It’s an old theme with me, this daylight / darkness / latitude. Bashing away at people’s preconceived notions, jousting at windmills. I do enjoy it.
Our annual “long day” began on May 25th. It’s 1320 hours, May 25 to July 18. No darkness.
On the morning of the 26th, I woke about quarter to five and stepped onto the deck to have a look at the wind pennant. We still had an airplane out on the ice. Two of them, in fact. Their landing gear is fat tires now; the hefty steel skis were swapped a few days ago for cushy rubber — a welcome change after a winter of bashing through wind-packed snowdrifts on takeoffs and landings.
The ice beneath those two parked planes is still solid and thick, more robust than we have had in the last days of May for the past six years. Pickup-truck thick out away from shore, maybe school-bus thick. But with one plane working far to the north every day, and soon to re-locate to a camp on the tundra, the other one needed moving from the ice onto terra firma.
The quirk of our convenient shoulder-season sand-patch landing area (we try to keep from calling it a runway, lest anyone get too grandiose a vision of it) is that it is a classic “one-way in / opposite-way out.” Landings are made uphill, northeast (060 True), and takeoffs are always downhill, toward the southwest, bearing 240. Downwind landings and takeoffs are not, er, prudent. I have never attempted any. Well, okay, there was a puff of a breeze behind me, landing uphill a few years back in the Husky, but the short strip was entirely behind me as the plane finally stopped rolling. A good reminder not to mess with the laws of physics, even in a lightly loaded Husky. Gravity, inertia and Mr. Bernoulli are to be respected and obeyed.
Anyway, at 5 a.m. the other day, with a forecast for a windshift later on, the wind was perfect. East-northeast, 8 knots, on the digital weather box by the window. It was time. “He who hesitates is lost,” and yadda yadda. I poked my head into the bedroom and told Kristen “I’m gonna go move the Bush Hawk. The wind is perfect.”
By six a.m., with another trademark inelegant spot landing completed, I was sauntering home down the trail, bear-spray canister in one hand and mug of coffee in the other. Breathing easier, as I do every year, to have one chunk of expensive machinery off the ice and up “on the hard,” as the boaters would say. I was relishing the two profound luxuries of the morning — the warmth that had precluded any need to mess with pre-heating the plane; and the never-ending daylight.
Our 1,320 hours are ticking past. The sun still sets every night and rises every morning, but while it is down it never dips to the magic six degrees below the horizon that makes for “legal darkness.” And — AND — this glorious 55-day bath of sunlight is NOT offset in winter by a 55-day period of darkness. Because, well, I won’t go into it again. Skeptics can read my post of September 2024, or even the eyeball-glazing original version from November 2018.
Being an insufferable pedant, I want to trot it all out again here — the magic of Civil Twilight, the slanderous mis-characterizations of winter at 63 degrees N as grueling pitch-black payback time. Suffice it to say that the lights have come up. Yee-haw! When, many sunlit weeks from now, at midnight in late July, I glimpse those first night-time stars again, I’ll be happy to re-make their acquaintance.
"bushedpilotblog" Dave Olesen 