Some months ago, I took a day off and with my wife, went to a little town fairly close to SHARKHUNTERS HQ here in central Florida. It was about two in the afternoon and we were walking along the main street and were passing a police officer who was waiting for children to come out of school so he could get them safely across the street. As with all these little Florida towns, people are friendly, so we said hello to the officer as we passed him. He nodded, looked at my SHARKHUNTERS “T” shirt and said: “I’m a SHARKHUNTER, too.”

We met officer BOB DUNN (3469-1994) because I wore my SHARKHUNTERS “T” shirt in another little town.

Two Meet

JOE BURGES (605-A-1988) loves to travel around the world on all types of tramp steamers and sailing ships, and he just returned from a trip where he sailed from Europe on a tall ship to islands in the Caribbean. During the cruise across the Atlantic on this sailing ship, he met another passenger and in the course of their conversation, JOE learned that this other traveler was a submarine veteran of World War II too, but from the KRIEGSMARINE. JOE is a transplanted Brit who joined the U.S. NAVY submarines to fight in the Pacific.

As they talked, they found they had more in common than just wartime service - JOE had met HORST HASLAU (167-1986), the radioman from U-1230 that put two German spies ashore in Maine in November ‘44! Two Members of SHARKHUNTERS met on a sailing ship in mid-Atlantic.

Arts and Crafts

Throughout the fall and winter months, every little town in Florida has a SEAFOOD FESTIVAL or an ARTS & CRAFTS FESTIVAL and my wife drags me to more than my share. As we were walking through one such FESTIVAL a month or so ago, I spotted a man wearing a cap that said USS BARB SS-220 on the front. I pointed at him and said: “You rode the BARB under Gene Fluckey”.

He quickly snapped back: “Best Skipper in the fleet!”

I started to tell him about our SHARKHUNTERS and how his former Skipper, RADM EUGENE FLUCKEY (2169-1992) was a Member of SHARKHUNTERS and also on our ADVISORY BOARD. He interrupted and said that I didn’t need to tell him about SHARKHUNTERS - he had been a Member for two years. He was PAUL SANDERS (3092-1993), one of the eight men from USS BARB who paddled ashore on one of the Japanese Home Islands to plant a demolition charge under a railroad track. PAUL was the guy who handled the explosives in that escapade and I should also say that this was the ONLY TIME in the course of World War II that American military men set foot on the Japanese Home Islands.

PAUL said that he was looking forward to coming to our ‘beer bust’ in December. I asked if he meant our Christmas Party and he said that since we were serving beer, then it was a ‘beer bust’. OKAY, sounds good to me . . . .

Do YOU wear your SHARKHUNTERS “T” shirt? Does your car have a SHARKHUNTERS bumper sticker on it? You’ll never know when someone will come up to you and say: “I’m a SHARKHUNTER, too!’