A Snowbirds pilot has died. Their season only just started – I saw a story about their sign-off show only a week or so ago. Oh man, I know it’s terrible either way, but I selfishly hope it’s not one of the ones who signed my laptop.
Category: Activities
Second paddle of the season. Overdid it a bit.
I went up the left branch of the creek after the weir, up to Old Browncroft Blvd. 4.4 miles round trip. The air was a little below 70 degrees and the water still a bit cold, and I wore my wet suit with no shirt underneath, and my PFD. The PFD isn’t very good, and it rides up above my fat stomach and ends up rubbing against my jaw as I paddle. The wet suit rubs a bit under the arms but I’m pretty sure it would be fine if I wore a t-shirt.
I tried hard to paddle with good technique, but I don’t think I did a very good job. My elbows are quite sore now. When I got to the turn around point, my left shoulder and right fore-arm were sore and I thought I’d have to take it easy on the way home, but with the current behind me I actually ended up doing some good hard paddling and I wasn’t sore when I got home.
If you look at the Google Maps Pedometer map on the link above, you’ll see that I went into a large area of open water. I think of it as “the lake”, but it’s not really one. The shores of “the lake” provide a lot of mud flats, and on the flats there were dozens of sandpipers. There seemed to be two types of them, some really tiny ones about the size of a goldfinch, and some about half way between that and a killdeer, but I wouldn’t swear to that. I also saw some highly aggressive red wing blackbirds – some attacking each other, and some chasing off some small falcon-form birds like a Merlin or a Kestrel. I guess the females are coming soon. This area also attracts vultures, which is not very encouraging when you’re struggling, and they were out today.
Speaking of birds, what is it about Great Blue Herons that make them so stupid? They see a boat coming upstream, so they “escape” by flying up further upstream, only to have to fly off again 5 minutes later as you get closer. Why is it so hard for them to figure out that they just have to fly around behind you? Bird brains!
On the trip back, I discovered a “gaggle” of young girls in kayaks harassing a swan. There were about 8 or 9 of them, and they had the swan surrounded and were sort of chasing it around. The poor thing had its wings up in a threat display, but there were too many for it to attack or get away from. I didn’t see an obvious leader, so I yelled at them to leave the damn swan alone before they killed it, and paddled on home. When I got to Bay Creek, I asked about this group and the guy working there said that they were supposed to be with an instructor, and he’d speak to them when they got back.
Sour grapes is turning me into a rules lawyer
I didn’t want to book any trips until I got IFR current because you never know when you’re going to need to fly in actual. So it was with some dismay a few weeks ago when I realized that one member of my flying club has managed to book the Lance on for the weekends of May 5, 11, 19, 26, June 9, and then solidly from June 17-29, and then somebody else has it solidly from June 30-July 8, and somebody else has it solidly from July 8 to July 22. Unfortunately Vicki has other committments on June 3rd, meaning that if I wanted to plan a weekend trip to Ottawa with a couple of friends, I’d have to wait until July 27th, or figure out how to squeeze four people plus baggage into the Dakota.
So I’ve been kicking myself for leaving it this late to book, and I’ve been a little annoyed at Jim for booking all those weekends. But last night Lenny mentioned that when he booked the Dakota to go to Colorado a few years ago, he was told that he’d have to get approval from the Board of Directors because he’s taking the plane away for more than 10 days. Well, those three block bookings that go straight from June 17th to July 22nd are all more than 10 days. So I’m not proud of myself, but I sent a letter to the Officers and Board of Directors asking if that policy is still in effect.
IPC Interrupted
I finally finished up my iPC this evening. The winds were favouring runways 4, 7 and 10, which meant that the only RNAV approach that had a LNAV/VNAV option was RNAV (GPS) 04. That’s unfortunate, because runway 4 is the one favoured by the big jets – when the wind is coming the other direction, the approach with LNAV/VNAV is RNAV (GPS) 28, and runway 28 is used by commuter jets and turboprops, which means that my 120 knot approach isn’t too far off their approach speed. And sure enough, on the first attempt at an LNAV/VNAV approach they gave me a 90 degree turn onto the approach just outside the FAF. I did a passable but not great job. I followed the needles down well below the Decision Altitude (1200 feet).
The second time was even worse. Just as I was expecting another 90 degree turn half a mile from the FAF, I heard squelch break twice and an inaudible whisper, and then a “23Y how do you hear me”. That was followed by two vectors through the course that took me past the FAF, and an intercept vector that wouldn’t actually intercept. I “fudged’ the assigned vector to one that would intercept. Starting off having to start my descent before I’d gotten squared away on the approach path meant I never really got settled down. Even using the “TRK” reading on the GPS to try to get the right heading didn’t really make it easy. I kept it within acceptable limits down to the DA. But there’s no way in hell I would have accepted such a lousy set of vectors in IMC.
On both approaches, I’d been chasing the needles in both directions, and didn’t get stabilized, although at the end of it the runway was pretty much straight in front of me.
For the last approach, I asked for the ILS 04. This time, we were obviously getting vectored further away – I don’t know if the controllers know how to vector ILSes better, or if things were slowing down so they could have us on the approach longer. Although he tried to vector a Citation in in front of us, but when it didn’t work out he vectored them through the approach course and a 270 degree turn back onto the course behind us. On the downwind, Lenny reminded me to get my pre-landing checklist done, pick a speed and altitude, get well stabilized, and try to maintain both speed and altitude. I picked 110 knots and 2000 feet. And it worked – I got a better turn onto the approach course about a mile outside the FAF, I kept my speed and pulled back the throttle to get a 550 foot per minute descent at the speed I’d trimmed for. A quick check to make sure my TRK was 043 degrees, and then followed the needles down. Everything was pretty amazingly stabilized in both axes until about 1200 feet, when both needles started to wander. Personally I thought there was a bit of a windshift, but Lenny says he thinks I just got fixated on something after switching to the tower frequency.
Afterwards, we did a bit of ground review. Discussed some interesting things, like why on the RNAV (GPS) 04 approach, the DA for the LNAV/VNAV approach is the same as the MDA for the LNAV approach, but the required visibility on the LNAV/VNAV one is way higher (1.25 miles instead of 2400 feet)? (Answer: because you reach the LNAV/VNAV DA 1.9 miles from the runway end, but the LNAV MAP is right at the runway end.) Couldn’t figure out why the DA is so high, however. The ILS DA is 765 feet, compared to the LNAV/VNAV DA is 1200 feet. Discussed the other IFR trivia, looked at some stuff on the charts like the new T-airways (there’s one up near Ottawa on the L24/L25 chart).
Anyway, it’s nice to be current again.
Whew!
I suddenly discovered I couldn’t reach my colo box. It wasn’t answering on any of the ports it’s supposed to be. But I didn’t get any indication that anything was going wrong before hand, and I couldn’t ping the IP one before mine, so I was was hoping it was a problem at Time Warner’s data center and not with my box. I called my colo provider, but didn’t get an answer. Ah good, I thought, ever the optimist, that means they’re working on the problem.
But the minutes turned into hours, and I still couldn’t get through to my box, nor was anybody answering the phone. But after nearly three hours of downtime, mail started flowing again! I could reach my web sites! And the IP one before mine became pingable. And it appears that they didn’t have to reboot my box to do it. My 65 day uptime survives. Yah!