Providenciales, Turks and Caicos Is.

When we arrived at Providenciales and made our way to the motel we found most of the group setting next to the pool. There were only two people we could recognize at this point, Jim Graham and Sally Plympton from Vancouver and Portland. They introduced us to the new gang and we had enough time to take our backpacks to the room, take a shower and get back to the flight briefing for the next day's flight. At the flight briefing is where I started learning more about international flying and position reporting requirements. Our trip leader had copies of his flight plan we could look over and we asked questions and planned our next flight. When you are flying between countries you have to estimate your time to the boundary after take off. Then when you are in the air and talking with the area flight service, they will want ETA's to various reporting points, most of which show up on IFR charts. It was a system we weren't used to but with a little practice got good at it. While I was piloting, Diana was navigating and using the second GPS on board to pull up ETA's as requested.

That night we had a great dinner at a French restaurant in a setting of imported palm trees, eating imported food prepared by an imported chef. It was a big relief just to have made it and we were finally starting to wind down from the previous five days.

The next day we were up early and packed up for the day's flights. After clearing customs we took our flight plans to the tower and handed them to the ATC guy at the console. They logged us in and we were ready to go. One poor fellow in a C-210 had just discovered he left his master switch on for the last three days and wasn't going anywhere for a while. The four people in that plane caught up with us a day later.

We headed out for our fuel stop at Isle Grande, Puerto Rico. Even though we were grouped into three flights of similar speed it was every plane for themselves. I first suspected this when the trip leader said several times during the briefing-"you are the pilot in command of your own airplane". He was showing us the way but we were doing our own work to get there. We had a pre planned inter plane frequency of 130.55 to talk to each other. This is where having two radios would have been really nice. I have one comm and a handheld for backup. One of the things I didn't get done before we left was set up the handheld on airplane power and wire it into the intercom. I'll have that fixed for the next trip.

Landing at Isle Grande we cleared US customs, got fuel for the planes and us and headed for the British Virgin Islands. On the way out I got a little mixed up with ATC and changing frequencies. I started out with flight following to get through San Juan's airspace, switched over to San Juan Radio to activate my flight plan and they told me to remain on that frequency. A few minutes later Jim hollered at me that San Juan approach was trying to raise me. I switched back and discovered I was being a fly in their soup. We got it straightened out where everybody was and where they wanted to go, and I proceeded to leave their airspace. Once again having two active radios would have helped although I should have told San Juan Radio that I was under flight following and could not remain on his frequency.

The weather was showing up around the islands so it was back down underneath as we got closer to Beef Island, BVI. As luck would have it I approached the island from a direction that I couldn't see the runway due to most of the island blocking the view. Once again the ATC earned their keep juggling some of our group, an American Eagle ATR 42 and me.

This really is fun flying in the Caribbean once you get the hang of it. The clouds over the water don't go lower than 500 feet and usually are at least 1000. You can fly around the showers and if you are looking for land you will usually find it under the clouds. If your destination is weathered in you can spend a few minutes out over the water until it blows over then go in and land. This is what the seasoned Caribbean pilots keep telling me and for the duration of the trip they were right. I'm sure this doesn't apply during hurricane season but that would not be an issue considering the planes we are flying.

The layout of the runways in the Caribbean is something to get used to. Here in the states and on most any large land mass the runways are oriented with respect to the prevailing winds. It's easier to land that way. In the Caribbean, runways are oriented with the prevailing real estate. In most places we ran across this made for some outstanding cross wind landings. I was ready to go around on at least half of the landings we made until at the last 10 feet the cross wind dropped off enough that I could set the plane down. This made for some real concentration on every landing.

Well, the Beef Island tower was glad to see me shut down and get out of their hair. When I spotted the runway I had just flown over a ridge and was right on top of it. We landed and joined up with the rest of the single-engines for the ferry ride to Virgin Gorda where we stayed four nights. The twins got to land at Virgin Gorda because of an amazing piece of local legislation that outlaws single engine planes on the airport there. This is a 3200 foot gravel runway and the tale makes for a whole 'nuther story by itself.

Virgin Gorda

We settled into our bungalows at the Fishers Cove resort on Virgin Gorda. Diana and I were finally going to get to relax for a few days. We had been flying hard every day for seven days. One of the things I was concerned about before the trip was being grounded in between island hops. I did not want to be setting on some beech twiddling my thumbs wanting to get in the air so I could "see" the sights. What happened next would only add to this seeming mystique of running around the world in an experimental airplane meeting friends you had not yet met.

When we started planning this adventure we thought it would be fun to have a web page that followed us during our travels. What with running around the Caribbean in a single engine airplane and all it would be a fun way to keep all of our friends and relatives appraised that we were still alive and hadn't been feeding the sharks. In the weeks leading up to the trip we were tackling issues that were threatening to scuttle our plans so we didn't tell many people about it. The night before Thanksgiving I sent a note to all of our email friends and to Doug Reeves of the Vans Air Force World Wide Wing web site. Telling them we were off (most of them think we were a bit off) and here was the web address that you could follow our exploits.

Thanks to Doug putting us in the headline spot on his web site, Jay Prat a builder in Texas emailed his buddy in Virgin Gorda that he should catch up with us and say hi. Murray, a former Texan himself, called us at the resort Friday morning extending a warm greeting. Before the weekend was over we had been told of the good places to eat, treated to a sushi dinner by his lovely wife Brit and friends that was out of this world, and gone on a formation-flying picture taking tour of the BVIs that I wouldn't have dreamed of. This was not on the trip roster and we give a nod to the RV community for making the connections possible. We certainly have a place to stay for traveling RVers after the hospitality we were shown by complete strangers-now friends.

  Looking at a Seneca III running on autopilot while Murray and Diana are shooting film. Mario was in the back seat of the RV handling all the radio communication with the local ATC. The four of us took off from Virgin Gorda in Murray's Seneca, landed at Beef Island and Mario and me hoped in the RV. We headed out along the BVIs, landed at Anegada and Murray got in for his RV ride. As if flying in the Caribbean wasn't enough, this was really a treat.
 
 

Murray has been in the British Virgin Islands for over 20 years and Mario and his wife have been there for a while too. Mario runs around the islands in a C-182 and has the only private permission to land on Saba a 1300-foot strip on another island. These guys had some good stories about flying in the Caribbean. It would be a tough life.

Yeah, we did some of the regular tourist stuff. There's this place called The Baths, a bunch of giant rocks on the beech and good snorkeling. What was really interesting was noticing the change in geology as you went from island to island. Florida is a giant sand bar, the Bahamas and T&C's are all mostly flat and coral and sand based. As you get past Puerto Rico it changes to more folded crust and volcanoes. I guess that's one of the things I like about flying so much.

We launched out of Beef Island on Monday morning. This time Jim and I had decided to try some formation traveling. We had each filed a flight plan but headed for Guadeloupe as a flight of two. We even traded duties talking to ATC as we made our way along. It worked well and effectively cut the radio traffic for the two planes in half.
 

We landed in Guadeloupe for fuel and found it very French. The line guy didn't know a lick of English so Diana stepped up and using her 20-year-old French took care of business. This was one of our fastest turn arounds for fuel as we kinda forgot to do the customs thing. When we landed Jim told the tower that we needed fuel so they guided us to the other side of the runway. We got gas and got rolling again and when we got to Grenada we compared notes with the other pilots. Found out that everyone else that stopped in Guadeloupe went to the terminal side of the runway and had a long drawn out process to deal with customs and filing flight plans. Jim and I had filed flight plans for both legs and they actually had them in the system when we left Guadeloupe. We were still almost the last to arrive at Point Salinas airport on Granada. The C-195 came in right behind us. Flying formation with a C-182 had me running about 2000 rpm, but, we got some good pictures.

There was this five-mast ship we flew over on the way to Grenada. We later found out was a Club Med boat. It ended up in St. George's harbor while we were there.

We spent our tourist day walking the streets and sampling the food. It was here that we watched the crab races after dinner. A show put on by the resort restaurant complete with wagers.

Next stop, back to a continent-Venezuela!