A Journal, with Pictures

Broth­er Mike, from Ore­gon, Joyce and I ( known by Joyce as the three mus­ke­teers) planned our almost annu­al fly­ing vaca­tion to New Eng­land and Cana­da. The pri­ma­ry objec­tive is to help reduce the lob­ster, shell­fish and seafood pop­u­la­tion. The plan was to fly to New Hamp­shire first to vis­it our friends the Yanof­sky’s. Harold flies both fixed wing and heli­copter, we looked for­ward to explor­ing New Eng­land from the air. We then planned to spend a day in Port­land, Maine sight see­ing and lob­ster eat­ing, before head­ing to Canada.

On Thurs­day, Sep­tem­ber 22nd. our planned depar­ture day the weath­er between Day­ton and New Hamp­shire was thun­der­storms, rain and low ceil­ings. Worse, the Maine coast was fore­cast­ing bad weath­er on Sat­ur­day our planned depar­ture day from New Hamp­shire. We decid­ed to wait and devel­op a plan B, which was to fly to Burling­ton, Ver­mont if New Hamp­shire did­n’t improve. On Fri­day the weath­er had not changed, so plan C was to fly to Burling­ton on Sat­ur­day. The weath­er improved Sat­ur­day, with a fore­cast of ceil­ings get­ting bet­ter in Burling­ton dur­ing our flight. As we flew toward Ver­mont, we had a nice tail wind, but the ceil­ings stayed at 400 feet, with mist and rain at our des­ti­na­tion. When we got to Syra­cuse, New York, we decid­ed to land and did an instru­ment approach in to Syra­cuse to wait for the weath­er to improve. It nev­er did, so we stayed overnight in Syra­cuse and devel­oped plan D. Weath­er per­mit­ting we would fly to Ban­gor, Maine refu­el and pro­ceed on to Syd­ney, Nova Sco­tia which would put us back on our orig­i­nal schedule.