Back in the Box

Done with the sim observation week, and it went a bit better than pretty well. I started this with a tendency to look at Sim instruction as just one of those things one had to put up with for the chance to get back into a classroom setting. All of the hours spent in the front seats of Sims over the years had dulled any enthusiasm for working in the box. These last few days have eased that feeling somewhat. The Sim is a unique training environment; a multi-million dollar, full-motion chalkboard used to study and master some pretty complex challenges. At the start of the week the crew I was with was tentatively poking at switches just to get the flight deck powered up and the engines running. Today nothing—not badly degraded flight controls, one engine gone, or 3 of their 4 instrument screens dead in the panel—kept them from flying near perfect night instrument approaches to absolute minimums, usually ending with a gentle touchdown and the airplane coming to a stop with the nose gear on the center line. This is training the way training ought to be, and is pretty close to as much fun as a person can have while, at the same time, just working for a living. (No, we didn’t do any single-engine dump truck jumping. It turns out I’m not the only one who thinks such things are a waste of training time.) Meeting with them after their successful check rides was cool, and they were even kind enough to say that what little input I offered over our week together in the sim was helpful.

Photo courtesy of aopa.com

My next task is to “teach” the Initial Pilot sim sessions to two Flight Safety Instructors pretending to be clients, while a third Instructor teaches me the simulator ropes. And that has led to one of the cooler things that has happened to me lately. (Though the idea of four Flight Instructors in the same Sim provokes images of four doctors in a Bonanza. Its an insider joke, don't worry if you don't get it.)

Years ago, I had a chance to teach a class on high altitude/turbine flight operations at St. Louis University, something that lasted nearly eight years. After that job faded away, there was some time spent as an Airline Captain. Fun job, but the pay was hard to live on. (Regional pilot pay back in those days was another inside joke.) I left that job to fly a corporate jet around the country for about a decade and, when the ax fell on that gig, Deb and I headed out on Kintala.

Now, something near 20 years later, one of the pilots I will be practicing on will be someone who sat in one of those classes at St. Louis University. He is a fully qualified Sim and ground school instructor for the Legacy, and it is likely he will have much of value to share about teaching others to fly this thing.

I have stumbled across several students from those SLU days: a young lady flying Apache Helicopters for the Army, several who are now wearing 4 stripes and flogging airlines around the world, one who flies B2 stealth bombers…I don’t claim to have had anything at all to do with their success, though it was kind of fun that such meetings always included smiles, laughter, and good stories. But to be working with one of them, having him show me the way around this high-tech wonder jet? That’s enough to make an old flight instructor feel pretty good about the paths life has taken; enough to have me truly looking forward to being “back in the box.”

The way it is.

Slowly, and somewhat against my will, the integration back into the world of land dwellers continues. I am starting to drive a little faster. The highway part of the route to and from the shop works best when big parts of it get done in the left lane. Two of the off ramps used are left exits, with one of those dumping me off into the left lane of another highway. From there it is about 1/2 mile to get across four lanes of traffic to a right exit. When in the left lane, it seems best to try and keep up, but ten over is about as fast as I care to go. It’s usually enough, particularly when the schedule has me making the trip around rush hour. Non-rush hour traffic is light enough that leaving the lane switch to the last minute isn’t a problem. On those days,speeds in the fast lane run 20/25 over…and more. Best to leave that bit of concrete to those in a real hurry to get to their next accident.

The drive through town to the highway has its own displays of land dweller foolishness. I don’t understand those who just blow through red lights without even slowing, something witnessed on an average of once a day. I can’t get my head around the idea of someone thinking that they are so important that traffic laws simply don’t apply to them. I sometime wonder if they think the laws of reaction times, momentum, braking traction, and impact “g” forces, don’t apply to them either. Then again, thinking isn’t likely one of their strong suits. Such drivers are, admittedly, a minority. Maybe Darwin keeps them from multiplying too rapidly.

Unsurprisingly, the job is helping ease the transition. In the aviation world, the people not big on thinking don’t get very far or last very long. (Darwin rules again.) Being among the tribe of hard-core, professional aviators helps take some of the sting out of not being among the tribe of cruisers. The job, now, is to sit through the exact same class/cockpit trainer/sim sessions as completed barely a week ago. Observing is the task at hand, concentrating more on how the material is taught rather than what is being taught. There is still a lot of learning going on. Knowing enough to pass the check rides and exams is not near to knowing enough to teach.

Mike, the instructor this past week, is the fourth I have worked with since hiring on. The first three got me – six years away from a flight deck – past an FAA type ride in the Legacy fly-by-wire-gee-whiz wonder bird, in three weeks. A pretty good demonstration of just how good they are at what they do. Watching Mike, with an eye toward working the classroom gee-whiz wonders and watching how he interacts with the group did (as I fully expected) highlight just how challenging – and fun – this is going to be. And there are still two areas of instruction, the cockpit trainer and the actual simulator, to be mastered.

Another help in taking the sting away from being off the boat comes from spending time with the pilots being trained. The current class includes pilots from Mexico, France, Germany (who was born in Brazil), and the US. One of the American pilots was a contract guy who has flown pretty much everywhere there is to fly, including Russia and China. This group of seven pilots is, collectively, fluent in at least 6 languages. They are very much the kind of people we routinely met while traveling on Kintala: adventuresome, capable, friendly, smart, and at ease with other cultures and ideas. It is just flat-out fun to be around them, listen to their stories, and work with them as they get a handle on this new bird.

It all helps.

The crew of Blown’ In the Wind is spending a few days on the dock where Kintala is sitting with the broker. They say it is strange to see her there without Deb and I nearby. It is even stranger having them “out there” while heading off to work each day. I try not to think of it too often; the job, Daughters (Two), and the grandkid gang of 7 are all good reasons to have taken this path. But sometimes the nights pass slow, with the lights of the city and the noise of the adjoining apartments rubbing raw against the nights of silence and darkness riding to the anchor off some uninhabited cay. At other times a thought or memory will sneak up and freeze my world for just a moment, right in the middle of the day. Those usually pass quickly, though the ghost of a hurt may linger for a while. Some of the people I love, and a world I miss, are very far away. And that’s just the way it is going to be for a while.

Just another ride?

One thing that seemed a pretty sure bet when we left land and moved onto a boat, was that there would be no more check rides in the future, let alone two check rides in five days. It would have been a bad bet to take.

Photo courtesy of AOPA.com

The first was Monday’s “easy” ride, the one to check the box required by the European authorities. That one was done with my new friend from Germany and was actually two, two-hour rides. Michael took the left (Captain’s) seat for the first ride with me on the right. Then we switched for the second ride. Like most jets, and in spite of all the high tech gee-wizardry that is supposed to make this one “easy” to fly, it is a two pilot airplane. When things start to go wonky, with warning lights flashing and aural alerts filling the flight deck, they can be two very busy people, with each person’s hands being filled with different tasks. The nice thing about European (EASA) rides is that they are not “jeopardy” events. One can’t really fail the ride. If a maneuver isn’t performed up to standard the crew simply does it again, learns from whatever mistake it was that they made, and moves on. There is always the possibility that someone will come along who simply can’t figure out how to do it right, but that is a pretty rare event at this level of aviation. These are not teenaged kids working toward their first solo flight in a single engine piston banger.

Another good thing about EASA rides is they focus on crew coordination and decision making, using the aircraft's capabilities to minimize risk. When things start to go wrong, the crew is expected to reduce the risks involved as much as possible. Checking destination weather, finding alternate airports, requesting priority handling to simplify the approach procedure as much as possible, are all expected to be part of the crew’s actions. Of course things still go wrong on an EASA check ride. Though there is a good chance that a pilot starting out today will never see a honest to goodness flashing red light in an actual cockpit, you have to practice something.

The second ride, the FAA sanctioned ride, was Friday. The FAA is the last aviation entity on the planet to still insist on “jeopardy” rides. Lose too much airspeed during one kind of maneuver, gain or lose too much altitude during another maneuver, and the examiner is required to terminate the ride, no second chances. The applicant is sent home with a “pink slip” and a notice goes in the federal records of a failed attempt to get a new rating. They can’t take away your birthday or anything, and a second ride can be scheduled after a certain amount of retraining is logged. The bitch with this approach is that anyone can have a bad day, and a ride can be “busted” even if the outcome of the flight was never in doubt. (You can read that as meaning it didn’t get near to crashing and no one was going to get hurt.)

During this check ride, one gets to demonstrate all kinds of skills that will never be called upon again. Steep turns in an airplane deliberately designed to correct any roll attitude greater than 33 degrees is one. The required 45 degree angle can be commanded, but one is literally fighting the airplane’s flight management system the entire time. Oh, and don’t gain or lose about a wing’s span worth of altitude while doing so, even if the ground is 10,000 feet away. Do so and the ride is a bust, come back another day to try again.

The same can be said for performing aerodynamic stalls, when the wing quits flying from too low an airspeed. Millions upon millions of dollars were spent when designing this aircraft to ensure that it could not be stalled. So, during an FAA check ride, some (not all) of the multiple layers of protection are switched off. Then the pilot can provoke a stall warning (not an actual stall) in order to demonstrate the “skill” of recovering from something that hasn’t actually happened yet. It is a bit like chopping off a foot to demonstrate the skill of hopping around on one leg.

After doing things in the airplane that the airplane was designed not to do, one gets to demonstrate the ability to handle multiple, cascading failures by making the poorest possible risk management decisions. No pilot I know would ever, with an engine shut down (OEI), press on to an airport where the weather was at minimums for making the approach. Nor would any airport I have ever flown to allow a piece of equipment to blunder onto a runway in front of an emergency aircraft, thus provoking a single engine low altitude (barely 50 feet in the air, less than the length of the aircraft) abort and missed approach. But an FAA check ride requires pretend stupid topped with a dash of silly. After the abort, the sky will miraculously clear and turn into day for the next landing, but the flaps will fail. A OEI / no flaps landing is like tip-toeing through a mine field. One faltering step will have the airplane careening through the grass on the side of the runway. (A sure way to bust any kind of check ride is to crash, even if it is a Sim.)

A saying that floats around the aviation world goes something like this, “It is best to exercise superior judgment and avoid demonstrating superior skills.” On the FAA ride we do just the opposite. The good news is that the Legacy 500 is such an overpowered little brute that it barely notices that an engine has packed it in for the day. So, what it taketh away in cooperating with steep turns, it giveth back when jumping over a wayward dump truck. The no flap, OEI landing? Just take it easy with the single thrust reverser, don’t pounce on the brakes with too much enthusiasm, and all should be well. (That is, by the way, just the highlights of the things that go wrong on this two hour check ride.)

For me the ride mostly demonstrated that it takes more than a few weeks to scrape off 6 years worth of salt water accumulated rust. Still, it went okay. The Check Airman was fair in his assessment of the things I could have done better and, to a large extent, all involved are well aware that check rides have little to do with actually using the airplane to move around the country day after day. I would have been quite comfortable to walk out of the sim, climb up into an actual Legacy, and head off somewhere; the Check Airman would have put his family on board behind me. When it comes right down to it, that is every Check Airman's actual pass/fail criteria. And it is the best one I can think of.

After the “official” ride was over, we had a good discussion of how I, as a flight instructor, can help him do his job as a Pilot Examiner. The people he checks will soon include people I have helped train. We are on the same side when it comes to getting them ready for both the check ride and the real world. Sometimes that is a delicate balancing act between two contradictory sets of standards.

With the rides over, and a new type rating in my pocket, the heat is off a bit. I am past the point where the job could still have gone very wrong, leaving us with few options for getting back to a boat someday. I have been “at the shop” pretty much every day since training started three weeks ago. When not working the GFS I was at home pouring over manuals, procedures, and test questions, often far into the night. Though not the FAA’s doing, to me this check ride carried more potential “jeopardy” than any other I have taken.

It will be good to get back to a more normal schedule. I am really looking forward to concentrating on getting to the front of a classroom, rather than to the front seat of the airplane. After all, they hired me to teach, not to fly. 

The End…

…of 2018 that is. The year didn’t end anything like I would have expected when it began. If anyone had suggested that it would close with us being back in St. Louis and Kintala on the hard for sale, the only thought that would have come to mind was that some real tragedy had struck. A second season worth of work at Snead Island was done, Deb and I both had Coast Guard Captain’s tickets tucked away, there was some money in the bank, and Daughter Eldest and Family were on their own boat living happily nearby. There was no reason to think that our life afloat would be history just 12 months later. And yet, here we are.

Yesterday we took advantage of the unseasonably warm weather and went exploring, spending much of the day walking down to the river to check out the Gateway Arch National Park. Since we last lived in these parts, a lot of work has gone into the Park. Each year there are several major events held at the site. Since we will not have to struggle with parking, I suspect we will take advantage of many of them even if big crowds are not high up on my list of favorite things. We did, after all, come this way to have new adventures and live a different way. If the crowd gets too much, it is an easy walk home.

I was a bit surprised at the lack of a crowd yesterday, it being a near perfect day for walking and the Gateway Arch National Park being a major draw in the city. It turns out the Park was officially closed, along with much of the rest of the Government. I don’t pay much attention to such goings on anymore and was only vaguely aware of the shut-down. I have already ridden to the top of the Arch, don’t need to take that trip again, and so didn’t notice that the ticket office was closed. The grass, river, trees, sky and sun ignore such goings on as well, and they were what had called us out for our walk in the first place.

Tomorrow is my first day of type rating class. I took advantage of the slower pace between the holidays to book a bunch of hours in the Graphical Flight Deck Simulator. It seemed likely that the years spent on an actual deck-deck had left flight deck skills a bit rusty. But in fewer hours than feared, old habits started coming back, the cadence of events that make up departures and approaches started to feel right again. I am not sure that all of the technology actually reduces the work load as much as claimed, it has just changed the nature of the work being done. Electronic check lists are cool, but do the exact same job as paper check lists and take about the same amount of time to deploy and work through. Instead of concentrating on physically flying the airplane, pilots now concentrate on a litany of nav source / autopilot / flight director / auto-throttle mode annunciators and controls. If the air is smooth one can certainly do all of that while sipping at a cup of coffee, so to someone looking in from the outside, it might appear that there isn’t much work being done. And it is certainly a different kind of work than that which goes on in a boat yard in the middle of a Florida summer, not to mention that it pays a lot better.

This might be a pretty good year after all.

The arch at the riverfront. We hear the barge horns in our apartment from the river here.

The arch is just too big to fit it all in a photo!

Odd Days

When you first think about going cruising, your focus is intense.  You have a goal, a plan, and a list of things to make it all happen. If you're fortunate, like us, you're rewarded with a couple years of intensely beautiful experiences - sunsets, new friends, dolphins, manatees, and an occasional moonlit passage.

After a few years, you might find yourself stuck on a dock working to replenish the cruising kitty like we are, and things are suddenly different. You're not cruising, but you're not really landlubbers either. You're stuck in this odd, fuzzy time of endlessly hot days, feeling a bit like the floating experience when coming out of general anesthesia - one foot in each world but not fully in either one.

The past six months on the dock have been odd days like this - floating - but not focused. Days meander by, but no thought is given to where we go next. No boat projects are being done because the need to have them completed is just too far away to think about.

The last week or so, though, the weather has made a decided shift toward Fall. For the first time in months we dipped below the 90° mark for a high. The breezes have picked up, announcing the approaching cold fronts. Something smells different in the air, a hint of dry leaves (although there aren't many trees that shed them here), and an occasional sniff of a wood fire somewhere takes me back to my days in Pennsylvania where the first fire in the fireplace signaled the change of seasons. It was just enough to break me out of the fog and start me thinking about what needed to be done to Kintala before we could leave the dock.

As I sat at the nav station working on a list, I could no longer ignore the weather station that resides just under the switch panel that has been inop since Spring. A new set of batteries, a spray of contact cleaner and a few wipes with emery cloth, and the weather station sprang to life once again. It took about 30 minutes, including the removal and reinstallation, a piece of our normal cruising life reinstated. While it might seem like a ridiculously small thing, that one little thing did much to lift my mood and put a smile on my face.

If you find yourself having to stop cruising for a while to replenish the cruising kitty (and most cruisers do at some point unless they are independently wealthy), there are a few things that I've learned these past two summers and I thought I'd pass them along.

• Nurture your dream while you're dock bound. Remember why you wanted to go cruising in the first place and find fellow cruisers to spend time with who can encourage you.
• Enjoy the little things. For me this past summer, it's been time spent getting to know three of our nine grandchildren. In the past few years we've only visited occasionally and there is no substitute for the day-in, day-out contact we've experienced the last few months.
• Find something to be thankful for every day. Your health, your friends, your supportive spouse, your home.
• Take care of yourself. Walk, ride a bike, eat well, read a good book.
• Connect with old friends and distant family members.
• Get lots of sleep.

Although I'm working part time now at a sail loft in town, I'm finding a few hours here and there to start on our project list which is mercifully short this year. All of our exterior teak needs refinished, our wind instrument needs repaired or replaced, our head plumbing needs the addition of a system to empty the holding tank at sea, and an errant leak needs chased down that dared to mar my new headliner from last summer's project list. These projects will be tackled while we await grandchild #10, due in mid-December, after which we'll start creating the possible routes to wherever we end up going this cruising season, a lot of which will be dependent on the condition of marinas along the way.

For now, here's a hodge podge of photos from the last few weeks, glimpses of sunlight through the fog.

A sail I'm restitching at my part time job with Sunrise Sails Plus. It's off a 65 foot ketch rig.

There's always time to climb a tree around here.

He was pretty happy with this coconut which he rescued from the water just outside the marina.

About half of the toe rail is now sanded. Next boat has metal toe rails...

The Coast Guard and Florida Fish and Wildlife have been raising these sunken boats to be hauled out and trucked away in a combined effort to clean up the local waterways. Some of them have been sunken for years, others fell prey to Irma

This was somebody's awesome power boat at some point

Working it out

When we first started thinking about cruising as a way to retire early, we knew we didn't have the money to retire on land with the associated housing expenses and transportation expenses that come with the lifestyle. Our careers in aviation had provided a satisfactory upbringing for our three girls, but it hadn't left us with a huge retirement fund. If you've read thebook, then you know the whole story - how we started thinking about retiring onto a houseboat on the river because we could keep the motorcycles, how our middle daughter moved to Cape Cod, how we started looking at power boats to make that trip from St. Louis, and how we quickly began thinking about sailboats as an alternative that fit our travel budget. That was 2007. By 2011 we realized it was a thing we really wanted to make happen and we bought Kintala. Shortly after, I lost my job followed by the loss of Tim's job in 2013. We had a decision to make, and quickly. Our options were to:

1. Find other jobs which would not likely be in our present location and would require a 2 year commitment and the mothballing / sale / or move of Kintala (Think big $$$$)
2. Leave early, even though neither Kintala nor the cruising kitty were ready.

At that point, Tim was 58 and I was 57, both of us a long way from collecting Social Security even early at 62. We had some cash savings, we knew we could sell the car, the bike, and the house and come up with a couple years of cruising, but we also knew after owning Kintala for 2 years that unexpected expenses were likely. (Oh...if only we knew how many of them...)

It was about that time that I read a post by Mike on Zero to Cruising where he talked about their departure. They also had some funds to begin cruising, acrued from the sale of their business, but realized that the money they had wasn't going to last forever. I can't remember the exact words he used, but he made the statement that they decided to go and figure it out along the way because they had always managed to work things out through their lives together and they were confident they could find a way to make it happen. It resonated with me because Tim and I are pretty much the same. We've been thrown a lot of curve balls in our 44 years together but we've always managed to work it out.We decided to leave early, fully realizing that we would probably have to stop and work at some point along the way.

People cruise for all sorts of reasons. Some are trying to escape, some are out for the adventure, others are challenging themselves. Some cruise for the closeness to nature, others for the closeness of the cruising community. Some venture far, across wide oceans and to foreign lands. Others cruise the Great Lakes or the US coastline, the Chesapeake and the Bahamas. Some find a place they like along the way and settle for a while. Some are better off and travel in mega yachts, others are cobbling together small production boats with duct tape and wire. Some work, some don't. There are as many ways to cruise as there are people doing it. I said it in the book and it's worth repeating here: There is no right way to cruise, only your way.

I had a blog follower tell me recently that it seemed we were doing more working than cruising. Unless you're independently wealthy, were fortunate enough to save up a (pardon the pun) boatload of money, or even more fortunate enough to have a large inheritance coming your way, you will probably have to stop and work at some point in your cruising years. It's part of the life for a large percentage of the cruising community. Some are lucky enough to supplement their cruising kitty with writing, others have part or full time jobs in IT that they do from their boats, some make and sell jewelery, others are rated captains and charter their boats or do deliveries. Some cruise for a year or two, put the boat on the hard, go back to their professions for a year or two, then rinse and repeat. While neither of us had any desire to return to aviation, we did have a need for cash.

Just as the need for cash was becoming apparent, a friend of ours mentioned that he was in need of a mechanic. We checked the place out, decided it would be a good fit, and Tim started working for Snead Island Boat Works in April of this year. It's a good place to work, a company that does quality work and stands behind it. The people are hard-working, kind, and generous. So when they asked if Tim would return next spring after our winter tour of the Bahamas, he said absolutely. The extra summer will give us a financial cushion, allow us to wait a year to collect Social Security, give us a chance to learn quite a bit more about boats, and give us a home base to which our eldest daughter and family can visit for a prolonged period.

Yes, at the moment we are doing more working that sailing, but we're in this for the long term and we want to do it comfortably. Soon the working/sailing balance will tip the other way, and we will be the better for having been here. So, if you're planning your cruising life in retirement, don't be afraid of the prospect of working along the way. You just might find something interesting that captures your attention, something new to learn, some new coworkers to get to know. It's all part of working it out.

An amazing storm rolling into the basin at Snead Island Boat Works