Max Ledbetter's Manuscripts and Publications

Summarizing some of my published and unpublished work.
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Some might recall Al Meadows's comments (Cockpit Comments. Western Fisheries 102 (August 1981): 28, a Maclean-Hunter publication): "I'll be reviewing a study known as the Ledbetter Report in a future comment. This report is about the seine boat fishery in Johnstone Strait and I have heard disturbing news that the Fisheries Service is attempting to water down and suppress it." -- hurtsea.com by Max Ledbetter

 

I studied the nearshore waters of British Columbia during 1974 to 1986, and my work as a graduate student in British Columbia during 1981 was probably one of the most dangerous jobs in the world -- maritime crimes are often perfect, typically perfect. Fish and wildlife officers are more likely to be assaulted or drugged than street cops. (Here is a disturbing news report: Is the world's deadliest profession also among the most violent?)

 

I made 61 flights over the British Columbia fishing fleet during the summer of 1981 (my pilot often brought the plane in low to give me a good view of the salmon in the holds). You see at that time, during my Cessna flights over the British Columbia fishing fleet (and during my subsequent data analyses), President Ronald Reagan's drug war in Florida was motivating the drug smugglers and the smugglers' motherships and recruits to move into Canadian waters, where they paid boaters and fishermen to run the drugs ashore. Mortgage rates were almost 20 percent. Businesses were going bankrupt; fishers were losing their boats, and homeowners were facing foreclosure. 1981-1982 was a "perfect storm."

 

A few weeks after my last flight in 1981, my pilot vanished while flying his Cessna airplane. I phoned the Coast Guard in that area and they said my pilot's plane must have hit the ocean hard; there was no oil slick, no wreckage, no flotsam, no trace.

 

"The search continued north of Port Hardy, B.C. for a Cessna 180 [piloted by Edward Carder of Minstrel Island, B.C.] missing since Oct. 23,[1981]." -- United Press International

 

Meanwhile, academia seemed ignorant of the dangers, or they turned a blind eye and watched you fall by the wayside.

 

 

Google Books

Academic work

Fisheries ecology

Unfinished Surveillance: A Novel of Witness by Max Ledbetter (Did they ignore the underworld and deny the possibility that a horrible drugging had occurred? Did smugglers or opportunistic sadists drug chosen targets with methamphetamine, a dangerous central nervous system stimulant that mimicked schizophrenia and caused psychoses that sometimes lasted for eight to twenty-two years?)


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