Tour de Coast

I had planned on flying yesterday. Woke up at 5:00 and called Whitted's ASOS. Winds were 18 knots gusting to 24. I promptly logged into the flight schedule and cancelled my reservation. I'm restricted to 17 knot maximum winds for solo flight. Just for grins, I called back at 9:00 when I was scheduled, the winds were 20 knots gusting to 30. I rescheduled for today and had a beautiful flight.

You might call it the lighthouse tour. I flew from Whitted north to the Anclote lighthouse. Anclote Key is the northern most of the barrier islands on Florida's west coast. North of Anclote the coast changes from beach to saw grass. In the middle of the top photo is the Anclote lighthouse. Look hard, because it's a rusty steel structure and does not show up very well when you're flying 1000 feet above it. It s no longer in use, but preservationists keep it from falling apart.

I took as many photos as I could manage. I had a real camera with me today. However, I had to fly while I was snapping pictures, and shoot through the window of the plane, so they're not perfect. To the left is the Egmont lighthouse. It looks a bit more like a traditional lighthouse. The water is not as blue as it should be this time of year. We have had high winds the last couple of days, and that has muddied the coastal waters.

I added a slide show of the pictures I took in flight. I'll keep adding to it as I travel to new places. If you click on the slide show, you should get a larger version. I've mastered one more tiny piece of technology. If you open the GPS file of today's flight, (which I forgot to turn on until I was over the beach) the track will be colorized and extruded from the ground to give you an idea of my altitude. Looks better too. Thanks to gpsvisualizer.com for the help with that.

Today's flight was fairly uneventful. However, for the first time, I did get to use runway 18/36 at Whitted for takeoff. I had planned on practicing my flight maneuvers and taking a couple laps around the pattern, but coffee and cold weather is a bad combination for Tony. My bladder was telling me it was time to land. I called the tower and the controller asked me which runway I wanted to use! He told me he had one reading on his wind indicator but the windsock on the field was pointed a different direction. I requested runway 36, having never landed on that one and wanting to try it. Moments later he was back on the radio telling me to land on runway 7.

The weird thing for me is believing someone would actually rent me a plane to fly around in. I know I'm doing it, but somehow it just doesn't seem real. The next weird thing is that I'm actually doing it. Taking off, flying, landing, all by myself without hurting myself or anyone else, or damaging the plane. Too cool.

lesson 10 file

You'll need google earth to open the flight file. I called this lesson 10 even though it's not really a lesson. Helps keep me organized.

Statistics

Dual Instruction Time: 11 hours

Pilot in Command: 2.8 hours

Landings: 51