Beechcraft Musketeer Sport III 19A VH-SQB
Leg 7: Caiguna to Esperance
Front ~ Next - Leg 8: Esperance to Narrogin
You never know who you'll meet, and while we were at the Caiguna roadhouse, we met someone who was working at the roudhouse, as a manager or something. He had a commercial pilot licence, but was not working as a pilot at the moment - I'm not sure what he was doing out here. He was thinking about becoming a helicopter pilot in the future, so he was happy to talk to us bout flying.
We took off (I was flying), and turned roughly towards Esperance. We were tracking to intercept the coastline, quite a long way from Esperance. We flew over some lightly wooded country. Clouds were low, and getting thicker. We were trying to maintain 1500, but were forced down to around 1200 ft, sometimes 1000 feet, to maintain clear of cloud. The cloud was never threatening to go down lower, so we kept checking we could escape to the North, or back East, if we needed, but it didn't look like we would have to.
| Taxiing back out from the roadhouse to the Caiguna strip. |
| Departing Caiguna. The familiar highway, which we'd followed for hours, continues dead straight. But we soon swung to the left (south), aiming to intersect the coast well before Esperance. |
| The coast in the distance, with some enormous white sand dunes visible for miles. We'd also encountered some low grey cloud. This got thicker and lower, the closer we got to the coast. Out over the water, we could see the cloud get very low. |
Approaching the coastline, we could see some major piles of pure white sand. Esperance is famous for its beautiful beaches. We still weren't happy about this low cloud, and we could see it got much worse out over the water, and it got a fair bit better to the North. We could cut directly to Esperance by leaving the coast, but it was going to take us a long time over thickly-wooded country. We preferred to stick to the coastline, where we had these wide beaches, given our low altitude, in case we had to put down for any reason. So we stuck to the coast for a long time.
| Heading directly to Esperance from here would have taken us over miles of increasingly thick trees. Staying coastal kept us over bare patches, although the thickening cloud was concerning. |
| We were flying quite low (again) over miles and miles of pristine white beach. |
We were approaching a kind of greyish haze. We weren't sure what it was - it wasn't rain, it wasn't cloud. Maybe it was a salty sea haze, but it was getting thick and grey, and we were flying towards it. We decided that this was time to divert around this weird grey haze, rather than fly right into it, because we wouldn't be VFR within it. Unfortunately, this forced us over the trees, which we had been trying to avoid.
This was a bit uncomfortable; we were quite low, and the trees were a long way in every direction. We had an uncomfortable 20 or 30 minutes. Eventully, the low cloud dried up, the haze disappeared behind us, we broke into bright sunshine, and we could suddenly see farmland ahead.
So we tracked directly to the farmland. We breathed a sigh of relief when we had open land beneath us, and clear skies which allowed us to climb.
| A very welcome sight. The clouds dissolve, and the end of the trees. |
Like another day had dawned, the clouds suddenly ended and we were in bright sunshine. Our mood lifted with the clouds. Twenty minutes earlier, we had been at 1000 feet, under cloud, approaching an inpenetrable grey muck. Now, we had no clouds, bright sunshine, the beautiful Esperance coastline and its famous blue water. We could see the islands, and quickly came towards the town of Esperance. It's hard to describe the colours in the water - a real bright blue you don't see in other parts of the coastline.
| Beautiful beaches to the east of Esperance. We could soon see all the islands. |
| The bays are dotted with islands. Lots of long, white, lonely beaches. |
| Esperance is famous for having glowing turquoise water. |
| The town of Esperance. It's a beautiful, pristine place. If it wasn't so far from everywhere else, it would probably be world-famous. |
The actual airstrip at Esperance is long way from the Esperance township. We landed on the gravel runway, closely followed by a Skywest aircraft landing on the paved tarmac.
We refuelled, and added some more oil. We hung out in the terminal, while it was busy for a few minutes, until all the passengers suddenly disappeared. I phoned my parents, but couldn't get an answer, so got hold of Sarah, and asked her to pass a message to my parents about what time we would arrive at Narrogin. Since they are on a farm 20 minutes from the Narrogin airstrip, we were hoping they'd be able to pick us up, allowing us to stay the night on the farm.
We had made great progress, with the howling tailwind and the early departure. Originlly, our plan was to reach Esperance this day. But now it was only just after midday, and we were already here, so we knew we could make Narrogin, even Perth. But even though we could probably make Perth (it's only an hour after Narrogin), we felt that we would be better off to stay with my folks, leaving a small hop for tomorrow.
| Coming in to land on the dirt strip at Esperance. There was a nice paved strip, but winds favoured this guy. |
| A Skywest regional came in right after us. |
| About to refuel at Esperance. |