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and not the plane's controls that had shorted. Up in the cockpit red
lights were flashing as the engineer peered into the electrical panel, a
concerned look on his face.
When we got close to the San Diego airport, the pilots had a prob-
lem getting the landing gear down. We circled around for a while be-
fore they succeeded. At this point smart-ass Bob went back up to the
cockpit and said, “Well, we took care of the fish; how you doing with
the airplane?” He got no response. We'd been told that the plane was
supposed to leave that night for the Philippines, but we heard later that
the plane was laid up for two months for electrical system repair. That
flight, together with another later one by Gerry Klay, led to strict
design and construction guidelines of shark-shipping boxes so they
couldn't lose water. From years at aquariums experiencing what
seawater can do to electrical systems, I knew that was a wise policy.
I don't think they addressed problems caused by know-it-all pilots,
however. Flying Tigers refused to charter planes to Sea World for some
years after, and Gerry Klay was banned by all cargo airlines for a
while.
In spite of the di‹culties, the sharks, the groupers, and all the smaller
fishes made it. Sadly, we lost some of the seventeen gars because of over-
crowding. Unlike most fish, gars are air breathers, but there was so lit-
tle room in their boxes that they couldn't all get up to breathe when
we hit that turbulence over Texas. Indeed, we learned a lot from that
ambitious, pioneering shipment.
A RECONNAISSANCE TRIP
Our success with the tropical sharks from Galveston encouraged us to
look for a closer source of warm-water species. The Gulf of California
isn't far from San Diego, but little was known about the abundance
and distribution of the sharks in the upper part of the Gulf.
There was one useful publication on eastern Pacific sharks, written
by Susumu Kato of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, but none of us
at Sea World had any personal shark experience in the area. No cargo
planes fly down to the upper Gulf, and the only paved road went as
far as San Felipe in Baja California. We decided to make a reconnais-
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