Sierra Del Barón Rojo

Well I had my wings clipped on Saturday, and had to drive up to Campbelltown to a 50th birthday party, to return later that night; we got to sleep at 01:30.

I had itchy feet and had to fly on Sunday, it's one of those pilot's things, it just isn't right not being able to fly.

The trip tracks can be found at YSCB-YMRY and
airports for GoogleEarth GoogleEarth.

The weather was predicted as SCT / FEW clouds at 6500', lowering to 6000' ft on the coast, but broken at Merimbula and SCT at Moruya, or so they said. I decided I was going to fly to Merimbula and take the fold-up push-bikes so we could ride into town, and I made contact with a passenger, and said that the weather forecast is a little marginal but let's try and get to Merimbula.

Well the weather was not as predicted, and there were bits of scud dangling down under the clouds, so we turned East and crossed the escarpment so we could decend in a valley to fly to the coast. We also decided to discontinue Merimbula as a target and headed back up to Moruya, which was our return leg. We flew through many patches of rain with varying droplet sizes. The best thing is watching the water run up the windscreen and out over the side windows - we have no wipers. The worst rain is when the droplet size is so small that it doesn't coallesce and just sits on the windscreen until sufficient gathers for it to form bigger droplets. Sometimes the small droplets are ice and then they just stick there, but we had no icing on this trip.

We intercepted the return track and were flying in sunlight and we could see that the way down to Merimbula along the coast was clear. So having flown over to our return-track we were now an hour ahead of where we planned, and thus we flew back North and landed at Moruya and visited the Aero Club and had lunch.

While we were there the weather lifted so the wait was a positive thing in this case, and it is always good to be where the weather is better.

Turning to join cross wind just past the windsock near the intersection of R23/R36 - which is now behind us. Yes we fly over the ocean.

Final to R18 Moruya - there is some turbulence throwing UMS around.

UMS was parked on the grass outside the club house and some grass parrots decided to feed closeby. My zoom was at its limit, and I couldn't get close enough to them to get good shots, but they looked pretty contrasted against the Orange paint scheme on UMS, so I had to take a shot.

Grass Parots near VH-UMS

It took 1h 8m to meander around cloud and change track back to Moruya and only 38 minutes to return from Moruya to Canberra, including nearly a 250 degree turn to join track and a cruise climb to 6500'. We were 47 nm from Canberra at top-of-climb and very quickly had to call into for airway's clearance. During the decent phase we saw ground speeds of 168 Kts. UMS is a slippery aircraft in a power decent, while I am trying to keep the engine warm. Such speeds cause problems for me because the controllers do not expect my plane to go so fast. I still haven't educated some of them who keep calling it a Beechcraft Sundowner. The standard cruise speed is 131 Kts, which is considerably faster than a Sundowner and a Cessna 172 for that matter.