He approached the owner, but the owner didn’t care. He contacted the Coast Guard and traced those letters and numbers to the Gemini. Names change, but call signs are forever. He spoke to the old skippers on the wharf, and when his uncle one day recalled the boat’s radio call sign, Whiskey Bravo 4404, he knew the search was over. By the 1980s, it had become their Holy Grail, and Bob Enea - nephew of Tony Berry, who piloted the boat through the Sea of Cortez - was their knight errant.Įnea combed through the archives of local papers for news of its whereabouts. Yet, for a handful of Monterey residents, its memory burned bright. Renamed the Gemini, the boat was lost, slowly sliding into anonymous ruin. The child survived, but not his marriage.Īfterward came the war, and with the collapse of the sardine fishery the Western Flyer left for the Pacific Northwest, where it chased Pacific perch, red crab and salmon until those harvests also began to decline. He was interested in everything.” - might just as well apply.Ĭhip away at Gregg’s past, and it may be tempting to connect an avidity for life and brushes with tragedy: a small plane crash he witnessed as a child, its occupants trapped in the flames the five years he spent at Children’s Hospital of Orange County, where his young son was treated for childhood leukemia. What Steinbeck wrote about Ricketts - “His mind had no horizons. He is kind of here but often somewhere else.” “He thinks in different patterns than I do,” said Ludbrook.

Potts, the inventor from “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.” Together for 22 years, the couple share a home in Corona del Mar.īut rather than developing a flying car, Gregg is looking at the slime produced by hagfish, the antiseptic qualities of horseshoe crab blood, undersea robots and the potential of a sardine boat almost 90 years old.

His partner, Renee Ludbrook, thinks of him as a modern Mr.

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