Day 45 - Boating in Brainerd

Tony Cacciarelli • Jul 29, 2020

Stuck in Brainerd - Day 3 - July 29, 2019

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SS Minnow

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The salty captain

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a 3-hour tour...a 3-hour tour

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Ernie's on Gull

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Original Instagram Post

For today I decided to go back to Gull Lake in a slightly different way.

I rented a pontoon boat and cruised the lake in style! It was a little cloudy and windy, but I had a great time motoring around. I followed the western shore down to the south end of the lake. On the way back north I made a stop at the same location I landed the A5 at a few days ago.

In the afternoon I checked in on the A5 maintenance. Unfortunately, things had gotten more complicated and now it looks like I'll be able to head out on Wednesday afternoon instead of Tuesday morning. So, I'm re-shuffling my stops based on this new timing and see which ones I can still hit as I work my way back to Torrance, CA.

Definitely getting lots of practice with planning on the fly.

😀👍🏼

I was excited to spend some time boating around on Gull Lake. It was a different type of piloting from what I'd been doing.

I'd spent some time on boats growing up, but I wouldn't consider myself an experienced boater, Having gone through the water training for the A5, though, I was pretty confident I could handle it. In some ways, a boat is easier than a seaplane. In a seaplane like the A5 once you start the engine you're moving forward and there's no reverse, so you better be pointed pretty much in the direction you want to go. The boat had forward and reverse and a decent turning radius.

I definitely had more boat than I needed for just me, but it was the smallest one the rental company had. There was a GPS unit that showed water depth around the lake. I wished I had that database built into the GPS of the A5. It would've made choosing a landing area a lot easier. I'd seen some shallow areas on my recon pass, but being able to see the depths on the GPS would really take the guesswork out of it. [Image from the iBoating website]

By around noon the weather clouded up and the wind was making the water choppy, so I set a leisurely course back to port for my 1pm drop off. It was just as well I did a half-day rental - I'd done pretty much everything I wanted to do on the lake at that point.

With the revised maintenance schedule, leaving on Wednesday would've put me 4 days behind where I'd planned to be. I only had two key dates that I needed to worry about by this point. I had a friend coming to Seattle from the UK, so I wanted to ensure some overlap with his schedule. I also had a hard date when I needed to be back at work. I'd built in a buffer so I'd have some time to readjust before jumping back into a 'normal' routine, but this delay was eating into that buffer.

So, I started prioritizing my remaining stops and seeing which ones I'd be willing to sacrifice in order to gain a few days back. I also had to consider what the weather was going to do over the coming week and how far I could realistically fly in a day.

This is where having my planning spreadsheet really helped. I could try a lot of different options and see how each one worked out. Then check if I could realistically pull that off as far as flying times and weather. I'd end up doing this exercise a bunch more times before leaving Brainerd.