Diary
 

March, 10th



Jerramungup

ChatOn the road again. In order to decrease the fuel-consumption we lowered the carburettor-needle in Giselas Trike. When I took a glimpse at the float chamber I almost felt sick: There was a big waterlense in both chambers. We are lucky that the engine hasn't acted up yet. Due to all the mechanical adjustments we started very late. The very friendly BP-gas attendant not only organized the weather-report for us from Albany-Met office but he also gave us the name of a Farmer near Wilstedt, whose house is exactly on our route and he does have a runway and gas for us. We called him up for directions and coordinates and left Albany. We had no problems finding the farm - an hour after take-off we landed behind his barn. The farmer kept a Cessna 150 in his barn and a fast fourseater for his longer trips. His Wife, the daughter and two grandchildren formed our welcome-comittee. We filled our tanks, made the two boys happy with our stickers and went on towards Bremer Bay. On our right a gorgeous coastline which we couldn't approach as it had only low forests and no place to land. Now and then the white sand blinked through and the water had an incredible shade of blue. Strong headwinds played games with us. Our ground speed sank to below 80 kilometers per hour.

Bremer Bay looks more like a little resort than a "real place". Next to the few buildings there is a broad river mouth - that of course is the Bremer River. I flew a few circles to take some pictures, then we returned to the airfield. Two criss-crossed runways on top of a small hill. Very sandy and lots of pebbles. When landing we realized that this is a very windy corner. It takes us some effort to park the trikes without them getting blown away. When checking our AOPA Flightplaner earlier on we had come across a phone number for gas and we had informed them, that we would need a gas-refill around one o'clock pm.

TankWe couldn't believe our eyes when suddenly a real huge fuel truck rolled towards us on the sandy dirtroad. The driver was quite surprised himself. He had expected a 'real plane' and not two small customers like us.... His name was Omo (really!) and he asked for 35 Dollars for the 44 liters we needed - and it took me some convincing until he kept the change!!!

Due to the strong gusts of wind we had to change our plans and declared Jerramungup our new destination for the day. HarryOmo advised us to contact Harry, the engineer, once we were there. But that wasn't for quite a while. We didn't dare to take off because the winds were over 20 knots, we didn't even try to roll our trikes back onto the runway. We couldn't afford another bent hangpoint now. We had to wait for more than three hours for the winds to finally calm down a bit. Less than an hour before sunset we took the courage and took off again. This time we were at 130 kilometres over ground. We reached Jerramungup in less than 30 minutes. An almost 2 kilometres long runway - fortunately it was directly into the wind. As soon as we had landed, a nice guy approached us, he had watched our arrival. JaneAnd he asked us the same questions anyone asked, who sees trikes like ours for the first time. Then he offered to drive us to the next hotel in town. But we didn't get that far. That's because we met Harry, who lives right next to the airfield and runs a workshop for farming equipment. He invited us to spend the night at his place. We gratefully accepted. Harry used to be a sheep-shearer in a former life and his wife Jane is a woolclasser. We learned a lot about how to breed sheep, how they are sheared and about life in the countryside before we crawled into our guestbeds quite exhausted.


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