Vertigoflyer Avis 

I understand that flying into remote lakes in rural Alaska will have an inherent risk of unanticipated weather delays. However, when a pilot withholds important information from his clients that could have changed the whole outcome of a once-in-a-lifetime activity, there is a problem. That is what happened in our case.
I had drawn on a very limited brown bear hunt on Frazer Lake on Kodiak Island and was very excited about the opportunity. My 89-year-old dad (who had taught me to hunt and fish) wanted me to shoot the last animal on his bucket list for him, so this was an important hunt for me. We were scheduled to fly out with Jay the last week of April and had made multiple attempts to contact him prior to our arrival. We wanted to check the conditions of the lake, make sure everything looked good, etc. Unfortunately, the only time he answered the phone (three days before our flight to Kodiak), he immediately said he was busy and would call us right back. He did not and continued to avoid our phone calls until after we had already arrived on Kodiak and it was too late for us to change our plans.
Kodiak had an unusually long winter, so the lake was still frozen, making float plane landings impossible. Had we been told this simple piece of information; we would have changed our flight to Kodiak and hunt times, avoiding the 5-day wait that almost ruined our hunt and cost us thousands of extra dollars for truck rental, food and hotels in Kodiak. Jay was fully aware but made no attempt to return our calls, emails or texts or communicate in any way. After arriving in Kodiak, is when Jay finally deemed us worthy of communication. The first words out of his mouth were “You are F***ed. We were then told to hang tight and that the ice could break any day with the wind coming in, so we waited there day after day, just hoping.
On day two (the best weather day of the trip), another transporter was able to land at the north end of Frazer Lake and confirmed that there were some open spots along the shore halfway down the lake, just not right in front of the south cabin where we were going to stay. We made arrangements with Jay to take us into one of the openings early in the afternoon so we could hike to where we needed to be. He finally arrived around 5:30 and made the comment that if we were just "a bunch of guys" he would still do it, but he refused to be responsible for taking a family in that late in the day. Sunset was not until 10PM, giving us more than adequate time to hike down to the cabin. It was myself, my husband and two older teenage boys; so, the real refusal was taking in a woman. We explained the four of us had tackled much harder hunting conditions sheep hunting in recent years and were more than capable of hiking to the cabin in the time remaining in the day, regardless of our gender or age. But the fact was, Jay just didn’t want to take us.
The last day, after waiting 5 days, was the worst. Once again, we waited at the seaplane base for hours after the new scheduled flight time with no word from Jay. We finally cornered one of Jay’s pilots to ask if he had heard from him. The pilot fumbled around trying to cover for Jay and couldn’t even look us in the eye. A few minutes later, Jay’s wife called us to tell us that Jay was sitting on a nearby lake waiting out fog after an emergency landing. No other pilots were having fog issues and the live weather camera near the lake he claimed to be on did not show fog. She told us not to give up hope and that Jay was still planning on taking us in. About 30 minutes later, the story changed again and we were told Jay had reported that the ice had shifted on Frazer Lake, so even the spot that had started to open up was gone and it was also fogged in. It was at that point he cancelled our flight altogether.
Luckily, not being his clients anymore allowed us to utilize flight services from the honest pilots we had become acquainted with while hanging out at the base day after day. One had even voluntarily checked on the lake for us just an hour or so before Jay’s wife called us to cancel on us, and verified the weather was clear and that there was a good-sized open spot right in front of our cabin. By then it was after 5pm. While we were loading up with our new pilot, Jay flew in with an unscheduled group of hunters. I am guessing this last-minute schedule was at a higher rate of pay, therefore a higher priority to Jay than the commitment he had with us at the lower rate scheduled 11 months ahead of time. We were able to fly out by 6pm with the new company, land right in front of our cabin and see for ourselves that the wind, fog and ice story that Jay tried to feed us was garbage. In fact, half of the lake was free of ice, proving that Jay had not even looked at it.