Blown Up : The Inflatable Boats Hilchey Uses Around Movie Explosives Help to Rescue Whales

It seems there is no job too big for the Inflatable Man.

That’s Dave Hilchey, who hails from Harbor City, where he runs an alley-end marine sales and service center, although chances are he’s afloat somewhere in the Pacific in one of his inflatable boats.

The ocean is Hilchey’s real work place. His small store is merely headquarters.

If there is a movie to be made on the water, Hilchey will secure the area and handle the rough stuff. If there is an angry sea lion entangled in a fisherman’s net or an oil spill to counter, you can count on Hilchey and his inflatable boats.

“I can get a call and I can be in the water doing 50 to 60 m.p.h. within 45 minutes,” Hilchey claims.

If you should happen by his booth at the Anaheim Boat Show, which begins a five-day run at the Anaheim Convention Center today, Hilchey will sell you an inflatable boat.

But he could also share a story that might seem somewhat . . . inflated.

He’ll tell you about the time he was boat master for the filming of “The Hunt for Red October,” based on Tom Clancy’s best-selling novel. It was his difficult task to keep a large area clear of seagoing onlookers who were mystified by the apparent presence of a Soviet nuclear submarine just outside Los Angeles Harbor.

“We would transfer the cast and crew, at the same time protecting the sub’s rear, front and flanks,” Hilchey recalls, revealing that the 200-foot sub was built to scale only from the waterline up, attached to two submerged barges and towed by a tugboat.

“When (the submarine) was going down, every crew boat that they could hire would go around in a circle to simulate typhoon-type conditions,” Hilchey continues.

“I’m sitting there with my boat sideways; they’re making these 10- to 12-foot walls of water. There were 20-foot diesel-driven fans blowing water from fire hoses making rain. The crew boats were off to the side making artificial smoke so you wouldn’t see the tankers coming into the harbor--it was a major production.”

Ask Hilchey if he has seen the movie, and he’ll tell you he “lived it” in his inflatable boat.

He was, he will say, the person that had to retrieve a live charge when it failed to discharge: “It had to be tied to the front of the Zodiak. The fuse had been set off, but it didn’t blow. It had to be brought back to the tug boat and rearmed.”

During another take, with the five-minute fuse leading to an underwater charge ignited, a whale-watching boat full of passengers faced imminent disaster, traveling on a collision-course with the charge.

Hilchey was sent to set the captain straight.

“They think I’m keeping them from the whales, and they refused to change course,” he explains. “So I actually had to come alongside the boat, get on a bullhorn and warn them if they didn’t change course, they would blow up.”

On a third take, again after the fuse was lit, a school of baby porpoises frolicked playfully into “the kill zone.”

“I jam in there with my Zodiak--I give myself three minutes on the watch--and I cowboy them out of there,” Hilchey says. “When it blew, we’re talking about an explosion 150 feet wide by 300 feet tall.”

Hilchey was a mile distant by then. The explosion reportedly rattled windows 13 miles away in the city of Long Beach.

Hilchey: “I was kidding around with (actor) Sean Connery; I told him I got to be 007 today.”

Dave Hilchey, 40, who like his father and grandfather has been involved with the entertainment industry, says he has helped to make 200 major movies, television shows and features.

Each production has meant charging up one of two custom-built inflatable boats that are maneuverable, fast and extremely seaworthy, therefore ideal for the tasks Hilchey undertakes.

There is the 18-foot Zodiak with twin 60-horsepower engines. It pushes 65 m.p.h. and is virtually impossible to flip. The Killer Whale, jet black and bright white, is a 25-footer fine-tuned to a value of $70,000.

“It’s got twin 90s, a Loran (navigational aid), plotting screens, sonar, dual radios, towing lights and fuel tanks for each engine,” Hilchey says. “It’s even got a dive ladder built so the diver can scuff aboard with fins on.”

In the filming of Rescue 911, Hilchey helped recreate a scene in which a surfer was knocked unconscious and was drowning until a lifeguard dived in to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in the water.

“We had to take the boat through eight-foot surf and crash land on the beach with the cameras rolling,” Hilchey recalls. “I had to catch the swell and (allow the photographer) to keep the actor in the frame, too. It was a major challenge; it took 10 takes.”

During the filming of “Joe and the Volcano,” with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, Hilchey says he hit a motor oil container at 35 m.p.h.

“Before we could shut the engine off, it literally blew the power head to pieces, disintegrated the engine,” Hilchey said, explaining that the container wrapped around the water intake valve, blocking passage of coolant to the engine.

During Michael Landon’s “Save the Dolphins,” Hilchey says: “I would jump the boat 30 to 40 feet through the air, chasing the gill-netters.”

Hilchey also braved 35-foot swells during the rescue of a group that chartered one of his boats and took it to Catalina Island. On board was a girl dependent on life-support medical machinery that if soaked would have ceased to work.

“We had 11 people in my 18-foot Zodiak in 30-foot seas,” Hilchey recalls. “It was one of the scariest things I’ve ever had to do. We tried to cross the channel and we couldn’t. We actually had to go back and wait it out for about five hours until it died down to 15-foot swells, and we crossed then.”

There was a time, Hilchey said, when he crossed the channel in 22-foot seas: “It was awesome. We averaged speeds of 75-m.p.h. down the face of the swells. We made it back in something like 47 minutes.”

If Hilchey has a tendency to blow his own horn, perhaps it is because he is an unsung hero of sorts, one who isn’t going to change the world, but who takes an active role in improving it--and of that he is particularly proud.

“We’ve gone out on whale rescues all up and down the coast,” he says, referring to his work with the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. “One time, we went all the way to Carmel and launched up there by Big Sur. This baby whale was dragging a whole dock.”

It was cut loose and set free with the help of Hilchey and his inflatable boat.

“Those (operations) get pretty wild because when you get next to those big whales and what not, it’s an awesome feeling because they’re so majestic, they’re so huge ,” Hilchey says. “All we have to do is get too close and they just flip us right over. But a Zodiak, with pontoons, makes it hard to flip over.”

Hilchey is building a barge-platform that will be used by the Sea Shepherds in their attempts to rescue sea lions entangled in pieces of net. It is driven by concealed motors and has secret compartments for divers. When a sea lion is trapped, it can be easily lifted with a net located in the center, and safely tended by a biologist or a veterinarian.

“We’ve spotted, in the past week, four sea lions with gill-nets around their necks from Los Angeles Harbor to Malibu,” said Peter Wallerstein, director of the Sea Shepherd Society. “That platform might give us a better attempt (to catch the injured animals).”

But Wallerstein will always remember Hilchey as the man with the inflatable boats, who is driven by the boats he drives.

“He’s been helping us quite a bit,” Wallerstein says. “I’ve been on the high seas with these (inflatables) in 60-m.p.h. winds with 20-foot seas, and I don’t think anybody handles those boats better than Dave.”