March 7 at Seminole – a very good (but short!) day

John Mittell (BZ) and I had a very good, but somewhat short soaring day today.  Winds were strong again out of the east-southeast, and by 11 am we had Q’s and streeting  visible.  Thanks to John prying me away from a geek session with another pilot, we were off the ground a little after noon.  I had to search around a bit for a first climb, but soon BZ and I were up at cloudbase around 4500′, and a beautiful cloud street stretched away to the southeast in front of us.  Not being completely brain-dead, we took off immediately along the street.  Unfortunately, after about 20 miles we found ourselves stuck against the 4000′ shelf of the Orlando Class B airspace, so we turned around and  ran northwest along the streets to just north of Green Swamp, then turned around and did another southeast-northwest run, winding up back at Green Swamp.  By the time we arrived back at Green Swamp, however, a high cloud layer combined with cloud spreadout made it pretty clear that the day was getting a bit iffy.  Rather than try and hang on and hope for a recycle, we both decided discretion was the better part of valor and beat feet back to the airport.

John and I were putting our gliders away when Don Kroesch (DK) returned from his flight, as he put it, “Not entirely of my own volition”.  When he asked me how my flight went, and I told him of our street runs, his response was “Are you making this stuff up?!!”.

Rumor has it that Richard Maleady’s (TO) RV suffered a meltdown, literally, when an electrical junction box in the ceiling overheated and started dripping flaming  plastic onto his carpet.  Reportedly, Richard had to use a fire extinguisher to put out the (small) fire, and then had to spend several hours cleaning up the mess, and THEN had to find an RV service place to address the original issue.

I have had my own micro-scale version of Richard’s troubles with my own micro-castle, when I discovered my whizzo electronic thermostat and heat/cooling controller gave up the ghost on me, just in time to let me freeze my little tootsies off on the coldest night we have had since I have been here.  After getting a new thermostat from Ocala only to have it die as well, I spent some quality time on the phone with the manufactures (who, by the way were very helpful and immediately put replacement parts in the mail to me).  So, at the moment I’m running my gas heater by manually connecting two wires together – which means I first have to get so cold that I wake up, then connect the wires until I warm up enough to go back to sleep, but I have to disconnect the wires (and stop the heater) before I go back to bed for fear of waking up as baked Alaska! ;-).  Thank goodness its getting warmer here, and maybe I’ll have it all repaired by the time the next cold snap comes along.

Nice street runs today