Things have been pretty quiet, the weather has been a bit too unsettled to do much more than catch up on my reading. Now my eye strain is bad enough to make an effort to get out and do something, anything!
I have always been very aware of the worry that Karen goes through every time that I go flying by myself. The country here is the least populated in all of Oregon, I am sure that it ranks up there with some other parts of the US as well. I installed a base aircraft radio to help and while the range is as much as 60 miles it requires one to be pretty high to accomplish that kind of range. I prefer to be within a hundred feet of the ground, so it means that if I decided to do something other than what I told her before leaving, I need to climb up high enough to talk to her. Wastes gas something awful.
I bought a Spot Messenger last year, but I did not get the tracking feature. Too cheap! It seemed to work somewhat, but the lack of a permanent placement in the plane caused it to be of limited use. I decided to purchase the tracking feature this year. I could say that it was for Karen, but some of the places that I go are really hard to get there from here, and I don't like walking all that much. We will just say that it seems like a good deal for both of us.
There is a "Gap Seal" between the wings of "Dart" that is made of Lexan, so I made a holder that would keep its antenna pointed to the sky. It worked sitting in front of the hanger, but it needed a flight to really give it a good test.
Today the weather seemed to invite flying so I rolled her out, dressed warm and took off for Arock. It was apparent that the wind was blowing at about 10 MPH from the West when I got up out of the wind shadow that shades the airstrip. The temps at 5000 feet was 40 degrees, so I wasn't sorry that I had put on my warm clothes. The plane and engine preformed flawlessly although I will put some tape on the oil cooler the next time I fly. The temps never got over 130 degrees, a bit cool for proper operation. I stayed at 1000 feet agl and checked some of the ponds and rabbit spots that we hunted Jessie and Peg on this fall.
In all the trip took 74 minutes and I burned 3.5 gallons of gas. I covered a bit more than 60 miles and even though I was down to 50 MPH coming back, I still averaged 60 MPH.
The wind was right for the short cross wind strip and I had drug it and rolled it, so I was interested in how it would feel. My landings are sometimes a thing of wonder. (wonder how anyone who has the hours that I have, can land so crappy. ) Except the first ones after a long lay off. My Golf games are like that too, the longer I play or fly the worse my landing get. I can't explain it, unless I just get careless. Any way I started letting down about a mile from the strip, did just like my instructor had told me so many times and depending on my position either gave it gas, or allowed it to bleed off altitude, and made one of those landings that no one ever sees, a perfect three point landing with so little roll out that I had to give it gas to get to the turn off to the hanger. It is only 320 feet from the fence to the hanger. Oh well, someday I will be able to do that every time. Yeah, right!
I was pleased with the results of the test, I had nine tracking points, that should make life or life flight easier.
http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=0siAoTNYTZD6KPbiDncNLfKZruRqx5nUO
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