Catherine and I wanted to attend the BC Aviation Museum‘s Open house, so we headed up to the airport, and started prepping the plane.

Previously we had discovered a birds nest in the rafters, and sadly we found that it had broken loose and fell on the wing of our plane either last night or today.  The nest was broken apart on the wing, but two chicks were huddled together in it’s remnants.  The other two had found each other beneath the wing and were shivering to keep warm.  The next half hour were spent moving the nest/chicks over to the workshop in the back of our hanger in hopes that they’ll survive the next few weeks as they mature to flying age.

After phoning and getting our VFR code to enter Victoria’s control zone, we topped up the fuel, and took off.  I’m getting much more comfortable with the plane, and we were airborne quickly enough, and climbing up to the required 2000′ for the Victoria arrival.  Tower radar identified us over Somenos lake, and gave us the expected Cowichan bay arrival.  After switching frequencies, we reported over the Bay, got the “descend at your discretion, report Deep Cove” that we wanted.  (this meant that there wasn’t anyone in front of us to hold us up, and we could make our best speed down to circuit height (1100′) by the base leg).  I put on the carb heat, enrichened the mixture, and brought the throttle back a couple hundred RPM and started down.

I had the descend pegged, we arrived at Deep Cove right as we hit 1100’, turned base, and got sequenced in ahead of the 172 on right base 🙂  I (of course) asked for a long landing, got it, and set up for the last half of the available runway.  The landing was nice and smooth, and we pulled off by the tower.  Over to ground and a quick taxi to the Museum’s corner of the airport.

The volunteer marshals brought us in on the grass taxiway, and let us park in the next spot available on the display line, which was cool.  We shut down, and hand parked the plane in it’s spot, removed the cameras, and put the information placard on the propeller.  Before we had all this done, there were already folks nosing around asking questions, shaking hands etc.  This is the cool part about the flying community, some of these folks were pilots, others just folks curious about airplanes.

The open house was great, I will never tire of walking through hangars full of airplanes.  We spent a few hours there milling around.  We bumped into folks we knew, talked to new people, discussing planes, flying clubs, etc.  It was neat when the guy who was discussing the airplanes over the loud speaker, actually had added us to the lineup!  Hearing him discuss our plane from the info on the propeller placard and seeing folks looking over at our plane while he did it was pretty cool.