It was supposed to be such an easy flight. Oh, there was some weather that was supposed to move in that evening, but I'd called Flight Service five minutes before leaving for the airport, and they'd told me it was clear below 12,000 feet, with 10 miles visibility all along my route. And forecast to stay that way the rest of the afternoon.
So, okay. The Livermore Airport, where the Cheetah is living at the moment, is a 45-minute drive away from my house. And I needed fuel, so it was probably another half hour after that before I was wheels up. And the Salinas Valley, which I was following on my way down to Santa Ynez, is probably another half hour's flight from Livermore. So as much as a couple of hours could have transpired from when I talked to Flight Service and the point when I decided that their forecast must have applied to a parallel universe in some other, more benign, weather dimension.
As I headed south from Salinas, I couldn't help but notice some really dark, nasty-looking gray stuff ahead that looked an awful lot like a ragged ceiling … a whole lot lower than 12,000 feet. To be exact, the clouds were lingering at about half that altitude-or about 500 feet over my canopy. In order for the "clear" part of the forecast to be accurate, you'd have to make a judge's ruling that clear rain, falling on the canopy, still fits under that category. As for the 10 miles … well, heck. Ten … four … What's a few miles between friends?
If I knew this particular set of ridgelines and valleys well, it might not have been a big deal. But I'd never actually flown this route before, and I had to thread my way through a couple of different valleys to make my way down to Santa Ynez at that altitude. I had my GPS dialed in, and I backed up my confidence about my exact location and distance from the ridges surrounding me with a finger plunked firmly down on the sectional spread out across my knees. I peered into the gray skies ahead, wondering if that dark patch lurking around my altitude a few miles down the road was a cloud or ridge, even as a piece of my brain recognized that "Is that a cloud or a ridge?" isn't really a question you want to be asking in your airplane.
ATC called me out as traffic to a Cessna 210 descending through 7,000 feet, only to have the 210 pilot reply in a curt tone of voice that they were in the clouds and couldn't see anything. Another pilot a handful of miles behind me called up right after that asking for weather conditions down the road, because both the visibility and ceiling were deteriorating where he was. Center asked if he wanted to file an instrument flight plan. "I'm VFR only," came the tense reply.
I shook my head as I scanned the clouds for the descending 210 that was supposed to pop out at any time now. Apparently nobody was having a good day out there today.
Nevertheless, an hour and a half later I'd found my way beneath the clouds and through the mist, rain and a couple of valleys down to Santa Ynez, where I parked the airplane and headed for the nearest bar. As I recounted my flight to a friend, he smiled and said, "Well, Lane, that kind of flight builds character, you know."
Among the unhelpful comments of the world, "Well, that kind of thing builds character" rates right up there with "Well, other people have it a lot worse," and the perennial favorite, "I told you so."
"You know," I answered with a slight edge, "I've had a ton of character-building hours in that airplane. I don't think I really need any more."
