Rants and Revelations

This morning I was sitting there enjoying my breakfast and the early morning quiet when a woman who was parked a few planes down (so she arrived the same time as me) came over to chew me out for nearly hitting her when I turned final on Saturday. I told her that while I don’t remember it exactly, I’m pretty sure my base had been called by the tower, so I really don’t know how that could have happened. Although in retrospect, I could have been focusing too hard on the Mooney I was told to follow, and not enough on looking around.

Now I’m all nervous about just how bad a job I did arriving here, and I’m even more sure that I shouldn’t do the VFR arrival without a second pair of eyes on board.

BTW: Wifi sucks here. It sometimes works at the shower stalls, but it cuts in and out when it does, and the wifi here at the bus shelter is more reliable but there isn’t any power here.

(This was originally part of a journal that I’m keeping on my computer, so it might repeat stuff that I’ve already put on the blog.)
Continue reading ‘Oshkosh First Day’ »

Yesterday I found some power but no wifi. Today I found wifi but no power. So I was able to finally get the log file that my boss emailed me yesterday. I had been trying to find a way to read it on my cell phone, but for some stupid reason every “text reader” I managed to find for the Palm either required you to convert the text file to something else on your PC, or the program itself was only available as a zip file, and I have no way of unzipping files on the Palm. Why can’t they just make the bare .PRC file available?

Once I got the log file, it only took me a minute to find the fix, so I’ve emailed me off. Yesterday I started writing a long narrative of my Oshkosh so far, and I was going to put it all up when I got home, but now I have wifi I guess I could cut and paste that into blog posts.

I made it to Oshkosh. And I flew the Ripon-Fisk VFR arrival. Man, I have never been so close to so many aircraft in the air before in my life. As I was coming up to Ripon, a Bonanza passed about 20 feet off my left wing and crossed about 20 feet in front of me. I don’t know if he saw me or not. Then since we were over Ripon already, I just turned up the tracks, but I think I cut off a Mooney who was also coming up the tracks. I was told to follow another Mooney up to Runway 27.

The instructions say to turn up the road just north of the field as a downwind leg, but the Mooney went about a mile wider than that, and an RV snuck in between us. I’m not sure where he came from, but I think he might have gone around from his previous approach. They also extended the downwind way out over the lake. Tower told me to turn to base immediately, and that put me way too close to the Mooney (I lost sight of the RV again), and then he told the Mooney to go around, and I thought he said for me to go around, but then he expressed surprise when I did, so I guess that was my other mistake.

But we got slotted into the downwind again and landed safely, although I don’t think he ever cleared me to land.

It was a very strange experience, and I’m really glad I did it. But next time I’m going to make sure I get an IFR reservation.

The guy who wanted a ride from Muskegon to Oshkosh has changed his mind. Probably. He’s still looking for a ride home on Tuesday, possibly by bus, but unless he calls me sometime tonight or tomorrow while I’m on-route to Muskegon, I’m going to be alone.

Time to study that NOTAM one more time, I guess.

I worked my ass off today trying to get these two bugs fixed before I left. I ended up coming out 12 hours after I got to work. I tried to put my key in the lock, and somebody had punched it out. A quick glance inside my car confirmed my worst fears: they’ve cleaned it out. Well, mostly. I suppose I should be thankful that they didn’t steal my PFD and kayak paddle. But the following items are gone:

• Pioneer AirWave XM Radio
• Garmin GPSMAP 296 (with car kit)
• Sportys leather flight bag
• Sportys SP-200 NAV/COMM Transceiver
• Quiet Technologies Halo headset
• Dave Clark DC10-13.4 with Headsets Inc ANR kit
• Pilot Avionics PA11-40 Headset
• 2 Flightcomm 4DLX Headsets
• Foggles
• Penguin LED flashlight
• 2 flashlights
• all my local charts
• my log book

There’s probably a bunch more things that I haven’t remembered yet. I haven’t even looked at my trunk yet to see if they got into that.

On the plus side, I finished a log book not too long ago, and I keep a duplicate entry in a program on my PDA, so other than my most recent BFR and IPC endorsements, I haven’t lost much there. It doesn’t look like anything irreplaceable. And I will be going to Oshkosh, which is probably a pretty darn good place to go with a shopping list and the knowledge that an insurance claim will pay for some of it. I just need to make sure I have a headset for the trip out.

I feel bad about the leather flight bag - Vicki was so upset when it didn’t come for Christmas. I think it came about 6 months later. Evidently Sportys waits until they get an order, and then they inseminate a cow, and wait for the calf to be big enough.

Update
Just remembered a few more items:

• Zulu knee board
• ASA knee board
• This “Flight Crew Checklists” binder thingy that I’ve been looking for another one forever
• Checklists for Archer, Dakota and Lance

Update 2:
I just remembered something else that was in my car: my Duluth Trading messenger bag. I don’t remember everything that was in it, but I’m pretty sure my Canadian passport was. Good thing it’s expired. My British passport might have been in there as well, but it expired years and years ago.

I found a guy who wants a ride from Muskegon to Oshkosh, so at least I’m going to have somebody to help me with the Fisk approach.

I waited too long to request an IFR reservation for Sunday for Oshkosh (I should have been on the STMP site yesterday afternoon) and now there aren’t any arrival slots in any timeframe I could reasonably make. I wonder if I could file IFR to the FAH VOR and proceed VFR from there?

I was hoping to not have to do the Fisk arrival without a copilot, but it looks like that’s going to happen.

After the race where my time sucked because of the broken skeg, and the race where my time sucked because I was in a strange boat, today I didn’t have any excuses - I was back in my own boat. And who needs excuses when you improve your previous best time by 48 seconds!

The rain ended minutes before the race - the thunderstorm had been so intense that they’d announced at work that people should not wade through puddles because the intense rainfall had blown the tops of manholes and you might fall in one.

The creek was running pretty fast, and the bay was calm and flat. For me, that was perfect. I really enjoyed the strategy of trying to read the river and find the quieter parts on the way upstream and the faster bits for the way downstream. I was a little scared of breaking my skeg so I pulled it up long before I got to the channel off the bay. And then I paddled inside the “scum line” - a line of duckweed that showed you where there was a little back-eddy for some of the upstream, then it was cutting inside corners and trying to stay as close to the inner bank as I could and still make a good paddle stroke. After the turn, I paddled downstream in the fastest part of the stream, usually the outside of corners.

What a great evening. Worth missing watching the best stage of the Tour de France for, which is high praise indeed.

I signed up for the EAA Rideshare to try to get somebody to ride along on my trip to Oshkosh. I got three people responding, and the two who gave their “preferred response” as phone, neither of them have returned my calls. The third was all set to come, until I told him that I was going to return on Thursday.

Only one week to Oshkosh, and I’ve barely started getting ready. I think I need to write what I need so I can strike them out as they’re done.

• Airplane booked
• Charts ordered and arrived
• GPS loaded with route and car charts
• Tent
• Sleeping bag
• Thermarest pad
• Camera and batteries
• Camp stove
• Camp chair
• Cooler
• Breakfasts
• water bottles
• diet coke
• beer
• cooking and eating utensils
• warm weather clothes
• cold weather clothes

You’ll note that I only plan to prepare breakfasts. OshawaPilot will verify that after a day of walking around Oshkosh I’m so wiped out that I’m useless for doing just about anything around the camp, so I’m planning to eat brats on the show site.

I’m also still having camera trouble - I bought a Minolta Maxuum 7D DSLR on eBay, but it was broken so I had to send it back, and I haven’t heard anything from them since.

I upgraded my blog to Wordpress 2.6. It was extremely painless - I didn’t even bother to deactivate my plugins. So far, it looks pretty much the same. I do like the new plugins page, though. One of these days I’d like to see if I can get the Gallery plugin working - I had it working for a while, but it broke after a couple of upgrades of both Gallery and Wordpress.

My boat is still broken. The skeg came in, but it turns out that the wire in the boat is too big for the hole in the skeg - evidently Valley made the skegs narrower in recent years and used a smaller gauge wire to fit it. So I’m going to have to wait while Dave at Baycreek rewires my boat.

I tried a Cobra Eliminator, which is a pretty fast sit-atop kayak. It was a bit tippy, but nothing I couldn’t handle. Unfortunately it had a couple of problems:

• It had a tendency to turn left unless I held a bit of right rudder
• the venturi self-bailer only bailed when I was going full speed, and tended to fill the boat if I went even a little bit slower
• Even with full rudder, it couldn’t do a u-turn in the width of the creek
• Most importantly, when I went out into the bay the water started coming in faster than it was going out - I ended up trying to balance the boat with the entire cockpit full of water
• The cockpit was a bit too short for me, so my inner thighs were burning after a few minutes, and when I got tired my paddle kept hitting my knees. We tried taking out the seat so I could sit back further, but then I started sliding from side to side, which was a real treat when the cockpit filled with water again

So I decided not to use the Eliminator. The closest equivalent to what I’m used to was a Valley Nordkapp. It’s a little narrower than the Skerry, but it has almost no rocker, so it was very difficult to turn. Going out on the bay, it wasn’t bad, but when it came time to make the turn I discovered that the combination of narrowness and my unfamiliarity with the boat, and a new set of rollers coming from 90 degrees to my course, I dissolved into a quivering lump of “oh god, please don’t let me tip out here”. Needless to say, that didn’t do much to help my time. And the paddling I did before, and the bad technique during the quivering lump part of the course, meant that my second half wasn’t very good either.

Soon after I finished, and while others were still on the course, we got a brief thunderstorm. Those of us not on the water waited it out under the tarp, but the wind was coming pretty hard so we got wet anyways.

I need to work on my technique, conditioning, weight, and get a better boat. But other than that, I’m perfect.

My main task for this release has been to rewrite large swaths of the database code. Along the way, I had to rewrite a lot of code. Well, evidently in the course of rewriting the code, I fixed a couple of bugs that some people in QA don’t consider bugs. And now they’re hassling me because there weren’t bug reports (PCRs) for the things I changed, and want to know what else I’d changed. I told them that I didn’t stop to document every bug in the subsystems I rewrote, I just wrote the new code to work correctly. But that isn’t good enough for them - evidently I was supposed to spend years doing their job (documenting what was wrong with the sub-system) before I rewrote it so that the bugs they liked could have been reproduced exactly.

The worst thing about this is that yesterday we had a 1 hour meeting with managers, customer service people, installers, QA and developers because QA had freaked about another behaviour that I had never liked and I’d fixed it on purpose, at the end of which every person present except for a couple of the QA people had voted that they like it the way I made it now, instead of the way QA wanted me to put it back to. And this new discovery is in almost the exact same area.

Today I was supposed to have another private lesson with Dan, and then attempt to keep up with the team while they trained. But Dan couldn’t get there until nearly the time the team was supposed to show up, so I went out and tried to practice a bit before he got there, and then paddle with the team. But without a skeg, my boat was damn near uncontrollable on the bay - there was a tiny bit of wind coming from the west, and my boat kept wanting to weather vane into the wind. And then a boat would come along, producing a wake coming from the east, and my boat would try to turn into the waves. I’d be trying to practice a good forward stroke, and end up turning in circles. Then I’d try to keep up with the team but in order to paddle in the same direction as them, I’d be doing sweeps on one side for 10 or 20 strokes before I dared make even one stroke on the other side. I can’t really practice my forward stroke when I’m only able to paddle on one side at a time, so I yelled to Dan that I was heading back as they disappeared in the distance.

As I turned back to the dock, I got a long series of wakes coming at me, and by sweeping on the upwind side I actually got a good surf going, and about a third of the way back was assisted very nicely by that. That was the only fun part of the whole evening.