One of the things Ron mentioned is that he has done some Angel Flights with his Musketeer.
Angel Flight is an organisation that provides non-emergency medical flights to people who are a long way from medical care. For emergencies, you've got the Royal Flying Doctor Service, but Angel Flight caters for less urgent stuff - people coming up for Dialysis, Chemotherapy, or other specialist treatment.
I'm interested in doing Angel flights in the future - unfortunately I don't have enough hours in my logbook at the moment to volunteer as a pilot.
Dan, my business partner, had mentioned that his dad (Nigel) was keen to get up with us. So a date was arranged.
I had to wait a few trips until my fuel went down, to make sure we wouldn't be over our weight limit with a third person. With summer arrived, our takeoff and climbing performance is down a bit most days. I'm still using all the same weight and balance numbers even though they were calculated for the 150hp version of SQB. Now, at 160hp, I've got heaps better climb performance, but no change was made to the figures, so I still have to be very cautious about loading.
Two other things about summer is, despite the clearer skies, the air gets bumpier, and you tend to get nastier crosswinds at Rottnest.
We planned to go coastal, taking us over Nigel's house in North Beach, then over to Rotto for a few hours. We very nearly didn't get off the ground. It took a long time to start Squibby. After a few attempts, probably 30 seconds in all, the prop was turning over very slowly. I was nearly about to give up, or run the battery completely dead, when it caught.
I figured we would charge the battery on our trip over to Rottnest, plus it's always easier to start Squibby's engine when it's warm, so did not expect any further problems.
The cloud base was a lot lower than forecast. At one point we started brushing the cloud base at 1500, and had to dip down to about 1400 to maintain visual. The air was quite hazy under that, but still very flyable - it's just that the clouds didn't lift as early as forecast. But we were able to find a good path across to Rottnest, well clear of cloud at 1500, and I could see that the whether, as forecast, was going to keep improving.
Landing at Rotto was mediocre, in bumpy crosswind conditions. After a near-perfect landing a few weeks ago, my best ever in Squibby, I've probably relaxed too much', and have developed a new bad habit of not pulling all the power off during landing. At first I thought my idle RPM might have climbed up, but it seems to be that I'm not pulling the throttle out enough. Result is a long float on landing, which, under bumpy conditions, means I eventually get bounced around during the holdoff, which means my landing isn't as pretty as I was expecting. It's always something.
Poor old Dan sits in the back whenever we have a guest, and there's no intercom jack back there. So he gets a lonely flight, where he can't here what we're saying. This time at least, we had some earmuffs, so he looks like he's about to go operating power tools, but at least it's a bit quieter. Apparently he SMSd his mum, who came out of the house and waved at us as we went over. None of us saw her, unfortunately.
After a nice coffee and snack at the Dome cafe, it was back to Squibby. Once Squibby has been run, usually there's never a problem with the restart, however, this time was difficult. Seems like my battery might be dying, because we didn't get many cranks out before it really slowed down. I started fiddling with the mixture, throttle, all sorts of things, and probably made things worse. At one point, it caught, but I'd set the mixture to idle-cutoff, and before I could react, the engine died completely. Now I had stuffed it. I started making mental plans, about whether we could get some assistance, or whether we'd have to catch the ferry home, and how long it would take, etc. But fortunately, just before the battery died, the engine caught again, and we were underway.
Ron, my Musketeer owning friend, recommends a solar-powered battery charger, which I might have to investigate. I don't enjoy having to worry about starting Squibby each time.