phik

It turns out that in order to get airways clearance out of YBCG, they require a filed flight plan — an atypical situation in my limited experience, not mentioned anywhere in the ERSA — but Gold Coast Ground was happy to file one for me.

The eastern VFR corridor around Brisbane is another magnificent low-altitude coastal route, with mile upon mile of perfect, unspoilt beaches and clear blue water. Visibility was for the most part excellent, and you could see little bits of sand or reef poking up to just below the surface of the water.

Rockhampton is known as the Beef Capital of Australia, so it pained me greatly to stop only for fuel. Such is the trouble with touring eastern Australia in just three weeks. After Rockhampton we did a little deke to get inland of the coastal mountains, and then went pretty directly.

just after I took this, a cow wandered across the apron

We had planned to stop for a day in Sunshine Coast, but the rain delay in Sydney required a cut somewhere, and this was the easiest choice. We’ll have to live without seeing the Australia Zoo on this trip. The Taronga Zoo will have to tide me over, which should be easy; it was pretty outstanding.

It was a very long ride to Townsville — 7.1 hours on the Hobbs — and we arrived just before sunset. It was bumpy all the way up — a real pain in the ass day to fly without an autopilot — but it’s nice to be here.

Once in Townsville, we had dinner at the very satisfactory Michel’s Restaurant. Fresh South Australian oysters and grain-fed sirloin did not disappoint.

The passenger/freight steamer SS Yongala sank (assisted by a cyclone) in 1911, and as such has had almost a hundred years to amass sea creatures. Like a cat lady, it adopts everything in sight until the house is barely recognizable beneath an accumulated patina, and the malevolent Child Protective Services threatens to take away its children.

Put simply, this is a vessel that requires imagination, because not a single piece of steel remains visible to the human eye. Every millimeter of its former coal-fired glory is now merely a base upon which sea life has taken hold.

As the only reef structure in an otherwise sandy area, the fish life that call it home are many and varied. One side — the boat sank on a bit of an angle — has fewer than the other, which is to say only a few tens of thousands.

The only downside is that it’s a good 50 nm from Townsville, which requires two and a half hours of steaming each way. I could have done this math in advance, of course, but then I might not have gone, so it’s probably for the best that I didn’t. I had planned to dive with a friend of a friend — who, indeed, has a boat! — but a last-minute work obligation scuttled those plans as surely as the Yongala itself.

I am terribly unhappy with the photos, but I learned some important lessons today about lighting, particularly in water as deep as that which the Yongala inhabits. Unfortunately, I learned these lessons in retrospect, which is why most of the photos are so blue and awful. That’s pretty much what it looks like 20-30 meters under, until I get some better lights: blue.

Virtually none of the photographs are worth showing to you, but you can hit the flickr stream if you are so inclined.

I pre-filed our flight details today; I’m still not sure whether that’s necessary, but since I finally had internet access, it wasn’t hard.

Not that it did us much good, in terms of getting out of Townsville on time. I did my preflight run-up on the military hardstand while waiting for a small commercial turboprop to taxi past, and when I switched to the left magneto it felt like the engine was trying to tear itself off its mounts. Probably something related to the 600+ RPM drop off.

I’d experienced a similar (but only 200 RPM) drop during my checkout flight in Sydney, but it disappeared as soon as we called the mechanic, and couldn’t be reproduced. This time it was much worse, and remained unimproved after trying to burn off whatever might be fouling the spark plugs (unsurprisingly). So it was back to the apron to find a mechanic.

Fortunately this happened in Townsville, where from the general aviation parking I could hit three mechanics with a cricket ball, and not, say, Birdsville, which if we’re lucky will have both a telephone and fuel.

Because I was only expecting a 90-minute flight, however, we were already cutting it pretty close. If this took more than about an hour to resolve, the disappearance of our atom-smashing light source would strand us in Townsville for another day. While Townsville certainly seems nice, I have things that need doing in Cairns.

In terms of this being a simple spark plug issue, the depth of our mechanic’s skepticism cannot easily be rendered on the written page. Nevertheless, he agreed to at least begin his investigation there and, to my quiet delight, found two inoperative. Replacing them returned the engine to its previous fine form, and a lesson was learned: two dead spark plugs on one mag can indeed cause a 600+ RPM drop.

The rest of the journey was relatively uneventful, save for a parachute drop directly in front of us that required a small course deviation. (Stuart took a photo, but honestly, at that distance the jumper is basically indistinguishable from dirt on the lens.)

The Cairns “western VFR” approach to runway 15 is interesting, in that you effectively fly a wide right circuit with a mountain between you and the runway. If you zoom in and set the map to “Hybrid,” you can see it quite clearly on the GPS track. (I like how the one narrow strip that we care about is the only low-res satellite imagery for miles in either direction.)

After making our way to the hotel, I had an extremely sub-par laksa for supper. I cannot in good faith recommend Limmy The Flavour Of Malaysia restaurant.

When this trip was originally conceived, a four-day trip into the Coral Sea — far enough out to experience a Great Barrier Reef that’s still alive — was its centrepiece, and I wasn’t going to let Stuart’s status as a non-diver put me off. It sounds like he had no trouble entertaining himself in the rainforest and shoreline of Cairns.

After a lot of reading and hemming and hawing I ended up going with Taka Dive, and I have no regrets. The crew were personable, entertaining, and professional, and I’d recommend them without hesitation. They took the preservation of the reef pretty seriously, which by now should not surprise anyone.

at Pixie Pinnacle

The weather was superb throughout, with excellent visibility and very little current. I had grown to be less than a fan of diving with larger groups (we were 23 plus crew), but these dive sites were so enormous that there wasn’t any issue.

The two night dives, in particular, I enjoyed much more than my previous night dives. The boat was lit up like the sun (and thus easy to find), visibility was excellent (unlike in, say, the Swan River), and we got away from the big group — this was key. In a big group I find myself spending the entire time trying to figure out which light is my buddy and where the hell he’s going.

Fourteen dives in three and a half days is exhausting, almost too much, eating after every dive because you’re famished, stealing every other surface interval for a nap. It usually felt like I’d just finally gotten dry when the divemaster was getting us riled up about the next site; he was fond of reminding us that we signed up for a dive adventure, not a dive vacation.

They offer a seven-day trip, but four days was exactly enough for me. I think on day five, putting on that wetsuit would have felt too much like work.

Although the weather was good, this was the open ocean, and there were swells of 3-4 meters while we were steaming along overnight. I had prepared for the worst, but in the end it didn’t affect my appetite or my sleep at all. It was for the most part pleasant, like a hammock. There was one person who I think didn’t eat or sleep for two days, just barfed; he was a wreck.

potato cod; big as a man

white tip reef shark

Back on land, it was time to return to reality and plan tomorrow’s flights to Birdsville, in the middle of the Australian nothingness. When you’re flying anywhere in Australia, but especially when venturing out into the vast, empty desert, knowing where you’re going to get fuel is serious business.

There aren’t very many airports between Cairns and Birdsville for a fuel stop, and my original plan, Richmond, is entirely sold out of avgas. Fortunately, Winton — home of Waltzing Matilda and 100nm further south — has 18,000 litres. Tomorrow’s weather does not look encouraging, so we’ll see whether or not we actually get there.

(Complete photoset)

Daybreak revealed low clouds and intermittent tropical showers, with a forecast of “potentially clearing” for the afternoon. Not ideal, but perhaps not a total disaster.

The unique geography around the Cairns airport, as I mentioned before, makes a low-visibility departure even less straightforward than usual. Fortunately, the satellite images indicate that if we can just get inland a bit, we should be cloud-free the rest of the way. Unfortunately, we may have to go quite a ways down the coast before we can cut in.

Given the quickly-rising inland terrain, there was absolutely no way I was going to turn west until it was visibly clear through the mountains. Fortunately it was only a single, relatively thin scattered-to-broken layer at that point, and we were able to pop through a big hole and fly above until we were past the mountains and the clouds dispersed.

By the time we left Cairns after lunch, there was no way we could make it all the way to Birdsville today. And since there’s almost nothing between here and there, we decided to call it a day at our planned fuel stop in Winton.

that reads BIRTH PLACE OF QANTAS, for the record

If you’re ever flying around the Queensland outback and need a place to stay, the North Gregory Hotel in Winton is a treat. David, the husband in the husband/wife owner pair, is a pilot, and he leaves a car in his hangar at the Winton airport for arriving guests. I assume that he is unconcerned by the prospect of the car being stolen; let us just say that it is not a car that I would want to take into the desert.

He and his wife chatted with us while we ate; the four times that he’s been to America have all been for Oshkosh, so he understood immediately what I was doing touring eastern Australia in a Piper Warrior.

Tomorrow if the weather cooperates, we’re contemplating making up our lost half-day and going all the way to Adelaide. If not, we’ll take pleasure in experiencing historic Birdsville.

Birdsville (much of the Australian desert, really) is not quite as dry as many people, including myself, think; indeed, it receives an average of 115mm over 33 rainy days each year. Today was one of those days.

Although we flew through only light showers en route to Birdsville, there were major lines of thunderstorms between here and Leigh Creek, and on to Adelaide. So much for making up our lost half day.

It is also, apparently, not as empty: as I was beginning my descent into Birdsville, I switched over to the Birdsville traffic frequency and made the standard radio announcement. Of course nobody responded — but three minutes later, another voice announced his intentions, and was very surprised to hear my reply. Five minutes after we landed, the one scheduled commercial flight arrived. The guy pumping our avgas said they get about 4 planes a day; we’re just lucky, I guess.

VH-TXG was occupied by a very nice, middle-aged couple passing through Birdsville en route (if I recall correctly) to Mt Isa. There were no thunderstorms in their way, so they refueled themselves and their plane and were quickly off again.

One nice thing about stopping in a town of population approximately 200 is that you can park right in front of the hotel. I wish I had realized how awesome this is in time to get a better photograph.

(Aside: Sometimes I really just want to get the plane put away and Stuart is all “blah blah blah”, and I have to be all “Hey Stuart, less talk, more chock” and he never gets the reference.)

The Birdsville Hotel is full, full, if you can believe that, because a tour is coming through. Fortunately, the caravan park had exactly one cabin left, so we didn’t have to hop back in the plane and try to find a nearby town with a sealed runway, VFR conditions, and accommodation.

The Birdsville Hotel had a much better selection of beer than I had anticipated, even if relatively little is on tap. Stuart was conned into drinking a VB, because he’d never had one. He certainly won’t make that mistake again.

I grew up in a midwestern town with easy access to areas of relatively little light pollution, so I like to think that I have a passing familiarity with the nighttime sky. It was with this nighttime sky (or rather, the nighttime sky of the southern hemisphere) that I was so looking forward to being reacquainted.

The short walk back to the caravan park was mindblowing in that primal, caveman-brain way. I wish we’d had the time and transportation to get away from the few lights of Birdsville, but even as it was, it was a hundred or a thousand times more densely packed than the skies of my youth. A million times greater than the ten stars you can see in Boston. A truly awe-inspiring view of the galaxy with the naked eye.

The last thing I did before departing this morning was allow my laptop to come tumbling out of my bag. Of course I would do this in a sparse caravan park cabin with stone tiles, instead of, say, last week on the opulent carpets of the Jupiter’s casino.

Given an initial visual assessment of the damage, I was terrified that I was going to be due for a new display and maybe main logic board — no mean feat on the outskirts of the Simpson Desert — but it unsuspended without any problem. Now that I’ve snapped the bottom of the display back together (eep), the damage seems to be entirely cosmetic (if you look closely).

After that excitement, we had breakfast in a little art gallery / cafe / internet hovel. It was a weird little commune — no less so for being in Birdsville — but the ham and cheese croissant was tasty. Their Windows internet machine took almost ten minutes to login — I don’t even want to know what kind of pestilent malware were clogging those arteries — but I was eventually able to get my weather briefing and file a flight plan.

The tiny desert flies, by the way, are numerous, relentless, and annoying. Our super-DEET bug cream did a decent job, but can only do so much to tame their powerful lust for our moist pink bodies. There’s absolutely nothing we can do to keep them out of the airplane cabin while we load up, but leaving the small side window open during the engine run-up tends to suck most of them out.

You may be surprised to learn that William Daniels is alive and well and working a Melbourne Centre air traffic control area. I know I was, but that voice is unmistakable. There’s no other explanation.

We were also operating in the vicinity of an aircraft operating under the “SHADOW” callsign, with which I was not previously familiar. According to this page at least, it was either an RAAF C-130 Hercules or a Navy HS 748. Interesting?

Also interesting to almost nobody is that I flew my 100th hour today. Fortunately, Stuart seems to be relatively oblivious to just how little experience 100 hours is, oblivious enough to fall asleep in the cockpit whilst I court death with every move.

The stop in Broken Hill was quick and uneventful; unfortunately, it doesn’t look like Stuart got any photos of the interior of the huge open-pit mine in the middle of town (this one gives you a sense of scale, at least). This satellite look should give you some idea.

You may think that Broken Hill is not exactly a direct route, and you would not be wrong. The original plan was to depart Birdsville to the south/southwest and stop for fuel in Leigh Creek, SA, however possible thunderstorms together with gusty winds and mountainous Leigh Creek geography made Broken Hill the more sober choice. It was a long day either way, only slightly longer for the detour.

Upon our arrival in Adelaide, while I was asking around for information about taxis or hire cars, a really nice young CFI from one of the flight schools offered us a lift into town. He was unswayed by my many protests that he needn’t go to the trouble, so we talked about flying whilst being very courteously shuttled into town. Thank you, random stranger!

We’re staying in a nice independent hotel in North Adelaide, and an easily-walkable shopping and restaurant district provided a venue for our Indian feast. So far, Adelaide is outstanding.

Much of today was relatively lazy, but I have no problem with that; it’s been a long few days of flying.

We eventually took the free bus downtown and sought out an internet cafe. Stuart used a desktop with no problems, but I used my laptop and suffered through the worst $5 internet experience ever. The owner had to reboot his server and issue a couple IDs, and that eventually worked, but the packet loss was appalling.

He, of course, blamed it on my laptop, but I think that was just this strange anti-Apple bias that I’ve been encountering recently. Maybe it is related to yesterday’s cabin incident, but I find that very unlikely.

Once our internet and burrito requirements were satisfactorily resolved, we made our way to historic AAMI Stadium to see the Port Adelaide Power give a good thrashing to the Richmond Tigers, although they really stopped playing about midway through the third quarter. It got pretty sloppy pretty fast from that point, but the first two and a half quarters of clinical football more than made up for it. A good time was had by all.

Tomorrow: wine country!

Today we holidayed in the Barossa Valley, about 60 km from Adelaide. It wasn’t long into the drive before we were in fairly rural South Australia, passing by all manner of SA’s agricultural production. But mostly sheep.

In one of the pastures we caught a glimpse of the Great Australian Wool Pipeline, with which Stuart was not familiar, so maybe you aren’t either. Completed in 1954, the Great Australian Wool Pipeline runs from Adelaide to Melbourne, and transports fully 25% of the annual Australian wool production to market. Unfortunately, the two-year drought has been hard on both graziers and the pipeline operator, and it’s facing stiff competition from rail and trucking. It’s a national treasure; I couldn’t believe Stuart had never heard of it.

At any rate, our first stop in Barossa was the venerable Jacob’s Creek, who are, if not the area’s most delicious label, at least perhaps the most famous. A suitable place from which to begin, particularly as this designated driver was abstaining this morning.

We took lunch at the 1918 Bistro, fortunately arriving early enough to secure a table on this very busy Mother’s Day. A bit on the expensive side, but a solid dining experience. I cannot vouch for its wine list, knowing full well that the afternoon would consist of more free wine than I could possibly safely consume.

From there to the Two Hands winery, who definitely had the nicest staff of the day. I was surprised to find it empty on Mother’s Day, and they were more than happy to educate and share their entire range. We also discovered, along with them, that one of their wineglasses — I forget which — will, in fact, hold an entire bottle of wine. The woman looked mildly embarrassed to reveal that she’d been filling them about halfway when she poured at home. ahem.

Given the overwhelming choices for the rest of our afternoon, we decided to focus on a class of wine that I’ve come to love, that was essentially invented in and remains native to Australia, and that is rarely available in the United States: the sparkling shiraz.

The nice folks at Two Hands recommended more than enough wineries with a sparkling shiraz to fill the rest of the afternoon. The only problem was, they had all already sold their entire stock for the season. sad.

Fortunately, they also recommended Seppelt’s rare fortified wine tasting, which was superb. I now have a new benchmark for port, the 1986 Para Single Vintage Tawny.

The final stop on our way out of Barossa was a last-minute addition to the programme, the unique Barossa Fruit Wines. They have a dazzling array of fruit wines, almost all delicious: apricot, blackberry, blueberry, cherry, mulberry, peach, plum, quandong, quince, raspberry, rose petal, plum, and strawberry. The winemaker was charming and enjoys making charcoal drawings of locally-built locomotives in his spare time. My only regret is that I was already pushing max gross weight on the plane, so I limited myself to a scant three bottles.

As a final word of warning, permit me to expound on the most fucked-up Thai “meal” I’ve ever had. Four words:

Deep. Fried. Chicken. Satay.

Adelaide residents and visitors beware: do not eat at Aroy-Thai.

Last night I worked with an AirServices briefer, who was kind enough to ring up Adelaide Centre ATC to negotiate a VFR route for me. The idea was to get something that ATC might actually approve in the morning, instead of me just guessing. Plan what you fly and fly what you plan, etc.

Just this once, everything worked out: direct Port Adelaide (PAL), overwater past Marino Light House (MLIT), overwater Sellicks Beach (SLB), then direct Kingscote (YKSC) at our discretion.

I elected to cross at the shortest overwater point, for obvious reasons, rather than go direct YKSC from, say, Cape Jervis. This way, it was short enough that I was never out of glide range in the unlikely event that the engine were to consume itself in a fiery blaze, and thus didn’t have to go buy life preservers to remain legal.

Hello again, Football Park!

We knew that we weren’t going to have enough time for a proper visit to Kangaroo Island, but it is difficult to comprehend the scope of what’s on offer unless you experience it yourself, or get your prose directly from a trusted correspondent.

We asked the rental-car woman to suggest a one-day whirlwind tour, so she promptly sent us to the direct opposite corner of the island. This was not a bad plan; driving after dusk can be treacherous, as that’s when the kangaroos come out and start keying cars. We were advised to work our way back across the island, and end our day without a long drive back to Kingscote.

Cape du Couedic Lighthouse, Flinders Chase National Park

In addition to that delightful lighthouse, Flinders Chase is home to Admiral’s Arch, New Zealand Fur Seals, and the Remarkable Rocks:

The rocks and arches and sleeping seals and such were great, but it was time for something that moves, and the koala walk fit the bill. Even even before we got there, though, this handsome fellow ran across the road:

Not much of a self-preservationist, but he was happy to pose while we frantically dug our cameras out of the back seat.

We did find three or four koalas on our koala walk, up in their big koala trees, including Yoda. This was the first time that I’ve ever desperately wanted my 75-300mm lens, and of course, I left it in Sydney. To save less than a kilogram. idiot.

Leaving the koala walk we stumbled upon our one (living) kangaroo sighting for the day. It patiently nibbled on the grass and paid us no mind.

Finally, we stopped in on the Australian Sea Lions in (aptly-named?) Seal Bay.

They’ve been giving tours of that beach for decades, so they know pretty well how to deal with the sea lions, and the sea lions are pretty used to people being around. They brought us and two other people startlingly close.

While we were there, a few returned from their three-day ocean feast, ready to start their three-day nap.

aww, she looks so sweepy

Back at the hotel I was truly excited to get my own slippery paws on some Kangaroo Island oysters, but by the fourth disgusting slurp I’d figured out that they were well and truly off. At first I thought it was a peculiar taste to this unique oyster, but with each taste I became more convinced that they were just spoiled. The fourth I had to spit out. The first hint should have been when they came out from the kitchen not cold to the touch.

We compensated for the oyster disaster with unbelievably delicious pan-fried haloumi cheese, a taste sensation not soon to be forgotten.

ALSO, SOUTH AUSTRALIANS, SERIOUSLY, WHAT IS WITH THE HOT WATER TAP BEING ON THE RIGHT? THIS IS NOT WHERE IT BELONGS. I WILL STOP YELLING WHEN YOU STOP BURNING ME WITH YOUR WATER.

(Complete photoset)

The forecast calls for thunderstorms back on the mainland, and while we probably could have dodged them pretty effectively, we were looking for any plausible excuse to stay another day.

Yesterday was a day of wildlife; today will be almost entirely gustatory.

It turns out that Stuart is a big fan of honey. I’m not anti-honey, to be sure, but I hadn’t considered it worthy of special praise among sweeteners until today.

Kangaroo Island, visitors are reminded frequently, is the only place in the world with purebred Ligurian bees, apparently loved by beekeepers for their docility. Bees were not native to the island, and it’s far enough from the mainland that they can’t fly here, so this specific strain was introduced in the late 19th century.

one of clifford’s ligurian bees. on my car.

Clifford’s Honey Farm operates a little shop where you can taste their honeys and learn how they’re made, and it’s good, clean family fun. Although it is fairly obvious in retrospect, having never tasted a honey made from a single type of plant nectar, I wasn’t really aware of how varied in flavour they can be.

From there we headed to a winery on the eastern part of the island, and our path took us right past Prospect Hill and its 512 steps of fun. Climbing stairs always reminds me of the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh, but that has a hojillion more stairs than this.

your intrepid leader has a bold new vision for the future

Having worn ourselves out, it was time for lunch at Sunset Wines. They had a pretty nice tasting tray, and a very acceptable sparkling shiraz, along with a selection of local cheeses, olives, chorizo, and so on.

The Island Pure sheep dairy is nothing particularly special to look at — I advise that you skip the “tour”, which consists of a 15-minute videotape and a walk through two nearly empty rooms — but produces cheese and yogourt that are the pinnacle of the human dairy craft. These I advise that you not skip, again and again.

Including that haloumi I was talking about.

Having stayed an extra day, I needed different charts out of the plane to plan tomorrow’s flights. Our hope is to go directly to Canberra tomorrow, and spend about a day there. Stuart’s never been, and I’m always up for another day at the War Memorial, so it seems like a fairly solid plan.

I didn’t have the code for the airside security gate at the airport, but fortunately the government’s multi-million-dollar “anti-terror” charade can be defeated with a single shoelace. Is this how MacGyver feels all the time?

me breaking into an airport

It was raining as we got back into Kingscote, but we were right on time for the pelican feeding.

It’s a fairly low-key affair, in which he dumps an entire beakful of fish into one pelican, some others chase that one around for a while, he hands out a few here and there, and otherwise leaves them hungry. They (who?) want the pelicans to come back every day, but not get dependent on the pelican man for food.

the Pelican Man

The weather looks marginal for tomorrow, but we’ll get as far as we can. It would be great to see my Canberra friends once more before I head home.

(Complete photoset)

This morning came much like yesterday’s, with looming thunderstorms on the mainland — though north of our planned route, we’ll have to keep an eye out — and generally marginal conditions. It’s VFR, though, and we’re going to seize the day.

Trying to get a proper weather briefing and file a flight plan was like pulling teeth; nobody in this town can keep their bloody internet working. The hotel’s has been down since the day we arrived, on account of a power surge or something destroying the access point. There’s a copy shop on the main road that advertises 24/7 wifi that you can access from the street outside, but of course it’s down too.

I waited around until they opened the shop, then asked about this, and the owner was nice enough to let me use her desktop. But honestly, how do these people even survive without the internet? It boggles the mind. And maybe they should think about keeping at least one spare access point on the island.

Our plan was for Canberra via a fuel stop at Swan Hill, and this was my personal limit for distance without refueling. I knew there would be no fuel on Kangaroo Island, and short of going all the way back up to Parafield — which only buys you about 45 more minutes net endurance — there just aren’t any good options for refueling between here and Swan Hill.

I’ve heard a rumour that the private Goolwa strip has fuel, but they require permission to land, and they weren’t answering their phone yesterday. Pinnaroo, same deal, and no mention of fuel in the book. Robinvale has fuel — in drums — but is just as far as Swan Hill. Sea Lake is a grass strip without fuel. Meningie’s not even in my book, never a good sign. No fuel at Hopetoun. etc.

We had plenty of fuel to make it to Swan Hill under forecast conditions, with a reasonable reserve, but there was not a whole lot of room for screwing around. If we encountered significant headwinds, we’d have no choice but to divert to Renmark — much closer than Swan Hill, but a good 100 nm out of our way with (according to the book) a two-hour wait for a fuel man to arrive. That would doom any hope of being in Canberra today before we got off the ground.

About halfway across the water we were forced to descend by clouds; they were scattered, but scattered directly in front of us, so down we went. Completed the crossing at 2500 feet, and had to stay at 1500 for the first half hour or so, but then we were past the clouds and it was beautiful and sunny.

Beautiful and sunny, that is, until we got to the Wyperfeld National Park, where we encountered a pretty solid wall of clouds; if you zoom in you can see me do a 360 on the GPS track while I look for an opening. All else being equal, I prefer sealed runways that are in our general direction of travel, so we set down to wait it out in Hopetoun.

Hopetoun aerodrome is a single hangar and a locked shed, with no services of any kind. It is 1 nm from the town of 600, but I maintained some hope that this would not be our final destination.

We were — to my great astonishment — able to get a Telstra GSM signal, and between Airservices and the Swan Hill airport, determined that the clouds were likely to clear in an hour or two.

We sat in the plane in Hopetoun for 90 minutes. Stuart took a nap, I read about the hydrogen bomb, then called Swan Hill and confirmed that clouds had lifted to about 700 feet AGL.

Fortunately, from the way the winds were blowing blue sky into Hopetoun, it was clear that weather here would only improve. In the worst case, we could always turn around and come back to Hopetoun, so I decided to see if we could get into Swan Hill and spend the night there.

We flew at about 600 AGL all the way to Swan Hill, and I’d like to apologize to the owner of one herd of cattle that I think got a bit spooked. It all worked out fine; we landed just ahead of an Air Ambulance who had also been waiting for the clouds to lift.

In retrospect, it could fairly easily not have worked out. If I’d made it most of the way to Swan Hill, only to return to Hopetoun, I’d have eaten up most of my reserve fuel. Without a calibrated dipstick to know exactly how much remained, I wouldn’t have been comfortable taking off again; I don’t want to become a fuel-starvation statistic in the best of times, and the outback really raises the stakes. That could have been a long wait for someone to deliver the most expensive ten gallons of avgas ever purchased by a human.

If I had to do it again without either an instrument rating or a severe clear forecast, and Goolwa still wasn’t available, I would probably insert a fuel stop at either Parafield or Renmark. Lesson learned.

But it did work out ok, and we got a lift into town from the nice guys at Mid Murray Flying Club.

A couple hours later, I learned about a key difference between American and Australian flight operations. In the US, VFR flight plans are basically just for search-and-rescue, the equivalent of filing a SARTIME in Australia. The difference is that if you don’t activate a US flight plan, you don’t have to cancel it; it gets purged automatically from the system. Not so in Australia.

I’d filed two — one to Swan Hill, one to Canberra — and never activated Swan Hill to Canberra, so I didn’t think I had to cancel it. Fortunately I had mobile phone coverage in Swan Hill, and they were able to establish quickly that I was safe on the ground (though not in Canberra). If I had been someplace without Vodafone coverage, that could have been very ugly indeed. Lesson learned.

Alas, this stop consumes our last planned day of weather delay, so we’ll have to skip Canberra and go direct Sydney tomorrow. Or not. The forecast, once again, is ominous.

As has become the norm for this trip, thunderstorms were forecast to be in the general area, but scattered widely enough that I didn’t think they would be a threat. We kept an eye out for towering cloud formations, and it ended up being such a smooth and routine flight back to Sydney that I have almost nothing of interest to report.

There are some rather tall mountains that are very close to the city, and combined with the complex Sydney airspace, require some very fast descents once you’re past.

Studying the Bankstown arrival procedure in advance is a must, of course, and while I quite like the handy guides published by AirServices Australia (and available online!), I lament that they are necessary at all.

When you compare the airspace configuration of a major Australian city like Sydney to even the most complex American airspace — say that around New York — it’s ridiculous. Basic arrivals and departures should not require a 30-page pamphlet, nor should Sydney require twenty-four different chunks of restricted and class C airspace. And this madness isn’t limited to just Sydney, it’s this way around all major cities. Get it together, Australia.

We returned the plane to Schofields with little fanfare and much sadness. They provided a really great experience: negotiating with Nelson was easy, the checkout flight was thorough but fair, they were easy to reach when we had that minor trouble in Townsville, and our budget estimate was spot on. I look forward to hiring from them again some day.

A couple more days in Sydney before Stuart heads to New Zealand and I’m back in the nifty fifty.

I haven’t seen any of the debates (being in Australia) but I’ve read about the Ron/Rudy exchange all over the place, including one farcical assertion that Rudy really “zinged” him.

Here’s the thing: Osama told us why he hates America, and it has nothing to do with our freedom.

Getting an Australian pilot licence — or at least a three-month validation of my American licence by the Australian FAA-equivalent, CASA — was sold to me as an easy process. And indeed it was, once I got past the bureaucrat in the Perth CASA field office, who failed to include everything I gave him when he sent it off to Canberra for processing.

What they don’t tell you, though — not on the web, not on the telephone, not in the CASA office — is that while a mere pilot licence would have been sufficient in the past, that’s just more pre-9/11 thinking. Now you need an Aviation Security Identification Card to visit a Security Controlled Airport, which is to say almost anywhere in the Commonwealth.

The ASIC requires background checks by the FBI- and CIA-equivalents, and if you’re an easy case, takes between two and six Earth weeks. If you’re not an easy case, which I imagine could mean anything from “brown skin” to “votes Labor”, it is apparently an indefinite process.

It is completely impossible to get a straight answer from anyone about the ASIC. I am told — not implausibly — that this is because the ASIC was mandated by the Ministry of Transport, to be implemented and enforced by CASA, but CASA want nothing to do with it. It is also not implausible that CASA are merely incompetent, a case for which has been building in the media after certain recent incidents.

Regardless of why, I have received various assertions about the ASIC over the past twelve weeks, such as:

“Before you can hire a plane for solo flight, you need an ASIC.” — owner of a Jandakot flight school

“Without an ASIC you can only fly from non-security controlled aerodromes.” — AOPA Australia

Needless to say, almost every AD in Australia is now a “Security Controlled Airport”. Sydney, Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide, those are all obvious. But it is difficult to take seriously a policy that includes this among its outcomes:

Birdsville, QLD, population 100, where I park the plane in front of the hotel, with an average of four daily aircraft movements, is a Security Controlled Airport.

So I submitted to the background checks, paid a hundred and forty-three more goddamn dollars, and sat on my hands for six weeks of perfect Perth flying weather — weather for which I would have killed a man in Boston — waiting for the ASIC to arrive.

Then while researching my east-coast adventure, I received a whole new set of assertions along the lines of:

“You only need an ASIC if you operate in the commercial-passenger section of the airport, not general aviation.”

“You don’t need an ASIC if you’re a foreign pilot on a Certificate of Validation.”

So now I have no idea whether I need one or not, really.

And of course, when I finally got it, I just put it in my flight bag and forgot about it. From the time I turned up at the (different) flying club, did a checkout flight with an instructor, hired the plane a couple weeks later, flew solo to Manjimup, and returned to Jandakot, not once during the entire process did anyone ask to see my licence or ASIC.

(To be clear, I have no problem with this. As far as I’m concerned, that’s how it should be.)

During my entire three weeks of flying around the east, one person asked for it, and I forgot to find out what would have happened if I didn’t have it. I mean, my plane had already sat on his ramp for two days, and I was getting ready to depart. Seems like that ship had already sailed, as it were.

Of course it doesn’t stop there — airports are receiving millions upon millions of tax dollars to “improve security,” which they dutifully spend on fences and fancy locks. Fortunately, most airport operators seem to hate this just as much as the pilots; they just write the lock combination with a sharpie on the secure side of the door so you can get back in without any hassle.

But it turns out I don’t even need that; my wrist is thin enough to slide through the bars and turn the handle on the other side. They put a metal plate on some of the doors to prevent that, so I had to use a shoelace instead. Let’s hope those terrorists are wearing velcro.

Money well-spent, Australia. Flight hours have plummeted so significantly that two Perth flying clubs are contemplating selling aircraft or folding up. You’ve made it a lot harder for foreign pilots to spend thousands of dollars touring your local economies.

But at least you’ve prevented a bunch of terrorists from blowing up empty hangars in Birdsville, am I right? Wait, I’m sorry: Birdsville is so small, it doesn’t even have hangars.

I posted an apartment ad on craigslist yesterday, and the response volume has been surprising. Conventional wisdom about the strength of the current rental market in Boston seems to be true.

Along with the dozen or so legitimate emails, I’ve also received a few clearly 419-esque responses. You know, from “overseas students” who need to arrange an apartment before they arrive, wanting to pay the deposit with a cashiers cheque, &c.

They’re all from Yahoo addresses, so I wanted to be a good internet citizen and forward them to the Yahoo fraud centre. In accordance with standard Yahoo policy, however, abuse.yahoo.com is a rats nest of pages with circular links that never answer your question or solve your problem. I can only assume that, were I using another browser, I’d have been greeted with pop-ups and animated Flash ads on each page as well.

As a last-ditch effort, I tried the link titled “Use this form if you are unsure where to direct your abuse report.” It is an empty white page.

Just in case you were wondering why so much of your spam comes from yahoo.com. Do the 419-ers click on a lot of ads or something?

A homeless man asked me for change tonight and I said “sorry, mate” and he mocked me.

But I’m not accidentally turning the windshield wipers on very often any more.