Christmas trip to Clare

December 28, 2008

For the last 3 years my wife, daughter and I have gone away for christmas at Clare Caravan Park for a few days. This year I decided to take the plane up there as well. The wife drove the car and the camper, and my daughter and I flew the Minicab. The original plan was to send the wife off and wait an hour before leaving. But monday morning started a bit cloudy with patches of rain, so she waited for us to call her enroute to say if we could make it. We made it through to Murray Bridge after skirting around a few showers and called her to tell her to leave. We then headed towards Angaston. I was trying to only use my compass, map and watch and not use my hand held gps. But the wind was a bit stronger and from the east more than was predicted and I had to divert around some patches of rain. I ended up over Rowland flat, which I mistook as Angaston. I then set course for Kapunda. After about 10 minutes what I saw outside didnt match my map. I turned around 180 degrees and headed back to my last waypoint. After orbiting for a couple of minutes I worked out where I was and corrected my headings and set of in the right direction. Once reaching Kapunda I tracked to Farrel flat with out incident(I had by this time got the gps set to double check myself). We arrived at Farrel flat to fairly clear skies and a resonable cross wind of about 10-12 knts gusting to 17-20knts. I was glad I had been doing lots of crosswind circuits the previous couple of weeks! Tailwheel aircraft are so much funthumb_down in these conditions. We tied the minicab down and walked the 2.5kms into town. Two hours later the wife arrived:clap:. Tuesday afternoon I went for a short evening local flight around Clare, Mintaro and Farrel Flat. On christmas eve I went on a nav ex to Lochiel, Which is where I grew up on the family farm and took some pictures of the lake and our old house. I then headed north to Snowtown where I went to High School to. Then east to Blyth, then to Clare. I then did a diversion to Burra as a good exercise. While at Burra I called the wife to tell her I was nearly ready to be picked up, Which she replied "yes I can see you we are in the main street of Burra!" I orbited outside of town and spotted her leaving along the highway. Even by crusing along at 55-60knts I still was faster getting back to the airstrip. I then found out it is better to take a couple of knts tailwind landing uphill than landing down hill with a headwind(still had about 7-10knts crosswind). The strip didnt look that sloped until then! The trip home Saturday morning saw the weather doing the same as it did on Monday, by the time we got back to Aldinga The sky was blue and sunny(I didnt have any nav problems this time). The wife arrived home 1.5 hours after we landed. This was the first time I have had the Minicab away overnight and the furtherest north I have travelled in it also. Next time I want to go onto Kadina and Port Pirie.

scott