A new way to fly
With flying on commercial airliners becoming somewhat mundane, I was excited to learn that there was the possibility of me flying over to Victoria on one of the Harbour Air seaplanes. The opportunity was looking kind of uncertain due to the fog each morning which was delaying and cancelling flights. On Thursday afternoon I talked with my boss, and he said to check the flights for first thing Friday and let him know if Harbour Air was likely to fly in the morning. I called Harbour Air, and their flights were all booked until 2pm, and as a result I was forced to take the other option, Heli-Jet. Now this trip seemed even more exciting since I had never been on a helicopter before. The flight took off at 7:30pm Thursday night from downtown Vancouver. The take off was definitely the best part of the trip. The pilot started the engines and the rotor began spinning, the whine steadily increased, and then we slowly lifted up off the ground. We progressed vertically for a short while as I watched the water and landing pad grow smaller below. The helicopter banked forward and we were off across the harbour, past Stanley park, over the Lion's Gate Bridge, then took a turn towards the south as we followed the coast past UBC, Richmond and Tsawassen before heading across the Georgia Strait towards Victoria. It was neat flying at such a low altitude that you could see the cars below, the dark and bright patterns on the road due to the spacing of the street lights, and the gas stations were the most interesting structures because of the red or blue square with white light spilling out around the edges. Thirty-five (35) minutes later we arrived at Victoria harbour, and the landing was not nearly as cool as the take off since we took a more gradual descent.I took a cab from the landing pad to the Victoria inner harbour where I met my boss on the boat. After a relaxing meeting, I barbecued a couple steaks for us for second dinner before heading to my cabin to sleep. The morning brought a nice sunrise over the harbour as we ate a filling breakfast of eggs, english bangers and toast my boss had prepared. I did some pre-trip checks, namely checking the oil and coolant levels of the two diesel engines, and calculating whether we had enough fuel to make it back to Vancouver. We didn't have enough fuel so we stopped on the way out of the harbour to fill up. The cost of filling up two 1500L tanks is a large deterrent of me ever owning a yacht. The drive back to Coal harbour was uneventful as we did some tests of our camera navigation system and took some video footage through Active Pass. The entire trip, including fueling up before and after the voyage, and a reduction in speed to enjoy some lobster bisque for lunch, took approximately 5.5 hours.
posted by Aaron @ 6:27 PM
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