We found Seals in the Salton Sea....

Well sort of....these were carrying guns.

My family started going down to the Salton sea back around 1967, after we had spent several years camping up at Lake Hemet....If you remember we used to get in free there because my Uncle Leroy was a member of the US Forestry Dept.....I guess he got transferred down to the Salton Sea, cause that's where we all ended up during the summers of 67, 68, and 1969....I recall 69, was my last year there....I had joined the Navy and I had met my future wife there....Funny how I was in the Navy longer than I was married....Oh well, another story all together that is for sure.

But joining the Navy is one way how I found out about the Navy facilities at the Salton Sea....And after a little investigating we found out some pretty interesting things about the Navy and there stay at the Sea.....Something else we noticed was that Bombers would come in and make dry runs over the little Chocolate Mts to the south of the sea and actually were the eastern barrier to the green fields of the Imperial Valley, where they grew and still grow tons of sugarbeets and cane sugar.....All of that outflow from the fields is one of the reasons the present day Salton Sea is in danger of becoming a dead zone.

But getting back to my story, the Navy first used the northeast corner of the Salton Sea in 1939 as a seaplane operational area with bombing targets and for emergency landings.....This area was just south of the Indio Area and the main railroad terminals, so moving men and equipment was easy....But there were problems with this area from winter floods and it was just to small an area....If you look at a map of the Salton sea, you will see that the area just south of Cochlea, is very narrow and shaped like a crows neck.

After the start of WWII, the Navy knew they needed a much larger site and looked at the Red Hill area next but decided to move the base all the way down to the southwest shoreline....Away from prying eyes, and away from neighbors....They picked an area that today is a prime wilderness area, but it was perfect for there operations.....In 1942, the Navy commissioned the base as a Sea Tender Training Center and a Naval Air Facility.

The base was initially equipped with PBY Catalina twin-engine seaplanes, and was used as intended for seaplane training and as a seaplane ferry stop......The seaplane base had a 2,100' long asphalt parking apron, a seaplane ramp leading down into the water, and a small group of buildings.....One problem the Navy ran into early on in base history was the fact that the parking apron looked like the main runway....It wasn't....All of the Sea Planes were supposed to land in the water of course but there was a small runway for regular scheduled Naval flights, and these planes sometimes coming in late at night would see the parking lights and think they were supposed to land there....So they had to paint a large "DO NOT LAND HERE" warning across the parking area.

I also found out later that several different films were shot out in the Salton Sea area, several using the Navy as a either a part of the movie or a major role, such as in the Movie Wake Island in 1942.....For some reason the producers loved the Salton sea area and decided to do all of the battle scenes and much of the airplane and Sea Plane action at the Salton Sea....Paramount Studios built a 4,000 foot long clay airstrip one mile to the east of the naval base.....they then used many of the beach scenes you see in the movie on the base itself, mainly the seaplane ramps and hangers.

In 1944, The Navy decided they needed to expand the base in order to do rocket tests and Torpedo runs, using real PT Boats that were a perfect match for the shallow waters of the sea....The rocket tests were done for carriers and large cruisers....To this end, a landplane airfield was built one mile to the south of the seaplane base.....The airfield consisted of two clay runways, one at 4,900' & the other at 4,000 feet a parking apron, and a taxiway connecting to the seaplane base.....Torpedo Squadron (VT) 20 was the first of 57 squadrons to deployed to Salton Sea for air-to-ground rocket training......Along with this new mission, the Salton Sea Naval Station was upgraded to a Naval Auxiliary Air Station in 1944......It is rumored that General Patten lent several squads of his troops to help build the numerous barracks needed to house almost 700 naval personal.

Tests were also conducted of Jet Assisted Takeoff rockets (JATO) in 1944.....In that same year, the 509th Composite Squadron from Wendover Army Air Field, Utah made over 150 drops of prototype atomic bomb shapes at Salton Sea.....Once while up in the chocolate Mts, in 1964, we discovered several shells and bombs that were unexploded....We called the then still existing base, and informed them of our find....We were told, oh dont worry about them....If they were dangerous they would have exploded under the hot desert sun....We left them alone....We found another spot to shoot our 22's, 350 mags and 33 ought shotguns.
According to the records, NAAS Salton Sea was disestablished in 1946.....However, it was maintained & manned at a lower level as a emergency seaplane facility until 1967, when seaplanes left the naval inventory......Then the base was taken over by NAF El Centro, which conducted parachute drop tests for the manned space program & other military systems until 1979.....And here we always thought they were dropping bombs and other goodies....we could see all of this action from our camp area at BomBay.

That's how we ran into the seals one night....We were out about 1 am in the morning on a foggy hot Salton Sea fishing.....We were way down south where the old town was buried by the rising waters of the flooding Colorado river back in 1913.....The fishing was real good down where the light and telephone poles were....Any way, there were about 10 of us one the boat when I heard a shout come out of the water,

something to the effect of "What the (Insert Explerative here) doing here....My cousin yelled back, who wants to know....All of sudden we could see about 20 guns pointed our way and a very angry DI Trainer.

It seems that the Marines & Navy Seals were out in the area on a combined service training exercise....It seems also that we came real close to being shot, curled, skinned and fried by the Navy's finest.....We apologized and beat it out of there.....The next time I saw UDT and Seal units was aboard our ship.....Everytime I saw them I remembered back to a night that I almost got my rear end frizzazied.....and I have never for gotten.

Gary Hall, the ghostpainter