Caneel Bay Plantation, Virgin Islands National Park, St. John, US Virgin Islands.


CANEEL BAY PLANTATION

How I got into the construction business is an interesting story in itself, and worth a few words, I believe.

One of my company’s diversification efforts was a joint venture called RCC. This outfit had decided to go after the salt water desalination business, and I signed on as a salesman. The prospect I drew was a resort on St. John Island in the US Virgin Islands, called Caneel Bay Plantation, which was owned by the New York Rockefellers.

So I went to work, and after a cursory investigation, I found that Laurence Rockefeller ran their operation, they owned several luxury hotels all over the world under the RockResorts brand, and an engineering firm in New York handled most of their technical activity.

Being an engineer myself, and a Montana boy, I felt more comfortable with the engineering types than the big shot Rockefellers, so I concentrated on the engineers.

As to the Rockefellers, I figured that the Boeing brand would pretty much sell them, but to prove to the Rockefellers that we were really operating in their league, I borrowed a DeHavilland 125 business jet from Reading and Bates (one of our joint venture partners) to further impress them.

Anyway, I sold the concept to the engineering firm, and they pretty much convinced the Rockefellers. Then, by liberal use of the Boeing name, and by judicious use of the DH 125 jet, we convinced both the Rockefellers and the Engineering firm of our credibility. Despite the fact that we had nothing tangible other than a stack of concept sketches, some slick brochures, and a lab model, I managed to ink a contract with the Rockefellers to build and operate a desal plant for their resort, and we were in business.

At this point I would like to share one interesting sidelight, which I think greatly influenced, the Rockefellers. It seems that on our first trip on the private jet from New York to the Virgin Islands, we had a planeload of Rockefellers and their senior staffers. And, I found out early in the flight that, improbably, every one of them had either been an intelligence agent or an FBI agent. Of course, I had also belonged to this fraternity, and to make a long story short, I really believe that this did more to cement my credibility with the Rockefellers than anything I had done before or did since. If interested, you can read all the gory details in my tale "Spy Stories", in my book "Airplanes 'Round the World. also on this web site.

At our victory party in a New York hotel room, the General Manager of our little RCC company asked me if I really thought we could deliver what we had promised. I told him that I doubted it, but anyway it was not my worry, as my only job had been to sell it, I and I had done that. The told me that I was wrong about that, and on the spot appointed me as Project Manager, with responsibility to build the plant. So that’s how I got into the construction business.

I didn’t have a clue as to what I was doing, or how to go about it, so I said OK. The plan which I then developed, was to get Boeing to build the plant, and then get a big engineering and construction firm like Bechtel to do the installation. Wrong on both counts, neither company was interested. And the other joint venture partners had neither the expertise or the resources.

We finally got moving on building the plant though, using a mixture of Boeing and Alaska Copper and Brass Corp. people, working in an abandoned Boeing facility in Seattle.

The installation at St. John though, proved a bit more difficult. We could just not get any legitimate construction company interested, for a reasonable price.

Finally, after spending several frustrating weeks running around the West Indies and the US east coast, without tangible results, I decided that we would do the job ourselves. To do this, I put together a consortium, consisting of the RockResorts maintenance organization, their New York engineers, an outfit out of Seattle called Turbo Energy Systems, and our own RCC. We called this unlikely outfit RCC Virgin Islands Inc. and incorporated it in the USVI, with myself as President. We then got moving on the site work, and surprisingly enough, things worked out very well.

Alex, my Superintendent, and I laying out the plant foundation.
Our transit is in the background.

As mentioned above, the plant itself was being designed and built in Seattle. But there was associated work scattered over North America like a dog’s breakfast. The site engineering staff was in New York, joint venture headquarters was in Tulsa, some testing was being done in El Paso, and I was staging all the stuff for shipment to the Virgin Islands, at West Palm Beach FL. Along with this, I was trying to get the site work done at Caneel Bay, to be ready for arrival of the plant.

Alex and I checking out a concrete form for the foundation.
We poured that foundation in a 40 cubic yard continuous pour, using a one quarter yard mixer. Took us almost two days

All this kept me pretty busy traveling between these places, and I figured that I put in about five hundred thousand miles of travel in one hectic year. But let me give you an example of a typical trip. I would leave Seattle about midnight for New York, arriving about 5:00 AM. I would then board a 747 for San Juan, an approximately four hour flight. I then caught a commuter aircraft to St Thomas, and took a taxi ride to the ferry dock, where I boarded a native ferry for St John. Upon arrival at St John I would jump into my Jeep and drive to the job site, for a total elapsed time of over 17 hours. Pretty tiring, huh, but fortunately, all First Class.


The plant site, after the foundation was poured.

Laurence Rockefeller, who ran their resort operation, was a great conservationist, and demanded that this tree be spared. Even though this required building the plant around the tree, in kind of an "L" shape. At considerable extra expense, I might add.
But the tree eventually died anyway.

At one point, at another Rockefeller operation in the West Indies, some native revolutionaries ran amok, spraying the golf course with automatic weapons fire. When Laurence heard of this incident, he was alleged to have exclaimed, "I hope they didn't hit any trees".

Well we got the plant built, and test ran it in Seattle, then broke it down into modules and trucked it to West Palm Beach, along with associated parts, materials, and supplies. At West Palm, we loaded the whole works onto a RORO ship, and set sail for Saint John. (This was a roll on, roll off, ship, not unlike a WW II LST, and like an LST, it could disgorge its cargo onto an undeveloped beach.) We stopped in St. Thomas to pick up some heavy equipment, then hit the beach in St. John, unloaded the whole works, and trucked it to the job site on big four wheel drive oil field tractors which we had brought along. I’ll tell you, the island had never seen such a sight.

Erecting the main tower for the plant. We had a 100 foot mobile crane, which we had ferried over from St.Thomas. As rental cost was an arm and a leg, we worked 24 hours a day to get the steel erected.


Setting a module into place on the foundation. The red shim was used to level the structure.

I had a real diverse labor force on this job. There were a couple of technical people from Tulsa who were normal Midwesterners. My Superintendent on the job though, was a young good looking Frenchman named Alex, who lived on a sailboat in the harbor. He had been a French Foreign Legion officer, but had got kicked out of France for life, because he took the wrong side in the Algerian Rebellion. Then there were some electricians form Puerto Rico, and some native laborers. The force was rounded out with several “Hippie” causal workers. These were white kids from the local commune, and were paid by the day through the “Boss Hippie”.

A fairly "normal" day on the jobsite. Note the plant modules in the background.
We got this plant built without a significant injury. One of my proudest accomplishments.

When I was actually at Caneel Bay, and not on some airplane or other, my day might go something like this. Up in the morning, with sometimes a quick swim in the ocean, which was right out the front door. Then up to the job site to get things started. Then a change of shirt, at least, and back to the resort, for breakfast.
Depending on the situation, I might then spend the day in Puerto Rico on business, or working with officials in St Thomas, or even on the job site. There was some underwater construction work involved, and I retained direct supervision of that work for myself. After all, one did need to get in some scuba diving occasionally.

On this job, since I was on an exotic tropical island, I had more than my share of visitors. Most of these guys had no clue about life in the tropics, so I had a lot of fun with them. I remember one particular time when some distinguished guys from somewhere and I were watching my crew pour concrete. It was a hot day, and I felt in need of a drink, so I walked over to the water barrel, which was a rusty 55 gallon oil drum filled with water with a sort of green scum floating on top. I grabbed the cup, which was a rusty tin can with a baling wire handle, pushed the scum aside with my hand and scooped up a cupful of water, which I proceeded to drink. My visitors were appalled. They were afraid to come near me, sure that I would come down with the Tropical Creeping Crud, on the spot. Truth was, I had been in the tropics so long that I was immune to that stuff, and the water gave me no ill effects.

Of course, a desalinization plant needs a sea water intake, and that was a story in itself. Finding nothing commercially available that would do the trick, I finally invented one, with the help of my engineering friends in NY. (Later, I even got a patent on the thing, but Boeing never followed up.) The basis of this contraption was an eight foot square concrete box, with hundreds of holes all over its surface, which was to be floated into place, filled with rocks, and sunk in the bay near the plant. A pipeline to the plant, and a pump, completed the installation.


Preparing to lay a section of pipeline.

Although we did have some girl roustabouts, this was not one of them. Just one of the guys, with long hair. And note my long hair in some of the pics.

Incidentally, this was one of the white "Hippies" on the crew. Most everyone else had the sense to wear shirts. Which were cooler.

The front end loader in the pic, and a Jeep, were the only two pieces of mechanized equipment we had. (After we sent back the crane). So everything was pretty much done by brute force and awkwardness.

So now all we had to do was build the box and get it in place, not such an easy task on that remote island. Well we built it in the village square, but one thing that stumped us was how to float this box into place, since it was to be perforated with hundreds of holes. The holes were about the same diameter as a Heineken bottle, so Alex and I came up with a novel solution. We would cast hundreds of Heineken bottles into the sides of the box, and after towing it to the proper location, would break out the bottles, and let the box sink. But how to get the empty bottles. We finally decided to let the resident natives help us, and we threw a great party, offering all the free beer they could drink. So we got the bottles, built the box, and then came the launch. An ancient front-end loader was the only piece of equipment on the island, the box was heavy, and we barely avoided launching the front-end loader, as well, in the process. According to our calculations, the box should have had plenty of buoyancy, but we must have slipped a decimal someplace, because it would barely float. Not to worry, we just lashed on a number of oil drums to improve the flotation, and the thing rode high and dry. (There are always plenty of old oil drums kicking around on a tropical island. Where else do you think that the natives get the instruments for their steel bands?)


Building the water intake box in the village square.
After the free beer party, to get the empty bottles.

So we tied it to our Bertram (boat) and started off. As we chugged along, drums started slipping off, and the contraption started riding lower and lower in the water, finally losing so much freeboard that waves started slopping in. We solved this problem handily, by putting some natives aboard the box to bail like mad. Then disaster threatened. Around the point came the mail boat, at a twenty knot clip, and throwing up a monster bow wave. It looked for all the world like a miniature tsunami coming our way. We blew the siren, fired off all the distress rockets, and madly waved our shirts, all of which seemed to be to no avail. But at the last moment the boat slowed to a stop, and we were saved. After that, the rest of the installation was more or less uneventful.

Well, after these and a lot of other interesting trials and tribulations, we got the plant set up and running. The resort was happy, and the Joint Venture had a real life demo plant.


The completed plant. Only thing missing is the outside sheet metal siding.

And it actually worked.

One thing I should mention in closing, was the diverse cultures I was thrown in with on an almost daily basis. First, I was living in a guest room at the resort, and mixing freely with the guests. Who included some very heavy hitters, with Billy Graham, and Thurgood Marshall coming immediately to mind. I also had my share of big shot visitors, and I occasionally hung with some of the Rockefellers. Outside the resort, the place was a sleepy tropical island, where one dealt with the natives to get anything done, and none of it in a hurry. I also was spending a day or so a week in Puerto Rico, which at that time was about as Spanish as one could get, so a real shifting of gears was required to function there. All this, along with supervising my diverse labor force, and spending a good part of my life on airplanes, kept me in a state of perpetual culture shock.

Other than that, I came out of this adventure relatively unscathed, except I picked up a tropical ulcer, which didn’t heal for 10 years, and a nice case of malaria. And I did learn something about the construction business.

You can read more about my trials and tribulations at Caneel Bay, in "West Indies Adventures" stories, on my website "Airplanes 'Round the World" , and the story "Caneel Bay Plantation" on my website "Livin' 'Round the World", both linked to my John's World Travels" web site.




NELSON LAGOON
Nelson lagoon from the air. This photo was taken in 1998. The runway, lower right, and the two large buildings did not exist when I was there

One of my more interesting and improbable construction jobs was building a power plant at the very end of the Alaska Peninsula in the dead of winter. The job, in a tiny burg called Nelson Lagoon, also included stringing wire and installing switchgear for every building in town. Later I was accused of building this power plant with only a DC-3 load of whiskey and a duffle bag full of twenty dollar bills, but that was a slight exaggeration. The DC-3 was only half loaded with whiskey, the rest being our equipment.

This is the DC-3 right after we off loaded the whiskey.

Our quarters were an abandoned native shack with dirt floors, which we covered with foam rubber packing, which we had removed from our equipment, before we spread our sleeping bags. Myself, though, being the boss, found an old sway backed divan, which I appropriated as my bed. The first three or four nights were kinda cold, as the sleeping bags had become soaked when offloaded from the airplane into a snow bank, but we coped.

Beautiful downtown Nelson lagoon


More beautiful downtown Nelson lagoon

Our equipment and supplies were shipped in via a converted PBY seaplane, and sometimes an Otter, (the airplane, not the animal), the aforementioned DC-3, landing on the beach, or a Cessna 185, landing on the village street. There was an abandoned oil company airstrip about five miles from the village, but an enterprising native had somehow gotten title to it via the Native Land Claims act and was charging landing fees. It really didn’t matter though, because there was no road from there to the village anyway.

I kinda used the Cessna 185 as my personal executive airplane, till the pilot made an unscheduled landing into the inlet. Along with the aforementioned DC-3 and the 185, we had a deHavilland Otter, a very large single engine airplane, which we used only to haul bulky freight. It was so old and beat up that I would not let any of my guys ride in it. Other airplanes used from time to time included PBYs, a Beech 18 Turboliner conversion, and a twin engine Cessna 310. Most of these airplanes were old enough to be in museums, but they were still daily drivers in Alaska

Part of my charter fleet. On the left is the deHavilland Otter. To the right is the Cessna 185 which was sort of my personal executive airplane.

Incidentally, if any airplane happened to deadheading back to Anchorage from the jobsite, we would stuff the plane full of glass Japanese fishing floats, (which were laying on the beaches by the thousand) where they would be sold for a tidy profit.

The village had a satellite telephone system, but nobody had figured out how to hook it up, and radio communications were unreliable due to interference caused by the Northern Lights. The weather, while not really cold, was just genuinely awful, which really raised havoc with flying. Since everything was tundra, our two principal means of transportation in and around the village were an old airplane with wings and tail removed and large tires fitted, and an ancient army surplus weapons carrier equipped with wheels and tires salvaged from DC-3 airplane.

Here we are using the weapons carrier to string wire


More downtown Nelson Lagoon.
That’s the Bering Sea in the background. COLD!!

We had brought along our own cook, an old boy named Snodgrass, and most of our necessary provisions. We then, however, supplemented these provisions with salt salmon provided by the natives. This salmon, which had been laid alongside a native shack to cure, and had then been peed upon by the ubiquitous native dogs, had an interesting flavor, to say the least.


The guys working on the distribution system.
The meters turned out to be useless. It took the natives about five minutes to figure out that they could remove them and reinstall them backward, and not have to pay for electricity.

The natives, aside from drinking all my whisky, were really neat people to work with, and furnished a lot of the labor. The Village Chief, incidentally, was a great help. He was a neat old guy named Gunderson, who claimed that he was half Aleut, half Swede, half Russian, and half Coast Guard. He also groused continuously that in the old days, nobody wanted to be an Aleut, but now that there was money in it, everyone wanted to be one. There were many other interesting characters around town, like Richard, the town drunk, who I had to keep supplied with whisky, as a bribe not to work. When I gave him a bottle, he would disappear for two days, thus giving me a couple days of relative peace and quiet.

My engineer, from Emerson GM Diesel in Seattle. He designed the switchgear, and gave on site technical support.

His contract stated, among other things, that “Consultant will provide own sleeping bag."

He designed this panel in modules. Each just large enough to slip through the side hatch of a PBY.


And here is a PBY Catalina, in which he designed the panel modules to be transported. They didn't remove the gun blisters when they converted it to a freighter, 'cause the view from them is so awesome.

These are the actual generators

Besides the people, the place abounded with wildlife. Caribou were everywhere, and occasionally a brown bear would wander through. These were Alaskan Brown Bears, about twice as big as a grizzly, and about four times as mean. Needless to say, everyone gave them a wide berth. Then, of course, were the dogs. Like all Alaskan native villages, the place was overrun with large mongrel dogs, who didn’t seem to serve any useful purpose except to act as garbage disposal units.

As I said, Nelson Lagoon was really remote, and getting back and forth, between there and Anchorage, was usually an adventure in itself. The quickest and most direct route was to take a charter or commercial flight from Anchorage to King Salmon. Then a charter from King Salmon to an abandoned Air Force field about two thirds of the way to Nelson Lagoon, then call in another charter from Cold Bay, or one of the native pilots from Nelson lagoon, to take you the rest of the way. (The reason for all this plane changing was that the planes that had the range to fly from King Salmon to Nelson Lagoon, were unable to land on Nelson Lagoon’s main street, which was the runway there).

Anyway, I well remember standing on that deserted Air Force strip, 200 miles from nowhere, in the heart of bear country, (Kodiak bears, that is) and wondering if the pilot from Nelson Lagoon remembered he was to pick me up this Tuesday. Remember this was before the days of cell and satellite phones, and the old two way radios we had were short range and extremely unreliable.

This old shipping container is the “Terminal” on that abandoned Air Force strip. In event of a Kodiak bear attack, one could lock oneself inside.

Note my engineer with the caribou horns on the roof.

To emphasize just what a hassle getting back and forth “to town” could be, let me tell you how a supposedly routine 700 mile flight from Anchorage to the job site actually turned out.

It seems that I knew a really great lady in Anchorage who worked for the State Dept of Social Services, and when I was back in Anchorage on business one day, she looked me up. She told me she needed to see the Village Chief in Nelson Lagoon, and could she ride back out there with me. I told her no problem, so on the appointed morning she met me at the airport, slung her duffel into the plane and away we went.

Our airplane that trip was a six place twin engine Cessna, which wasn’t a particularly good bush plane, and couldn’t land on the village street (the normal landing ground) because the Cessna’s wheels were to small and too close together. I had chosen this airplane, though, because I did not want to subject the lady to all the plane changing mentioned above. I figured that we could land on the abandoned oil company strip, and it would be no problem to get someone from the village to pick up this VIP.

First stop was at King Salmon for gas, then on to Nelson Lagoon. When we got to Nelson Lagoon, or the vicinity thereof, the fog was pea soup thick, and we couldn’t see a thing. We stooged around in the fog for a while, but couldn’t find the town. Remember, this was in the days before GPS, our INS (Inertial Navigation System) wasn’t working, and the LORAN didn’t seem to be reliable.

To tell the truth, the navigation system, at that point, consisted of me, in the right hand seat with a map on my lap, looking out the window, glancing at the gyrocompass, and calling out course corrections to the pilot.

Finally, after using up several of our nine lives dodging 10,000 foot volcanoes, we were running low on fuel, so it was back to King Salmon for more gas and a $25.00 six pack of beer, and then up and away again. This time, when we reached Nelson Lagoon the fog had lifted, or more accurately, blown away, but there now was such a crosswind blowing that it was impossible to land. Besides, it was getting dark, so the only thing to do was to go on another 100 miles to Cold Bay, where there was a lighted runway.

Cold Bay was an abandoned Army B-29 base, which had very little maintenance since WW II, but was kind of maintained as an emergency landing field for commercial air traffic to the Orient. There was a primitive transit quarters, consisting of a Quonset hut with no doors on the rooms, and also a bar and restaurant of sorts, called the Tiger Den. This establishment was a holdover from when the old Flying Tiger Lines made a scheduled fuel stop there, on the way to the Orient, before long range jets.

So we put the airplane away, got something to eat, and headed for the bar, which was presided over by my friend Judge Hiker. Hiker was a profane little German but was a real judge, sort of a cross between a Justice of the Peace, and a Superior Court Judge. He was in his cups, as usual, and regaled my lady friend with tales about him being the only f*****g judge in 40,000 f*****g square miles. Hiker, incidentally, was bedding the Nelson Lagoon Village Chief’s white girl friend when the chief was out of town, which was often, so he was a frequent visitor to our job site. But we will hear more about that later. Anyway, after the festivities died down, the pilot and I had to guard the bathroom doorway, (no doors again) while the lady took a shower and got ready for bed.

Next morning, no problem, a clear and beautiful day. We gassed up the airplane and headed out. When we got to Nelson Lagoon, we landed on that deserted oil company strip about five miles from town. And since, contrary to my expectations, and our arrangements, no one came to meet us, we hiked in. About this time the lady looked at me and remarked, “Do you suppose that a letter would have done just as well?”

This is the Cessna 310, and pilot, who flew the lady and me to Nelson Lagoon. Note the winter Alaska outfit I am wearing. Wool shirt with Canadian Indian sweater over that, with wind shell over that. Cord pants over thermal underwear bottoms, wool socks and insulated boots. This plus a Canadian Indian wool hat, would keep me warm down to –30F.

The 310 had two wing tip fuel tanks, with transfer valves behind the pilot’s seat. A favorite trick would be to surreptitiously turn all valves off, and see how quickly the pilot would react when both engines quit. Hey, we had nine lives, might as well use some of them up.

The only civilization anywhere near Nelson Lagoon was a girl watchman at a deserted cannery at Port Moller, about 20 miles away. She, though, did have a radiophone, which worked most of the time. So the way to send messages was to get on the CB to her, and have her relay a message on the radiophone. Of course the whole village monitored the CB, but I finally got even with them. It was just getting dusk the day when the installation was finally complete, and I was ready to throw the switch. But before I did, I got on the CB to the lady in Port Moller, told her I was going to throw the switch, and asked her to watch the western sky for a big explosion. This really shook up the natives.

Me throwing the switch turning everything on.

Now let me wind up this sordid tale with a yarn starring Judge Hiker. For some forgotten reason, I needed an engineer consultant from Seattle for a day or two. So, knowing that he could not handle the plane changing normally involved, I told him to fly with Reeves Aleutian Airlines to Cold Bay, and then charter a Cessna 185 for the hop to Nelson Lagoon. And if he had a problem to look up Judge Hiker. So, on the appointed day, I was kind of hanging around waiting for the 185, when into the lagoon flew a PBY (A large seaplane), which landed and taxied up to the dock. Imagine my surprise when the door opened and out popped Judge Hiker, along with my engineer. Seems the Village Chief was out of town again, and the Judge, seeing an opportunity to visit his, (and the Chief’s) girlfriend in style, convinced my engineer friend to charter the PBY, rather than the 185. This raised my charter expense by a factor of about four, but I just charged the difference off to public relations.

This is a pilot who used to fly me around Alaska a lot in his Cessna 185.

He was a good Bush Pilot, but about two days after this picture was taken he got some bad gas, the engine swallowed a valve, and he crashed the plane into the bay, killing his passenger.
Next time I saw him, he asked me how much I owed him for his past couple of weeks flying for me, as he had lost his logbook in the crash, and didn’t have a clue.

Incidentally, there were several airplanes around that poor excuse for a village. They were kind of used as we use cars, to go to the store for groceries, or to fly to the next island to visit friends or relatives. Strictly local stuff. The natives had pretty much taught themselves to fly, and mostly did their own maintenance, such as it was. Being out at the tail end of nowhere, they didn’t worry much about pilot licenses or airplane registrations. And besides, they were Native Americans, so who was going to hassle them.

I could go on and on about Nelson Lagoon, but you get the idea. Anyway, the power plant got built and the village had lights, but I used a few of my nine lives in the process. The natives were happy, the State and my company were both ecstatic, and I was a certified hero. Not to mention the legend about the whiskey and the $20 dollar bills, which also helped spread my fame.

The warranty I gave the village on the power plant, by the way, was until the wheels were up on my airplane, leaving town.

But we weren’t out of town yet, and as I mentioned before, flying in the Aleutians depends a lot on the weather, which is really horrible. It can go from a flat calm, with pea soup fog, to a full gale, in less than thirty minutes. The weather is so bad, in fact, that you can only maybe fly a plane one day out of two or three. Anyway as we are packing up to leave, I see Snodgrass feeding the surplus food to the ubiquitous village dogs. Hey Snodgrass, I say, “What if the airplane can’t get in tomorrow, what are we going to eat.” Snodgrass then fixed me with a steely gaze and replied, “Well John, in that case, I guess that we’ll just have to eat the fucking dogs.” Fortunately, the airplane came.

This is the airplane I chartered to get us out of town. It is a Volpar conversion of a Beech Model 18, Twin Beech. Conversion includes bigger cabin, lengthened nose, tricycle landing gear, and Garrett Turboprop jet engines. Called a Turboliner. A real rare bird.

Note: The pictures accompanying these stories are scanned from 30 year old Kodacolor prints, taken with a cheap camera, so quaity may not be up to my normally high standards. But you get the idea.