Chasing My White Whale

My first patrol aboard the Coast Guard Auxiliary Vessel Silver Charm was in October of 2005. I was a wannabe photojournalist who wanted to put a story together about the San Francisco Fleet Week air show from the perspective of being on the water. A former manager of mine who was in the Auxiliary put me in contact with the owner of the Silver Charm and arrangements were made for me to be a passenger on one of the 4 day long patrols that they would do that year for Fleet Week.

The patrol position was on the west end of the air show box, 800 yards north of the St. Francis Yacht Club and roughly about a mile and a half east of the Golden Gate Bridge. The perspective of shooting from that position was much different than shooting from the crowd line of an air show, the maneuvers look different, you don’t get a great view of the photo passes, but you do get a good view of the aircraft as they exit and enter the show box.

I took a lot of photos on that patrol, wrote an article, but the photo that nagged at me was the one that I wasn’t able to capture. During the Blue Angels demonstration they do a maneuver called a “sneak pass”. The setup for the sneak pass is done by diamond formation doing a Left Echelon Role that starts over the Marine Headlands in the northwest and ends east of Alcatraz. While the formation captures the crowd’s attention and gets them looking toward the east the Lead Solo comes in from the west over Fort Point and drops to an elevation 50 to 100 feet above the bay’s waters before passing along the showline at a speed of 700 mph. On our 2005 patrol it passed by no more than 100 feet to our south and even though I tracked it through the lens of my Canon 20D neither the focus or shutter were quick enough to be effective. Even if I had managed to catch a sharp image it would have been silhouetted.

But alas, that first attempt got me thinking. If the boat was in a position directly in the flight path with the weather conditions conducive to vapor, and I had the equipment that was capable, I could probably get a pretty awesome shot. Ideally, I wanted fog at the Golden Gate in the morning that pushed back in the afternoon so that vapor would appear around the wings and fuselage of the aircraft. I would also need to get lucky with position as it was difficult to predict exactly where dead center of its flight path would be and I wanted to be either right in the flight path or slightly to the south.

The photo I envisioned of the Sneak Pass had become my White Whale. For the 14 years following that initial patrol I would go on at least 1 of Silver Charm’s Fleet Week patrols. Linda Vetter (co-owner and coxswain of Silver Charm) and later her husband Terry Blanchard would do their best to get me in a position if it didn’t conflict with the demands of the patrol. A couple of years we were in the right position but the air was to dry to show vapor and other years conditions were right for vapor but the position was wrong. The equipment I was using was not sufficient no matter which year it was.

In 2019 I had the opportunity to go on Silver Charm for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday’s Fleet Week patrols. It was also the first year that I had the opportunity to shoot with a Canon 7DmkII attached to my 100-400L lens and I was hoping that this would be the year that all of the three factors would come together.

On Friday’s patrol we were in an ideal position and I captured a decent image of the aircraft as it approached us at 700 mph but the air was to dry for much vapor to occur. On Saturday’s patrol our position was just a bit too far to the north and I ended up shooting into the sun. However, the results from the first two days showed promise that I finally had a camera body with the a fast enough focusing system and an fps rate that I could get 3 or 4 images within the ideal range, whereas my previous camera body was good for 1 or 2. I was shooting with the lens at 300mm and I considered the ideal range to be the distance where the plane filled between 1/3 and 2/3rds of the frame.

On Sunday it was cold and windy on the bay as we arrived at our patrol assignment. The fog covered both towers of the Golden Gate Bridge and Carl’s finger stretched towards Alcatraz. Rule of thumb is that if the fog doesn’t clear the towers the Blue Angels won't do their demo. As the tour boats that we were tasked with keeping out of the airshow box arrived near our patrol location we switched our position as the second boat from the south with Coast Guard boat from Station Monterey who was on the corner. We found out over the preceding 2 days that they got more respect from the tour boats than we did.

By the time the Blue Angels started their show the fog had pushed back and sat west of the Golden Gate Bridge. As the diamond formation set up behind the bridge for the Left Echelon Role I double checked my shutter speed and focal length. As the formation started its climb heading east I scanned the west over Fort Point looking for a descending dot. Spotting it with my eye I raised the camera and followed it through the viewfinder. As it approached the ideal range I pressed the shutter button while concentrating on keeping the aircraft in the frame as the boat rolled with the waves. In 7 frames the aircraft passed by overhead, 3 of which I was actually able to not cut off part of the aircraft.

The rest of the air show was anticlimactic. I had a strong feeling that I had caught the image I had been looking for, it looked good on camera’s screen but I wouldn’t know for sure until later when I had downloaded it to my PC. Had I finally captured my white whale? In the end I can't sit back and accept that it's not possible to do better no matter how pleased I am with the results. Next year I hope I get the opportunity to go out and try again.