Hello, hello...is this thing on...anybody here? All joking aside, this is the longest I've gone without posting in the 11 years I've had this blog, and if you read the other blog you know why. We've been so busy working on our new boat and preparing to go cruising that we've scarcely had time to update that one. And most of the interesting happenings in our lives these days are sailing related, so it's the sailing blog that gets the posts. If you don't read the other blog, here's what's happened in the last few months. Dawn and I sold our house and moved into a temporary apartment in June. W ..read more

My 35th birthday was on April 17th, and I spent it in about the best way I could imagine: Dawn and I cruising up the west coast in our Piper Pacer. The day prior we started in Torrance, CA, where the plane had been kept since our February Baja trip, worked our way north via Big Sur, Napa, and the Siskayou Mountains, then stopped for the night in scenic Ashland, OR. On my birthday we made it to Vancouver, WA in one long leg, then picked up my friend Brad and farted around a bit, landing at a mutual friend's private strip to check out his new Maule M5. Later that week I had a long PDX overnight ..read more

Last post I alluded to some pretty major developments in my and Dawn's lives, and I won't keep you in suspense. Last August we decided we want to do something completely different. Dawn was starting to get burned out on teaching and I'm not growing any fonder of Minnesota winters; there's really nothing keeping us here. My airline has seven different 7ER bases and MSP is one of the most senior and is slowly shrinking. We talked about various places we could move, and then I broached an idea I'd been mulling over for some time: what if we moved onto a 40' sailboat and cruised the Bahamas and Ca ..read more

Considering my lack of posting you might think that my airline is working me to death, but no, that's not the case. Recently I passed 120 hours on the B757/767...just over six months since I went to class! Keep in mind that I was originally awarded the slot way back in Feb 2015, meaning I'm only nine months away from my seat lock expiring. I'm not planning on going anywhere but it keeps options open. Basically what happened is that my airline was originally planning on retiring a significant portion of the 7ER fleet, didn't train many new pilots on it for a while, then decided to keep many of ..read more

This is rather last minute, but I wasn't entirely sure I was going to make it until fairly recently. The ModAero NextGen Aviation Festival will be happening in Conroe, TX (just north of Houston) this Weds-Sat March 16th-19th, and I'll be speaking on the main stage at 12:30PM on Friday. I'll also be participating in a few panel discussions throughout the day. ModAero is an interesting concept, a fly-in/aviation symposium/music festival aimed at younger pilots & aviation enthusiasts. This is their first year, and it'll be interesting to see how it goes. So if you're in the area, come check i ..read more

I flew back down to Tampa on January 15th, caught an Uber ride to Peter O Knight Airport, and inspected the Pacer. The local mechanics had completed the required 50-hour muffler inspection, but hadn't been able to hunt down a slight oil leak I had noticed the previous week on the way over from Orlando. Nothing to do but fly and try to figure out where it was coming from on subsequent legs, I figured. I launched to the north, into the teeth of a fierce headwind that spawned moderate turbulence and miserably slow groundspeed. Finally I ducked down low and just offshore alongside the Gulf Coast ..read more

Growing up in the Great White North, I knew a few snowbirds among my parents' circle of friends and supposed that everything south of the Mason-Dixon line was perpetual glorious summer. I wasn't fully disabused of this notion until my frigid motorcycle trip across the South six years ago, which comprised two legs of a nearly-15,000 mile ride around the Lower 48. I rode shivering in temperatures mostly in the 20s and 30s - the warmest it got between San Diego and Florida was 49 degrees, in El Paso - and an enormous winter storm that dumped a foot of snow on Dallas chased me all the way from Tex ..read more

 If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times: airplanes are meant to fly, they like to fly, and the worst thing for them is to sit unused. This is one of the reasons flying clubs make so much more sense to me than sole ownership, at least for the average owner: the use rate on a large portion of the GA fleet is abysmally low. When we bought the Pacer on December 15, 2014, we set a goal of flying it 10 hours a month. Well wouldn't you know it, as of December 15, 2015, I had exactly 119.7 hours in the airplane. Not bad. In the five weeks since then, I've put on another 54.5 hours ..read more

Never say I never give you anything, dear readers. I'm about to show you how to make a homebuilt 978MHz ADS-B receiver in 30 minutes and for under $100. I built this a month and a half ago in preparation for a major trip with the Pacer that I'll be writing about shortly, and it has worked flawlessly and been an invaluable addition to the flight bag. I used it with an iPad 2 running WingX Pro7, but it purportedly works just as well with ForeFlight and various other EFB apps on a wide variety of platforms. The commercial versions of this box (Stratus, Garmin GDL39, etc) retail for $500-800. The ..read more

I was originally awarded the 757/767 back in February, but this came on a fairly open-ended bid that allowed the company to converted awarded pilots more or less when they pleased (though always in seniority order). At the time the thinking was that they needed us on the line yesterday, and I assumed I'd be trained and on the line by July. As it turned out, I was dead wrong and got to enjoy another sweaty summer on the Mad Dog. I then would have been placed in training in October, except that was when I had two weeks of vacation, and in the bid preferences I had asked for the vacation to be ho ..read more