(VIDEO) Christmas Day Durban Snow

On Christmas day, my friend Leon, his family and I had a bit of fun and put this short story out on national TV news that evening...

Belinda has always wanted a white Christmas, but with a family and the ever increasing costs of overseas travel, getting to see a white Christmas was not possible. But this year her husband promised her she would have some snow.



TX: 25 December 2009

Flying Saturday

I left home at about 05:30 and got to the field at 6. Some of the guys were getting ready to fly off to Ballito about 50km away on the coast. As I didn't know about the fly-away, I decided not to rush myself and join them. Preflights and preparation can't be done in a hurry. That's when things can go wrong. So instead Noel, one of the instructors asked me to take an aerial photo of the airfield and the new hanger being erected seeing as I had my camera with me.

It was a beautiful calm morning with no clouds, but there were patches of surface fog around. One bank in particular was approaching the field from the north west, but was a few kilometres away and very thin. I kept an eye on that!

I climbed to about 1½ thousand feet above the ground (an altitude of ± 4000 feet above sea level) to take the shots. The sun was still low, so the hanger was in the shade, but I got some nice pics. In the mean time that fog I had my eye on was creaping round the hill at Grass Roots strip and just reaching the end of runway 19, the northern end of the runway. The wind was favouring 01, an approach from the south west. I circled one more time for another shot and now the mist had come over half the runway, so I decided to do a rapid descent before it covered completely and I had to land at Cato Ridge or Emoyeni and wait for it to clear. By the time I was on final approach, it was almost covering the whole runway. But fortunately it was very thin so landing was not a problem.

After about 20 minutes, the fog cleared and I took off again, and headed north west, towards a ridge near Camperdown called Nomgomankulu. There was still a bit of fog over the Tala Game Reserve, but not enough to make flying a hazard. I flew around over the sugar cane farms in the area for a few minutes and heard my friend Jeff (from Underberg Adventures) on the radio. He was flying on the other side of Tala. I decided to return to Light Flight as there were some cumulus clouds building up on the eastern side of Cato Ridge.

What a delightful morning flying!

My Hammond T222 Organ

About 3 months ago I decided to start up the old Hammond organ. I haven't played it for decades. My dad used to play every now and then. Mostly when I was at work (thank goodness - he used to look at music but play by ear!) It produces it's notes with a tonewheel generator which consists of 74 small wheels with varying number of notches on them. They're all driven by a central shaft about 80 cm long and are spaced on either side of the main drive shaft. The number of notches on a particular wheel determines the tone produced as the notches spin past a magnetic pick up coil. The generator has to be oiled regularly and it hadn't been oiled regularly since I don't know when. It started with some terrible screeching sounds. I switched it off immediately and went onto the net to learn more about the Hammond tonewheel generator and where I could buy more oil, as it had to be genuine Hammond oil or untold damage could be done to the generator so the forum messages said. I had some good quality clock oil so I poured some of that into the filler holes and left it for a month.

I stared it up again a month later and it sounded much better. I noticed a "C" note was dead, so I decided it was time to open it up and investigate. Everything was covered with years and years of dust, cobwebs and some empty cockroach egg shells. So I pushed the organ into better light in the kitchen and proceeded to pull it apart and clean and vaccuum all the dust etc out. I replaced a flaking chipboard shelf, chips were falling into the tone generator and I didn't think that was good. I fixed two supports for the generator to stand on while I cleaned that up, removing oil-laden dust from the transformers and capacitors. I managed to find an almost complete service manual on the internet with the hope of tracing the missing C note. I joined the Hammond Zone forum and found others had similar problems with missing or dead tones. The usual suggestion was to check the soldered connections where the wires go from the generator to the keyboards, and at the capacitors and resistors on the transformers. I checked all the wires but found none broken or disconnected. I managed to locate the broken tonewheel from a chart on the net. I connected it's pickup coil wire to another connector and found it was definately dead. I then connected another tonewheel I knew was playing to the same middle C on the manuals, and it played. So the problem was somewhere in the pickup coil inside the works and from what I'd read on the forums fiddling with the tonewheels was definately not recommended as it was a "very precice piece of mechanical engineering and special jigs were needed to assemble it". I needed to get that magnet out and check the coil!

In the mean time the motor capacitor almost burnt out. It got extremely hot while the organ was running while I was testing and tripped the house circuit breaker. I have not managed to find an exact replacement but someone from work gave me a capacitor he had which is doing the job for now.

Today I decided it was now or never and I started opening up the metal frame of the generator to remove the magnetic pick up coil. It was quite a mission but with a bit of "gentle persuasion" I managed to get it out. I inspected it with a magnifying glass and found one end of the hair-width wire on the coil had broken where it was soldered to the terminal. I unwound some wire and soldered it back and put the pickup back in the generator. Fortunately the offending pickup was right on the end so it was not necessary to open the whole generator up, and I didn't need to use the special jigs to get it back together! either!! Just lucky I suppose.

When I'd reconnected the wires, I switched on and gingerly played the "C" note.

IT WORKED!!!!

PS. I've ordered some Hammond oil from someone in Canada as there is none available in South Africa although someone I know who has worked on the organ in the past said good sewing machine oil is ok, but I don't want to take any chances.
PPS. This organ is now for sale. Any takers?

Towards a Better Environment...

I have a large front lawn at home and have to mow the grass every second week during the summer months. This isn't too bad as I have a ride-on mower and the whole yard takes about 2 hours to mow.

Over the past few years while going round and round in ever diminishing circles on my mower, I've noticed that there is a lot of the original wild veld grass trying to grow through the lawn. The land used to be open grasslands before it was proclamed a residential area in the 1950's. Most of this grass seems to be growing in an area sort of in the middle of the front lawn. So a few weeks ago I decided to stop mowing the centre portion and let the wild grass grow back (and make the mowing a bit less too!) Well, these photos are a result of about a month of no cutting. I have tried to landscape it a bit by cutting a pathway through the middle.

I suppose to the residents of my neighbourhood the lawn might look unkempt. But it is in fact an experiment in conserving the natural environment. It will encourage seed eating birds to my garden and hopefully the grey heron I saw there when I first moved in in the 90's might come back to catch 'noo-noos' in the long grass.

Click on the pics for a larger view.

UPDATE : November 2011

The Black-headed heron returned a few times in November 2011, and once I photographed it catch a blue headed lizard which it swallowed with great difficulty.

A Sign?

The company I work for is experiencing financial difficulties at the moment, probably mainly through "empire building" and it's finally caught up.

After a short rain shower early this morning a bright rainbow appeared over Kloof Gorge.

Let's hope the day turns out well.

Leaving the Berg

Some of us have to work, and so I had to return early on Tuesday morning. All the valleys were filled with fog as I left the farm.

When got to the higher ground near Bulwer behind me I could see the mighty Drakensberg rising out of the mist filled valleys at their feet. In front over towards the east was the Umkomaas River valley and this too was filled with fog.

As I approached the valley I took these photos.

Monday Flying the Umzimkulu River

Monday morning dawned clear and calm so Jeff and I headed out to the Himeville airfield armed with the video camera to try to film the starting point of the canoe race on the Umzumkulu. We took off and headed up over the Sani Pass hotel then turned left parallel to the Drakensberg and flew over Cobham camp site. The air was so still we headed towards the Bushman's Nek area and landed on a new farm strip out that way.

On the way back we headed up the valley to the bridge where the race starts and got some good aerials. Back at the farm I edited those shots onto the start of the material I'd filmed the day before and now the race organisers have a nice aerial tracking video of the river.

Our province is so lush and green at this time of the year. Other parts of the country are experiencing lower rainfall than usual and do not look this good.

See the videos here.
(Update: the video has been removed because it was reported by somebody as being inappropriate and misleading and I had my youtube account suspended for 6 months. I was furious about the incident and appealed against the decision stating that it was no more inappropriate than some of the junk one finds on youtube. I explained the reason for the video i.e.as a guide for canoeists but added that it was very old and no onger needed and if they really felt like it they could delete it. I complained that I had not been given any chance for an explanation and was treated like a naughty child. Youtube reinstated my account but I was unable to upload videos for 6 months.
Shame on you youtube.com

Last Underberg Adventure

Well, this may have been my last Underberg Adventure for a while. My friends at Pevensey Jeff and Brigid are moving back to their town home soon. I drove to the farm early on Saturday morning to spend the weekend.

On Sunday morning we finally had good flying weather to video the Umzimkulu River for the Drakensberg Challenge Canoe Race organisers. We headed up towards Drakensberg Gardens, but the Bantam fix winged microlight encountered nasty turbulence at the entrance to the large valley where the canoe race starts on the Umzimkulu River. We turned round and concentrated on filming from a bit further downstream where the air was more calm and would make low level flying safer. The 2 day race ends at Umzimkulu River Lodge about 60 kilometres from the start.

After flying the Umzimkulu, Brigid packed a picnic lunch for us and we headed up Mahwaqa mountain behind the farm on the quads. Low cloud was starting to roll in from the Bulwer side of the mountain, so we didn't stay up there all afternoon. We stopped and looked at waterfalls in deep ravines, flowers and skittish buck. Lunch was at a small stream. We were looking for 

one waterfall in particular, but didn't locate it because the mist was getting thicker. We turned round and went exploring on a lower stretch of the mountain, before heading for the farm house.

That afternoon a very mean thunder storm came up, but passed in the distance.

Happy New Year!

First of all, a very Happy New Year and may everything you wish for in 2009 happen.

Secondly, the neighbour's dogs saga ended well this morning. The tennant next door contacted me after reading the note I left stuck to his door and we managed to get all 3 dogs home. They just need to block the hole in the fence where the dogs got through and hopefully they'll stay home.

I didn't go flying because it was overcast and a bit misty earlier on. We'll have one day with perfect conditions soon.... I hope... it's been over a month since I last flew. The summer weather's not conducive to microlight flying.