Aileron's Air National Guard Website

Water Survival - San Clemente Island

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For a couple of years we got to go down to San Clemente Island for water survival. We'd fly down in a C-130 with all our gear. Here's Jim "B.O.B." McNab, Joe "Spam" Leadingham, and Paul "PC" Carroll. Ever the outdoorsman Spam's heading out to catch his dinner.

Mork and Lightning. BFFs :)

I like this one. I'm glad I ended up with a few pictures of Wes Deane. Ray Bluhm, Sean Bautista, Wes Deane.

Here's Goldie checking out his dinner. Rick Skidmore would go abalone gathering in the evenings and bring back a few. They would then beat the crap out of them and stick them in a cooler overnight. We drank a lot of beer and got pretty dehydrated. There's nothing worse than getting up in the middle of the night looking for some ice water in the cooler and taking a big gulp of abalone water. Yuck!
Goldie once brought a skinned sheeps head over to my house for a flight party. I won't go into that one. :)

Our very own Roy Stuckey. Ex Agressor and excellent Squadron Commander. The beach we camped on was used by the Navy Seals and they were nice enough to let us use their territory. One evening we had invited the commander of the Seal School to dine with us. He brought his girlfriend along and arrived in a jeep. As he approached he was bombarded with bottle rockets. He dropped his girlfriend off and roared off in a cloud of dust. We thought we really pissed him off. He arrived back a short time later, stopped the jeep and pulled out a grenade rifle and fired it off down the beach. We all threw our arms up in surrender and got him a beer. Unkown to anyone, Grinder was hiking around down the way where the grenades went off. He heard the shrapnel hitting the rocks around him and hit the ground. I guess he can laugh about it now. :)

First thing even before setting up your tent - beer! Shooting off bottle rockes was always big fun.
Jan Pedersen, Jack Bolt, Bill Gore, Unknown, Brad Kight, Stilly Spraugue, Tony Gaedicke, Mark Taylor.
Joe Conway went bow hunting for wild boar and bagged one once. On the right it looks like we're set for some serious Bar-B-Qing.

Spam setting up for the weekend.

Who knew that Brad Kight was a smoker. Karl Piccotto and Bob "Mulch" Mulcahy relaxing in the raft. It was such a tough life. :) Karl loved rock and roll. He knew the genealogy of every rock band and band member from the 60's and 70's. Amazing!

Bill "Curly" Gore giving us our obligatory survival briefing. Recognize any of these characters?

Another view of the gang. For the life of me I can't remember the names of some of the WSOs. We transitioned to the F-16 about 25yrs. ago. Man what that does to the 'ol memory! Check out the background on the left. Burned out relics of the Seal's nightime work. They really like to blow things up and they get to use real explosives. There were numerous very deep craters in the sand all along the beach.

Getting to set off your own personal smoke.

I mean - setting off smoke bombs, shooting bottle rockets, eating BBQ'd tri-tip - how could that not be fun!
Pat "Stinky" Belanger, Jim Sheppard, Frank Schippell.

Les Spencer would bring his helicopter over from his search and rescue unit and help out with our training.

We'd all get to take a turn sitting in a raft and getting winched up. That was fun, but good training if you found yourself floating in the ocean on a particularly bad day.

PC, Bo, Ludwig, Jim Killian, Wes Deane, Snort, Jim Sheppard sharing some yucks.

It's always best to stand upwind...

Goldie Hawn and Frank Schippell after hard day in the water. Randy Bushore in the back.

Curly in the raft.

Some of the guys getting ready to swim out to the raft for a quik helicopter ride back to shore.

Les Spencer in his chopper was always a crowd pleaser. Sadly, Les was killed in a helicopter crash not long after. Les used to date and live with Diane Belmessieri who was one of our first C-26 pilots along with Mike Giersch.

B.O.B. preparing early for his ceremonial firewalking ritual. Only those with nerves of steel (or heavily sedated nerves) would ever attempt this dangerous, yet important squadron ritual. That was the highlight of our island vacation.

Some of the boys just hanging out.

Crow Bob doing one of our survival briefings. Jim Sheppard in the middle and Joe Conway on the right wearing his mandatory high-fashion survival training scarf.

Tent City by the ocean.