I’ve flown in the Mallard many times.
I’m telling you, taking off and landing on water is “way” different from doing it the conventional “way”. Good thing is…you can just about set that puppy down (or take off) anywhere. Once, some friends and I hired one for a day. We sprayed off from Christiansted, St. Croix, USVI in the early am…did St. Thomas and St. johns, and all points bars in between. The pilot would set it down wherever we wanted, get fairly close to shore…and we would just jump out and swim to the shore bar. Damn thing had an anchor. We did a lot of bars…the biggest problem was swimming back to the plane (after many Rumbos) and climbing a rope ladder to get aboard. Crazy, but a whole lot of fun. Landed at Davis Bay for the hell of it for a while…(last scene in Trading Places was shot there)…who cares…having your own seaplane for a day is very cool.
Unfortunately, the Virgin Islands Seaplane Shuttle fleet was wiped out during Hurricane Hugo.
I flew on ‘em many times, but I will never forget that day. Doing a pub crawl in a seaplane was a first for me.
Cool Runnings!
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I got a ride back to Miami on one of Chalk’s planes back in the day, but that’s a whole nuther sordid story.
A guy in my hometown (everybody knew fucking everybody, literally) owned a Lake Buccaneer for a period of time. Hellishly slow but he had fun with it on the Tennessee River from time to time.