You might say the PBY Catalina is responsible for bringing people together.

Lesley Bond, of Wichita Falls, Texas, credits his wartime experience at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island’s Seaplane Base for a new friendship that might never have happened if it weren’t for the PBY.

Bond, 85, had not been back to Whidbey Island in 65 years. But his association with PBYs would bring about the start of a beautiful friendship.

Bond was stationed at Seaplane Base during the 1940s. While there, he met and dated a girl from Bellingham named Ernestine Swann, who later went on to marry a shipmate of his, Jack Hill.

Many years later, Bond took a notion, as he says, “to look up (my old girlfriend) on the Internet.” Thanks to a Whatcom County public records search, he was able to do just that, and made contact with Ernestine once again.

Ernestine’s daughter, Coleen Hill of Bellingham, and her siblings had never personally met the man who counted both her mother and father as friends.

“I had heard of him (Lesley) through my mother and father,” said Hill.

Her mother passed away in March.

“I was trying to contact Lesley, because I knew he would want to know about it,” she said. Her dad died in 2000.

Telephone calls proved unsuccessful at first, but “after one thing or another, we finally established contact,” she said.

The correspondence between the two became more frequent, and the conversations turned toward the possibility of Bond making a personal visit, he said.

“Coleen kept saying, ‘Why don’t you come here and see us?’ Well, here I am,” said Bond.

Bond himself has two children, a daughter and son, living in Oklahoma and Texas.

A former Navy Seaman Second Class, Bond said one of the most memorable incidents of his Seaplane Base experience occurred when he was part of the beach crew for the PBY seaplanes.

“My job was to tow the planes up the ramp once they’d landed,” he said.

As Bond tells it, his friend, named Chamberlain, wanted to learn to tow the planes with the tractor. While the seaplane was safely parked with no problems, not so with the tractor.

“(Chamberlain) got a little too excited, and drove the tractor off into the water, and down both of them sank,” said Bond. “We were preparing to pull him out, when out of the water, his head popped up.”

As far as Hill is concerned, Bond is now part of her family.

“We’ve adopted one another. Well, we’ve adopted him into our family, whether he wants to be or not,” she laughed.