DAY 3
Tuesday, August 30th
So Tyler had to work this morning (he's a firefighter / paramedic and stays pretty busy), so Kam and I got up at the hotel, showered, and had a peaceful, 2 mile walk to the airport.
After fueling up, I was paying my bill and while talking to the guys at the FBO we told them about our alternator issue and that the voltage level was still acting funny. They told us about the on-site mechanic who was a Mooney wiz, so we thought maybe we'd go introduce ourselves and pick his brain about our voltage issue. We walked over, said hi, let him know about the issue and he was interested in taking a look at it.
After about an hour of diagnosing, he concluded that the voltage regulator was bad but he didn't have one on hand or the time to swap it out. But he then told us it was fine to fly, but we just need to keep an eye on it and manually reset the breaker as needed (this would end up being a nuisance for Kam but she took on the challenge from this point on and made it work the entire trip) .
He didn't think it was dangerous or that I was at risk
for something going haywire and creating a safety issue.
He just said that I should have my mechanic look at it
once I'm back in KC.
So then we left to make our way to Shelter Cove,
California. The plan was to land here and have lunch by the ocean...
So that didn't happen. A low and thick cloud layer had the shoreline socked in and with no IFR approaches available into Shelter Cove, we diverted to Ukiah, California where the weather was better and there was fuel available.
Ukiah, California was amazing. Aside from the fact that the building with a sign that said "bathrooms, cold drinks..." wasn't actually the FBO building, and the lady inside was confused about why I was looking for a bathroom, we were happy to have diverted and were blown away at how gorgeous it was to fly into this airport.
While descending in a pattern around the airport, we saw this gorgeous mountain lake just to the east of town.
We stopped for a bit, fueled up, and talked to a
firefigher pilot who was there and he showed us their setup.
Their setup was pretty legit. Ironically, this plane
has very similar avionics setup to mine (Garmin530, KX155 NAV2 radio,
Bendix-King HSI, and a G5 for an attitude indicator).
We got off the ground there and headed directly to
Monterey, doing a flyby of the Golden Gate Bridge and downtown San
Francisco along the way.
We did a loop over the bay before heading back South.
We arrived at the Monterey Airport (KMRY) at 4:40, picked up a car, and checked into our hotel room.
Then we got to do some exploring on Highway 1 along the coast:
Watching the sun set behind Point Sur while driving down the Pacific Coast Highway was the perfect ending to this day.
DAY 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9