First Flight

Well, not exactly my first flight... It was more a case of my first flight not in the training area. My newly acquired certificate allows me to fly within a 25 nautical mile radius (about 45 km) from my take off point - which I think is a decent area to explore.  The training area is a square heading out to the West from the aerodrome stopping near Lake Burrumbeet and extends North towards Clunes.  Needless to say, I now know this area very well!

I wanted to go somewhere and see an area I hadn't seen for ages - Mt Buninyong.  There was little wind around, and the cloud was at about 3500 feet, but the most strange thing was the smoke hanging in the air from the stubble being burnt by farmers in the area.  The lack of wind meant that the smoke hung around and caused amazing shafts of light effects.

 

There were glider operations on runway 36, so I opted to keep out of their way and use the grass runway 31 instead - what little wind there was favoured this strip anyway.  Taking off and departing to the South, I heard on the radio a Seminole was doing practice NDB approaches using the Yarrowee NDB.  They were up in the cloud a little higher than me, but I kept a close eye out for them anyway.  I eventually managed to catch a fleeting glimpse of them up above me in a hole in the clouds.  Good, I knew where the were.

I climbed as high as I could without getting into cloud and headed over the township of Buninyong, then beside the mountain.  It was nice for once to have a look, but I made sure to keep a good lookout for other aircraft!

Shafts of light - near the site of the former Lal Lal racecourse.

Then, my next part of the plan was to head over to Lal Lal and overfly a friend's horse stud estate.  To get there I used IFR techniques.  No, not Instrument Flight Rules... For me it stands for I Follow Roads!  I found it by heading across to the East and then down the Yendon road - easy to spot because the rail line runs right beside it, so I guess it could be called I Follow Rail too!

After that was a quick look at Lal Lal reservoir and then head North past Warrenheip up to the White Swan Reservoir - Which actually is easy to spot because the nice people have placed a very large shape of a white swan on the dam wall!  That was nice of them.

Lal Lal Reservoir - looking much better than the last time I saw it!

I listened to the AWIS report for the winds and started formulating a plan for re-entry to the circuit.  The glider and the tug were both still active, so I kept a very close eye on them.  It was a line call whether to use 31 or 36 as the wind was right in the middle (not much of it, though!), so I listened to the traffic for a minute to see who was using what runway.  Only a few seconds later I heard one of the STATA students doing touch and goes on 31 (which was a surprise! Usually they don't use the grass strip), so I took that as a sign and joined mid-field cross wind for 31 and did a touch and go myself. Upon returning, the glider tug was in the process of being put back so I gave them a hand to put "Isabella" back to bed.

All in all, a lovely flight.  It's nice to fly just to fly.

One more hour down, 3.7 to go before I can go for my passenger endorsement!