U.S. Coast Guard, be a hero every day! (Yea right)

While fling an LE patrol off the Aleutians we flew over a HSDN (High Seas Drift Net) vessel, catching them in the act of illegally poaching salmon. They were retrieving their net, which was more than three miles long! We established a secure comm link with RCC (Rescue Coordination Center) in Juneau, informed them of the violation, and requested further instructions. At that time the regular radio operator was replaced by the highly excited voice of one of the controllers (obviously a JO) who asked "Which way are the salmon swimming?". Confused, our copilot responded "into the net." The Controller came back on  and said "This is very important! Can you tell if the salmon are swimming toward Alaska or Russia?!" (Yea right, from a C-130 flying at 200ft AGL and 130 kts) We were all laughing so hard, no one could respond for at least three minutes...

Funny.  Someone had to put him up to that though.... I can't imagine some JO came up with that on his own.

In the Navy we used to get newbies all decked out in NBC suits and send them to the forcastle with a firehook and tell them to catch the mail buoy when it floated by.  Good times!

I have to disagree... This sounded like some Ensign bucking for LTJG. I can just picture it...

You think?  Do they really have to do anything special to make JG?  As far as I could tell it was automatic as long as the guy wasn't a complete waste.

Amen. You make JG in two years unless your pulse rate is zero.

ROFL!  

It makes a difference because if the salmon were swimming for Russia they were defecting and could be shot!  If they were swimming for Alaska we would have granted them asylum.

Hey, Mainframe- didn't you tell me a story once about a Japanese fishing boat and a prop synchronizer turned off?

Roger on the salmon defection... maybe we weren't supposed to be doing LE and were supposed to be doing AMIO (Alien Migration Interdiction Ops)!

Yea, the "prop sync" story is one of mine... I'll tell that story in a new post, so we can get a different discussion thread going...

As for you guys who think the JO was "set up", I still disagree... You're right about LTJG being a automatic promo, but they still need cannon fodder for their OER if they want to advance quickly or get a good assignment. Seing how this guy was content to stay off the radio until something important was happening, I see it as an attempt to take control of a situation that was already under control. We were on scene, he was 2000 miles away in an office building...