at the foot of the Bering Glacier, a Rhode Island-size chunk of ice 200 miles east of Anchorage. I had landed on floats there to pick up a friend for a fishing adventure. My friend Mike, who flies a Piper Super Cub on tundra tires, had dropped him off on the beach. We had a special spot where our camp was set up nearby on one of the many rivers that drain into the sound.
I had completed a top overhaul on my engine eight hours previously, and the airplane flew me to our site as comfortably as usual. However, on the pretakeoff engine runup I could not get full power without the engine popping and backfiring. I beached her once again, took off the cowling, and examined the engine for loose anythings. I have always been involved with my airplane's engine and airframe work, since if anything's going to break, it will always do it somewhere out in the Alaska bush where there is no help. My working knowledge had previously bailed me out of other tight spots, and I carry a fair-size tool kit for these situations. So there we were, looking for the problem.
We could find nothing out of place. Reassembly and another try gave the same result, so we proceeded to disassemble the fuel system. We examined the fuel injectors, one by one, and they were all clear. We tested both fuel pumps, and they worked. We checked the spark plugs, wires, and contacts. Nothing. Another attempt and the same effect. Dejectedly, I sent Mike, my friend with the Cub, off to Cordova, 80 miles away, to find some help. In the meantime, the tide was going out, and being only a half mile up the river from the ocean, the water level was dropping rapidly. That's when it happened: The tide and wind shift unplugged Bering Lake, and down the river, hugging the bank, they came, bold as bullies — icebergs. Small ones, big ones, long and skinny ones, and they all wanted to eat my airplane for lunch.
In chest waders from fishing, I ventured into the frigid water 10 feet out. The bank fell sharply away, and the beached airplane's nose was pointing ever higher as the river's level fell. The bergs were drifting idly along 10 or 20 feet apart; some were as big as trucks, some were more like 55-gallon drums. Upstream, I kicked and shoved, diverting their paths out into the flow for well over two hours, with many just missing the tails of my airplane's floats. When the water level had dropped, they could no longer touch my airplane's rear end as they passed. I could breathe again.
Mike landed to inform me that a mechanic was on the way, but wouldn't arrive until the next morning. I had a survival tent and sleeping bag on board, so I settled in for the night on the bank above my airplane, now poised like a rocket ship 40 degrees from level on the rocks. I dozed fitfully, peering out over the bank every hour or two to check on the returning tide. But then I dozed too long and was awakened by the sound of waves lapping on aluminum.
The tide was back, at 4 a.m., and in the moonlit night the icebergs glowed like they were hot. They marched up the river relentlessly with the reversed flow, again toward my floatplane inclined on the rocks. Many of them were identifiable as the same bergs that I had kicked out to sea before, those same bullies back to taunt me again. To make it worse, the tide had risen so slowly that it allowed time for the air in the last float compartment to be expelled from the forward ones, filling up the floats through the vent openings, from back to front. The tail of the airplane was in the water now, with the back third of the floats submerged.
I ran out to the floats and was able to insert my 30-inch bilge pump into the last compartment to pump it out, with an inch of pump exposed over the water's surface. I pulled out the water, refilling each compartment with air drawn from the forward ones until the tail rose inch by painful inch. Working forward, left, right, and back again, I floated the airplane. Another two hours of push and shove later, the panic was over and the airplane was afloat at high tide, mercifully intact.
Mike returned with a mechanic, and we proceeded to troubleshoot. Everything checked out fine, but we were still unable to stop the engine from misfiring. Only after disconnecting the fuel-injection lines and running the auxiliary fuel pump for some time were we able to confirm that we had an air lock within one of the many lines. The engine had run for eight hours since the top overhaul. You would think that such a problem would be obvious sooner than that, or at least back in Anchorage where help was handy. But no, Murphy was at work here.
There's much more to bush flying — especially float flying — than there appears to be. The water I landed on looked perfectly lovely, but six hours later the nice beach was very different after the tide came in. There's nothing in the book that tells you about icebergs, nothing that tells you about the angle of the floats at low tide. You have to prepare by carrying such things as tools and survival gear. There are so many variables to consider and I'm still learning.
Anyway, we caught more than 100 steelhead in the four days we were there — at least my partners did. I was busy mixing iceberg cocktails on the Bering River. Flying lesson number 4,546: Icebergs, tides, and airplanes just don't mix.
John Sparaga, AOPA 654196, is an orthodontist and instrument-rated commercial pilot with more than 3,500 hours of Alaska flying. He lives in Anchorage and guides private trips with his own Cessna 185 on floats.
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