Newsletter of WaterWings Seaplane School

Our newsletter is back! After a hiatus during a really busy year, we're starting up this publication again. We've heard from many of you that you missed it, and we're happy to be putting our editor and writer hats back on. You'll notice we've simplified the newsletter format so more of you will have fewer problems receiving and reading it. You'll also be seeing Charles' blog on the website soon!

Mission Statement
Our mission is to offer the seaplane student the best training environment and tools possible while providing fun and adventure. We want our students to leave with plenty of stories to tell their friends, new skills, better understanding of our flying environment, and a yearning for more. Students will be treated with respect. They will never be rushed, or yelled at. Safety will NOT be compromised.

On The Step by Charles Welden, CFI

Alone on the River
A seaplane is a wonderful toy. It is easily among the fastest of the boats on my lake, cruising at 100 mph while only sipping 8 gallons an hour of fuel. It makes a small wake, and only does that for a few seconds at the beginning and end of a flight. I can cruise my entire lake in a few minutes. Just when I get comfortable with this great piece of machinery, it reminds me that it that we have to respect it and the environments that it can take us to inthose few minutes.

Lake Martin in southeastern Alabama is a good sized lake in a chain of lakes that comes from Georgia and leads to Florida. There are 5 lakes in this chain that I can reach within 30 minutes in my little airplane. Just below Lake Martin Dam is Yates Lake. This is a 10 mile long section of the Tallapoosa river that is very lightly populated. It has high terrain on both sides and it is about 1,500 feet wide at most points. The water in this lake comes from the bottom of Lake Martin, making it 10-15 degrees colder than the water on the surface. There are only 3 or 4 houses on the lake, very little boat traffic, and no access to the other lakes by boat.

This makes it a perfect spot for training on busy spring and summer weekends. Sometimes it's the only place that I can find glassy water to train on. It even has a current sometimes, so that I can teach students how to deal with rivers. One of my favorite things to do is to land on this little stretch of paradise, shut the engine down, and just listen to all the sounds of nature coming from the surrounding woods. There are even times when it is nice to dip my feet in the cool waters while resting on one of the pontoons.

One fine spring day last year, I was training a new seaplane student. I did my usual intro to the seaplane, pre-flight, taxiing, cruising around, etc. It came time to introduce my student to river flying and Yates lake. We did several different types of landings and then I decided to enjoy the quiet and solitude of the river. We landed and shut down the engine. I stepped out onto the pontoon and we floated for a bit. Then I got back into the plane and asked him to get us moving. At that moment my luck began to run out.

The combination of a hot engine, a little too vigorous action on the throttle by my student, and a suddenly weak battery all culminated in a dead engine and a dead battery. The silence was really deafening now. I found a screw driver and proceeded to unscrew the back seat of the airplane and then the panel that covers the tail section. The battery is located deep in the tail cone, and my thought was to get back there and clean the contacts of the battery. That had to be the problem since the battery was only a few months old and the alternator was less than a year old.

We had been flying for an hour, so it must be the contacts- I thought. I was thoroughly sweaty at this point and made an excellent conductor as I crawled to the very back of the plane to remove the stainless steel cover of the battery box. I cleaned the contacts with a piece of sandpaper that I keep in the glove box. Still no go. I tried to hand prop the plane a couple of times to no avail.

Finally wishing that I had a ground service port, or a set of really long jumper cables, or an access panel to easily reach my battery, I decided to search for a boater. After about thirty minutes, I was able to flag down a passing fisherman. He offered to take my battery to a buddy's house down the river and charge it. I thanked him and handed him the dead soldier. He said he would be back in half an hour to an hour.

Now it was really quiet. Neither I or my student had brought a cell phone. It probably would not have helped anyway. We were in a canyon. The radio was now dead because the battery was with a fisherman down the river. At least the weather was nice, it was mid-day, and the conversation was good with my student. Winds were light. The banks of the river were nearly vertical and a walk out would be ugly as we were miles away from the nearest road. Mooring the plane would be difficult it we had to leave it.

My student and I spent the next hour exchanging all of our aviation stories. That's when we heard the first rumblings of thunder. Ten minutes later the storm hit. We did not really get hit hard. The walls of the canyon protected us from the worst winds. Still it was a challenge to keep the tail of the plane from smashing into hillside behind us, with both of us paddling. I think we got off lucky here.

For the next two hours we waited for the battery to return. There was not much else for us to do, our life stories having been told. Finally after three hours our savior returned with the battery that had gotten a nice trickle charge, as that was all the fisherman could locate. We were very appreciative. I installed the battery and said a couple of short but very sincere prayers. The plane started and we continued our lesson for another hour.

I now have a much greater respect for my little plane and the environments that it can take me to. And I always carry a cell phone now, for what it's worth. Ten minutes in a seaplane can take you 15 to 20 miles from civilization. In this case we were just 3 miles from a very busy lake, but it was inaccessible from where we were.

The next week I ordered and installed a new battery. The good folks at Gill Batteries in conjunction with the good folks at Aircraft Spruce and Specialties replaced the battery at no charge.

News & Notes
We said a fond goodbye to Mike Volk when he stepped down as president of the Seaplane Pilots Association last year. In fact, our last newsletter featured his visit to our place on Lake Martin. Best of luck, Mike!