New Directions

Off to the North. We are now on St. Eustatius. We will spend the next few days exploring. Diving should be good. We have our bikes out and are ready for hiking, biking, diving and adventure.
We had an interesting day. The flight was fine.

Great need of support at Guadeloupe International

Red Tape in Guadeloupe

We spent the good part of today dealing with French authorities. The Glastar was not on their aircraft registry. Thanks to an extra hour or two of our time, French Guadeloupe knows of the Glastar.

Dominica is Out!

Darn! We waited, we tried but the weather heading south form here, Guadeloupe is worse and does not look good for the next week at least. Oh well, we can't argue with Mother Nature. Heading north looks so much better.

Guadaloupe

Because of weather we ended up here. Not too bad! Time for some exercise. We swam out to the little island behind us expecting a drink and a water taxi back. No drink, no taxi.  We got a great work-out and a good laugh.

Weather still changing our schedule

We left the St. Kitts this morning with multiple layers of clouds above. The photo is of the island of Montserrat. You can see the lava from the 1995 eruption that destroyed the main city & the whole south end of the island. We shot the instrument approach into Guadeloupe, a French protectorate. Cloud layers thickening. Our destination was Dominica, but as weather came in Guadeloupe was as far as we could get today.

Waiting for the weather to clear in St. Kitts

Drove around the island yesterday. Visited Brimstone Hill Fortress which was pretty interesting.
We are hoping for a break in the weather today, so we can head to Dominica.
St. Kitts is a sad little island. So many young people with nothing to do. I can't even imagine what the unemployment rate might be.

Landing St.Kitts

St. Eustatius fly-by

We will be coming back to visit "Statia" later.

Wild Sky

Enroute to St. Kitts today.

Off to a New Island

After an early morning storm we awoke to this beautiful scene. Plans had to change a bit, but it was less stormy in St. Kitts & Nevis than in our earlier planned destination, Dominica. Dominica will have to wait for another day. The weather systems around here are pretty interesting.

Shore Diving St. croix

Yesterday we spent the day shore diving. All we had to do is rent a little gear and some tanks and the guys from the dive shop pointed us in the right direction. Our fist dive was a great wall dive in Cane Bay. Then we drove to the other side of the island for a couple of deep wrecks. It was like a big treasure hunt. Using the directions given to us, we found the beach and spotted the buoy about a half mile from shore. Once we got to the buoy and took a look under water we could see a dark shadow on the ocean floor. As we descended, the shape of the started to take shape. It was so cool. Once on the bottom we explored the interior of the ship. In a bit shallower water was the second wreck. A wonderful and cheap dive day.

Adventure Day in St. Croix

Yesterday we started the day with a wreck dive and then a shallower dive on the pier. We then took a two hour ATV tour through the beautiful rain forest and northern mountains. Finally we ended the day jet skiing. Fabulous day. To finish it off in style, we found a little bakery that had delicious guava turnovers.

Awesome day on the beautiful island of St. Croix. Reminds us of what Hawaii might have looked like 60 years ago.
Our little hotel is on the furthest point.

Cane Bay, St. Croix

We are staying on the north side of the island at Cane Bay ( view from our room) for a few days. There is some great wall diving and fun to be had. Weather looks great.

Landing St. Croix

During the flight there was an interesting TFR (temporary flight restriction) over the Puerto Rican island of Vieques. Vieques was a US bombing range that was in the news a few years ago because of protesters. Today the TFR was due to clean-up procedures on the island.

Reality Check In Paradise

Flashes of lightening and crashes of thunder with palms whipping
against our window started our day at 3:00 AM. Immediately we were
both worried about Subie but were not willing to verbalize what could
be happening to our little plane only a few miles away. Steve started
to question whether he put the gust lock on after our Salt Cay
adventure. We tried to ignore our angst and get a little sleep. By
6:00 AM it felt like the brunt of the storm had passed. This storm
came out of nowhere. A couple of the little boats in front of the
hotel were lost down the coast. We decided to work through our planned
departure to Dominican Republic and just assume Subie was fine. Steve
spent some time dealing with international flight plans and EAPIS as
we planned to end up in Puerto Rico, USA. by the end of the day.
What a relief when we got to the airport. I never saw anything so
beautiful as our little plane standing alone off the runway with gust
lock and XL jet wheel chalks firmly in place. She had weathered the
storm, and the storm was headed north east. We were on our way south
east, so that sounded good. It was VFR with broken layers. This looked
like our window of opportunity. We were off with sort of low
visibility, probably 5 miles, cloud level 5000 for an hour flight to
Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic.After about 20 minutes int the
flilght, cloud layers thickened and lowered a bit, so of course we had
to decend, visibility- maybe 3 miles and the head wind is what really
slowed things down, 25 miles on the nose. I can't tell you how happy
we were to see land.
After 2 1/2 hours dealing with the Dominican Repulic red tape we were
ready for our final leg of the day. The good news was that the weather
had improved. We had a wonderful flight to Aguadilla, Puerto Rico.
The cloud cover came back near the end of the flight and Steve did an
IFR approach into Aguadilla.
All is well that ends well! We are hoping for better weather! Deep breath! :)

Salt Cay Visit

After another great day of diving where we saw barracuda, shark, giant crabs, lobster, shrimp and a myriad of colorful reef fish, we decided to head over to a small neighboring island 11 miles away.

We had a fabulous day today. We are staying at the Osprey Hotel on a little island (7 miles long) called Grand Turk. This morning we had two dives. We were the only customers on the first dive and one guy joined us for the second. Hurray for low season as long as the weather holds. The second dive was outstanding. We saw tons of life and the topography was beautiful: garden eels, shark, grouper, rays...The first dive was good too. We saw a couple of hawksbilled sea turtles, some very large lobster, and some cute decorator crabs. After lunch we took a nice bike ride to the lighthouse. The bikes are a great addition to the trip.
We plan to stay two more nights before heading south. We may take a short flight over to Salt Cay tomorrow after diving. 

Hanging our hats for a few days.

First, let us apologize for all the e-mails you may have been getting regarding this blog. That would be those of you who signed up as followers. Until just a few minutes ago, I couldn't figure out how to send multiple photos with this iPad photo program.

Second, we would like to wish all you dads a Happy Father's Day. It is a huge holiday here in Grand Turk.

We started our flying day by having to wake up the customs officer @ home & have him come down to the airport! Things seem pretty low key in the Bahamas. We've yet to be asked for aircraft documents.
Today's flight took us from the Bahamas to the Turks and Caicos Islands. The plane hummed along flawlessly burning about 9.5 gph(I run 100 degrees rich of peak exhaust gas temp.) @ 9,500 feet and between 125 &138 mph(our headwind component kept changing). On final I tipped the wing to check out the reef drop-off where we'll dive tomorrow. The light blue is around 50 feet deep and the dark blue is where the "wall" drops off to 4000 feet. Sometimes you can see some big animals cruising along it.

Survived the Bermuda Tringle

After an incredible morning of flying, we spent the afternoon in a secluded bay kayaking. Literally, we were the only people in the entire bay. Warm wind, warm water, if not for a few pesky skeeters, I would be afraid we died and went to heaven.

Stella Maris landing strip. 368 nautical miles from Stuart, FL

An amazing flying day. We may have seen every hue of blue on the palette.

Nassau, New Providence
Some of these islands are super touristy and crowded.
Note the cruise ships and high-rise resorts.
Not our bag, but happy to see others like it.

Check out little Little Whale Cay. The landing strip takes up the entire island. Can you see the salt water pool?

This picture speaks itself! We were pumped and the Bahamas delivered.

12 inch letters are required for foreign travel. Thanks Zach for helping to get those on. And, yes, they held tight. Yeah!

Gulf Crossing / Florida

Today was an exciting day. We got an early start from McComb, Mississippi this morning. We were grounded yesterday due to weather and couldn't make it to the planned destination, New Orleans. The weather was a little iffy today, but with an early start it ended up being a beautiful trip through the wonderland of cloud formations.

This was also our first large water crossing. We spent about 30 minutes over the Gulf of Mexico from Pensacola (we thought of you Tucker) to Apalachicola, Florida. The second leg was a little over an hour cutting across the Gulf. We didn't see land for about 40 minutes. I thought it was pretty exciting. Subie ran like a clock. It was fun to wear our new life vest/ belts.

An Economical Start

Yeah! We are off.
Today we made it to Odessa, Texas. Flight was uneventful, no thunderstorms, just pretty hot 106 in Tucson. Arizona is still burning.

There is no recession here in "Oil Country." We couldn't find a vacant room in Odessa or any of the neighboring towns. We are considering it our good fortune as we are staying the night in the FBO lounge here at the airport. Free accommodations!

Trip planning/safety first

Picking up odds and end for the trip including some great auto-inflating life vests that we'll wear around our waists while flying. We're also taking 2 "spare-air" mini bottles that'll give us 33 breaths if it takes a while to egress after a ditching(unscheduled sea landing).

Our good friend, Kelly, is loaning us his self-inflating life raft. Otherwise we would need to rent one in Florida for $400. Hope it remains unused. Thanks bro!

We leave in 11 days!