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Christmas Eve on Skis:
With Dick Smith's and my dad, Gene's help, I finally got 179 on skis last week. The weather wouldn't cooperate until Sunday, but it left us with several inches of nice fluffy powder.
It was my first real experience on skis, the others times really don't count. I learned a lot. First of all, I got stuck right off the bat. Dick warned me about the skis wanting to stick at first, but I don't think I took his advice seriously enough. I ended up spending about 20 minutes with the shovel clearing out enough ice in front of the plane to clean the bottoms and get some speed before getting into the deeper powder. Once they were clean, it slid fine the rest of the day.
Next I learned about flat light. My very first landing I set it up like a glassy water landing on floats and waited for my skis to touch. I could have sworn I felt my right ski touch, so I rolled the yoke to the right, and it felt like it was pivoting off the ski, but I still wasn't sure! I got scared and went around. I didn't see the track until about an hour later when the clouds cleared and the sun shone down on the lake. Sure enough, there was a lone ski track.
Then I went to another lake that had a lot of sunshine on it. This made it a lot easier to judge. I drug the lake, looked at my tracks on the next pass, then made about a half dozen more practice landings. I spent another half hour or so checking out several different lakes and occasionally making a flat light/glassy water landing. What a difference having a set of tracks from the previous landing makes on judging the next one.
What fun I had though! I found a bunch of beaver houses and plan on setting some traps in the next couple weeks. Haven't run a little trapline since I was in highschool and I miss it.
In other news, I proposed to my beatiful girlfriend, Molly, on Saturday while we were out snowshoeing...she said YES!! WooHoo!!
-Chris
With Dick Smith's and my dad, Gene's help, I finally got 179 on skis last week. The weather wouldn't cooperate until Sunday, but it left us with several inches of nice fluffy powder.
It was my first real experience on skis, the others times really don't count. I learned a lot. First of all, I got stuck right off the bat. Dick warned me about the skis wanting to stick at first, but I don't think I took his advice seriously enough. I ended up spending about 20 minutes with the shovel clearing out enough ice in front of the plane to clean the bottoms and get some speed before getting into the deeper powder. Once they were clean, it slid fine the rest of the day.
Next I learned about flat light. My very first landing I set it up like a glassy water landing on floats and waited for my skis to touch. I could have sworn I felt my right ski touch, so I rolled the yoke to the right, and it felt like it was pivoting off the ski, but I still wasn't sure! I got scared and went around. I didn't see the track until about an hour later when the clouds cleared and the sun shone down on the lake. Sure enough, there was a lone ski track.
Then I went to another lake that had a lot of sunshine on it. This made it a lot easier to judge. I drug the lake, looked at my tracks on the next pass, then made about a half dozen more practice landings. I spent another half hour or so checking out several different lakes and occasionally making a flat light/glassy water landing. What a difference having a set of tracks from the previous landing makes on judging the next one.
What fun I had though! I found a bunch of beaver houses and plan on setting some traps in the next couple weeks. Haven't run a little trapline since I was in highschool and I miss it.
In other news, I proposed to my beatiful girlfriend, Molly, on Saturday while we were out snowshoeing...she said YES!! WooHoo!!
-Chris
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