On Saturday I managed to find the only bit of significant cloud in an
otherwise clear sky and that kind of luck managed to follow me right through
the Thanksgiving weekend.
The original plan was to take RTH’s mother (who is visiting) out to
lunch at Lindsay airport, the same place we had our anniversary lunch. The
weather looked flawless, as did the sky. We set off confident that we’d get an
awesome view of the changing Fall colours. I was looking forward to a nice
relaxing ride in the back, where I didn’t have to worry about where to put my
hands, or inadvertently stepping on the rudder.
The plan started to unravel as soon as we got to the flight school.
We appeared to be booked in the only plane that hadn’t returned yet. We were a
little early, we waited patiently.
And waited and waited.
Long story short, we were over an hour late taking off. Maybe more
on that another time. As we took off I couldn’t help but notice the appearance
of the dreaded white fluffy stuff. It’s hard to gauge cloud height from the
back but it was only a tad over 3000ft maybe. From my perspective I wasn’t sure
if we would make it up to 2500ft as requested by ATC.
As the flight went on the cloud base got lower and lower. At one
point we can’t have been much more than 600ft or so above the ground! It was a
lot of fun, the scenery as breath taking as usual. I’ll pull some stills from the video I took
and post them when I have a moment. You could see that RTH has having an
absolute blast, barely containing his glee. But RTH is a safe pilot and when it
became obvious that the radio masts were getting a little too close for
comfort, we made the obvious choice and turned around to head back to home.
Some stations not far from our intended destination were reporting IFR
conditions and cloud base at 800ASL. That is the beauty of having a passenger
in the back seat with a smart phone and the AeroWeather app. I could tell RTH
exactly what various stations were reporting while he concentrated on not
hitting any cows!
It was a fun flight even if we didn’t achieve what we set out to. I
just need to stop attracting that cloud!
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