I went out to the airfield this morning for a coffee and to talk flying and found that we must have had a lot of rain overnight because the stream was pretty high and very muddy. The water was flowing back up the drains onto the field but the runway was useable.
Various aircraft preparing to aviate while Craig and Rob prepare to deal with some willows from the stream.
Bruce Lynch's Tiger Moth ZK-ASM flew off to North Shore where they had a gathering.
Then Neil Wright said he was going to fly up to Maungaturoto in his Fantasy Air Allegro 2000 ZK-DCU to have a look at a property he was interested in that had an old topdressing strip on it. He asked if anyone wanted to come and I thought it would be rude not to! So a quick rearrangement by pulling Honey Bebe out of the hangar and driving my car in to the shade for the dog, with a bowl of water.
Then we were off! Jim was preparing to fly the Aviat Husky up to Dargaville for lunch.
For the second week in a row I was amazed to see how convoluted the route of the Whangarei to Auckland railway was in this area. That is a bridge across an arm of the Kaipara Harbour down there, about 2 miles South of Maungaturoto.
The Allegro flies very well and you can see its glider like wingspan in this photo. It is pretty slippery and Neil told me it uses 10 litres per hour in the cruise with its 100 HP Rotax. That's pretty impressive.
Then we popped over to the Brynderwins to see the slips that have caused so much havoc to SH 1 traffic over the last few weeks. This is the major slip that has reduced the road to one way North (you can click to enlarge once or twice).
Looking down on what was the old tearooms at the top of the Brynderwins. You can see the road at the bottom of the hill at the top left with the Atlas Quarry off to the left. It is amazing how far up the quarry goes and you might well wonder if the quarry could be the basis of a complete bypass of the current winding road up the hill.
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