2012-11-04 29 -82

Sun 4 Nov 2012 in 29,-82: 29.8422319, -82.7904151 geohashing.info google osm bing/os kml crox

Location

A stand of trees on a pasture in the middle of a bunch of private property. But that is okay because...I'm flying over it!!

Participants

Grumpa

Plans

The original plan on Sunday was to fly over the hash points for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday for the Gainesville, FL graticle. Then for the Sunday (current day) graticle I'd climb to 5500' and get the Mile High achievement.

Expedition

Heavy fog covered North Central Florida both Saturday and Sunday morning. I got the airport about 9:45am for my 10:00-13:00 rental reservation and the airport was under full IMC conditions. Not being instrument rated there was nothing I could do but complete my pre-flight and wait on the tarmac for the fog to lift.

Gainesville isn't a particularly busy airport but on a Sunday after a home Gator football game there is a steady stream of executive aircraft leaving the airport. And I'm the sort that can sit and watch airplanes all day.

Finally the fog burned off and I was able to takeoff to the southwest in search of Friday's location. Less than 10 miles from the airport, however, was an almost solid band of cloud cover extending north-to-south and all the way west to the Gulf Coast. Worse, the bottoms of the clouds were at about 1000' AGL, meaning they were too low for me to scoot along underneath. All three hash points were going to be under cloud cover.

I decided to abandon, for now, the previous day's hash quest and go striaght for Sunday's. The chances of me seeing the ground at the point were pretty slim and I was uncomfortably nervous that when I returned to Gainesville the cloud bank would have moved east, preventing me from landing. The gaps in the cloud cover were nowhere large enough for me to drop down between clouds and maintain minimum VFR clearance.

So now I was left to trying to fly over the unseen point at about 90 knots using only the gps on my phone.

When I fly I usually track my flight with an [1] gps logger.