I got up to my alarm at 6:30 yesterday morning. I don’t get up that early for just anything. In fact, I only get up that early for about one thing–flying. (For puzzles, I’ll stay
up until 6:30 and beyond, but to wake up then is a different story.) Jennifer and I were going to take a couple of friends (Erik and Sonya) on a plane trip to the
San Juan Islands, almost literally only a stone’s throw away from Canada (you can look out and see Victoria on Vancouver Island from one of the San Juans).
Leading up to the trip, I had been a little nervous about whether it would even happen–the forecast for the weekend looked bad starting as much as a week out, but you never get to fly anywhere in Seattle if you always believe the TV weatherman’s 10-day forecast, so I patiently waited for the aviation forecast to come out. Since the aviation forecasts span 24 hours, I could get a sense for what our morning flight would be like starting the morning before. It looked marginal, and often the forecasts change slightly in one direction or the other over the course of 24 hours so we had to continue to defer our go/no-go decision. As of the evening before, it was looking slightly better for the outbound and the weather for the return flight looked really good, so we called our friends and told them that we’d probably get to go but that things could take a turn for the worse over night. We’d meet at the airport unless they heard otherwise by 7:30 the next morning. They didn’t hear otherwise.
Jennifer and I got to the airport around 7:50. Jennifer’s flight instructor was scheduled to open the flight school that day, and she showed up just a few minutes after we did to let us in and get started dispatching us. Erik and Sonya showed up just a few minutes after that. The day was getting off to a great start.
I did some arithmetic to make sure we weren’t going to be overweight, since the airplane we were in can only barely carry four adults. We would safely all fit, but couldn’t afford to carry the weight of a full tank of fuel. I did a quick preflight inspection of the airplane (it was in great shape and everything worked fine), and we all piled in. After we had clearance from the ground controller to taxi, I had Jennifer do the taxiing so she could get a feel for how that works in aircraft types other than the one that she trains in. We did our final engine run-up to make sure everything was fine and requested clearance to take off. The controller asked us to depart using the complicated
Vashon Departure procedure.
Once we were outside
Boeing Field’s airspace, we turned toward our first waypoint which was carefully chosen to avoid a few spots of sensitive airspace along the way. The clouds were still fairly low over our heads for this leg of our flight which added watching out for towers to the already important task of avoiding other airplanes. The weather conditions at the time we left and the forecast indicated that the cloud cover should be higher before the over water, and I told my passengers that if I couldn’t climb by then, we’d turn around and head home. Just in the nick of time, the clouds gave way to much higher skies. I shoved power to full and we climbed to about 3500’. Once we got to the water, we turned to head directly at the
airport on Orcas Island.
Once we got to the island, we opted to take the route toward the airport that involved flatter land so we could scope it out a little easier. We flew over the airport still at 3500’. It’s a pretty airport, with the north end of it’s approximately north-south runway very near the north shore. We decided to fly out and around Mount Constitution on the eastern side of the horseshoe-shaped island while shedding some of our altitude so we could make a good first approach to the airport. I warned my passengers that in the event that I felt there was anything wrong with my approach to land that I might go around and try again. I didn’t have to in this case. Both our setup and the conditions—a 10 knot headwind blowing straight down the runway—were perfect. We got down on the first try and headed straight for parking.
After tying down the airplane around 9:30, we left the airport. We had to go through a gate designed to keep deer off the airport property, and after that it was slightly more than a 10 minute walk down to the town of Eastsound.
Once we got in to town and scouted around to see what was open. Since it was a Sunday morning (before 10am), very few places were open. We found a bakery and stopped there for coffee and a very light breakfast. While we were there, other places began to open, so we set off to explore the town some more.
We found two main streets in town, and we walked up and down both, stopping at almost every store that was open, including a couple of independent bookstores, an antique store, and a neat little museum of Orcas Island history. At some point during our wandering, we stopped for lunch at Vern’s Bayside Restaurant & Lounge. A couple of our other stops were timed to wait out brief rain showers as the clouds from back home caught up with us. At some point mid-afternoon, we decided to skip over to San Juan Island and check out its biggest city, Friday Harbor.
We took off from Orcas Island and headed directly to the
Friday Harbor airport. There was a fairly strong crosswind there, and I haven’t had a lot of crosswind practice. Unfortunately, it took me three tries to get down at Friday Harbor. It was pretty busy, too, which made me feel even sillier over having to go around. But really pilots don’t laugh at each other for balked landings—even multiple times. Everyone was a beginner once, and even the experienced ones have their less-than-perfect moments. We finally landed, parked, and set out for town.
The security gate at this airport was designed to keep out not only deer, but unauthorized people as well. Since we had flown in, and were on the inside of the gate, we were given the benefit of a sign telling us the combination to the keypad lock. We typed it in and made it a point to remember it so we could get back in later that afternoon when it was time to head home.
We spent some time wandering around Friday Harbor and stopped a few times to just relax and chat. I checked the late afternoon weather update on my cell phone, and the conditions for our return trip looked great into the evening, so we called the flight school and extended our return time from 6pm to 8pm (“Hello, this is Scott Blomquist in Niner Five Two Two Sierra over in Friday Harbor. Nothing bad happened—I just wanted to check to see if anyone has the airplane reserved right after my flight, and if not I want to extend my flight time.”). We wandered around a little more doing nothing particularly exciting, and then headed back to the airport. We added 5 gallons of self-serve fuel, for which the gas pump refused to give me a receipt. Even without adding fuel, we had more than enough for the return flight home, but the flight school from which I rent asks us to always take off more than half full of fuel and I figured I might as well go along.
We took off and backtracked toward Boeing Field. We had intended to go fly over Microsoft campus and some other things worth seeing on the east side of Lake Washington, but the skies looked pretty hazy over there. Instead, we decided to just fly back to our home airport and land. Apparently, while Jennifer and I were busy planning and executing our approach to Boeing Field, Erik and Sonya got a great air tour of Seattle, which was probably more interesting to them than an Eastside air tour, anyway.
The controller assigned us a straight-in approach from north of the airport, which really is a pretty easy approach to make. The only thing that made it difficult this time was that visibility was only 6 miles due to some rather foggy skies in the vicinity of the airport. 6 miles may sound like a lot, but it made it pretty tough to spot the airport. Or, more precisely, it made it hard to be sure that the patch of ground that I thought was the airport was, in fact, the airport. It was. I had to make another crosswind landing, but given the practice that I had gotten earlier in the day made it a pretty good landing. Jennifer complemented me on it once we were clear of the runway. I got a lot of good crosswind practice in throughout the day.
It was a fun trip, and I’d love to do it again sometime.