So now its about 11 am or so, and Dave and I spend a few minutes getting to know each other. He asks how I’d like to approach my training – minimum flight time or maximum experience. Since I had already learned that Chuck Brown wouldn’t be available for my check-ride today, I went for the maximum experience. I intended to fly today until I got tired, and stop before the fatigue mistakes kicked in.
The plan we came up with was to fly for 90 minutes or so right here in this vicinity; have lunch at the fishing camp; and then fly the afternoon away.
Right here on the lake, we start with rough water take-off and landing work done within sight of the dock. Several circuits with normal take-off and landings went well; practice step taxi and plow taxi maneuvers; and preparation for the oral test as we flew along. Even though I had spent 5 hours sitting dock-side before I finally got moving, I was good to go and having fun at this point. The entire effort was worth it. Getting away from work and being absorbed in this new challenge provided a necessary distraction.
Lunch was at a restaurant that had been recommended, but I had avoided up to now. You can see it over the left-most golf cart. That is an outside bar to the right of the enclosed shack/restaurant. That shack actually turned out to be a nice clean restaurant inside, that served up an amazing fried Grouper sandwich. This place could be a really good time when you didn’t have any place to go or things to do. Reminded me of almost exactly a year earlier when Ted and I rode to Bike Week down in South Carolina. Same deal, only flying was part of this one.
Maybe eating fried good wasn’t the best choice. I had some serious flying ahead of me, and I could have used a bit more energy at the very end. I’ll talk about that in the next post on this issue.