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!