Day 1 - Spruce Creek to Marathon FL - Sunday 10 July 2005

Today, Sunday 10 July will be famous for the day that Hurricane Dennis came ashore on the Florida Panhandle - a repeat of Hurricane Ivan.

I was, however, scheduled to visit Marathon in the Flordia Keys today but Dennis put paid to this!

Evacuations from Marathon and the surrounding area were mandatory so it was certainly inappropriate to think about flying down there, even if the weather had cooperated.

The weather at Spruce Creek (7FL6) was flyable and whilst nearby Daytona Beach (KDAB) was showing clear sky at 7.53 EDT with light winds, this was certainly not the case at Spruce Creek.

Marathon had gusty winds all day, and even though the sky was clear at times the visability was down to 3 miles.

In retrospect it would have been possible to fly down to Marathon, but it would not have been fair on EAA members down there who were recovering from the effects of Dennis.

So the visit to Marathon will be postponed until a later date, and Marathon will become the final port of call on the 'Four Corners' Flight Around America rather than the first.

Having made the decsion not to visit Marathon this weekend it allowed more time to work on 'GOOFY' and fix download problems for updating the database on my Blue Mountain G3 Lite EFIS. If only BMA had used an SD Card for updates instead of FTP then life would be much easier!

The plan now is to start the western part of the flight on Thursday, 14 July with a long flight from Spruce Creek, FL (7FL6) to Lubbock, TX (KLBB) - see 'Day 2' flight log.