Track for the day:
A familiar story by now, I awoke to find billy goat cliff already scrambling up a mountainside. It was about zero nine hundred when I looked out and there was some low cloud hugging the top of the high ground, it didn’t look promising!
A fairly similar story to most mornings weather wise and as such a small while later it was starting to lift.
It actually meant that our lazy mornings were in fact well planned, well that was my excuse anyway ;-).
We made our way down to breakfast and started to discuss the days flying ahead. We had a rough idea about covering county Donegal but no real plan for where else to head or what to look out for.
There are a couple of small strips up on the northern coast of the ROI so we figured that was as good a reason as any to head up there.
Delvinmore looked like a small private strip with a lovely approach coming in over the estuary and as it turns out it was exactly that.
The other small strip was a bit precarious and had vehicles and pedestrians on it so we decide to give it a miss, turns out the Tarmac is actually part of the coast road. Strange idea for a runway!
We started meandering back down from the coast just inside the FIR toward letterkenny for our planned comfort break while we decide where we were going to head.
Upon arrival at letterkenny, which was another stunning arrival across the estuary the airfield appeared to be deserted, not even the caravan/clubhouse was open and therefore no access to make a brew 🙁
We had just started to plan where the next stop was going to be when a car came trundling down the airfield Tarmac. Turns out that is the only access road for vehicles.
Mac, who we’d rung earlier in the day for PPR apologised for not being there to meet us. He showed us how to get into the clubhouse for future reference and proceeded to take us through the history of the airfield.
They have 5 aircraft based there presently, of which a significant number are piper clippers. All of which have been restored by another resident who turned up shortly afterwards.
We took a walk round the hangars and gazed admiringly round the resident aircraft before eyes turned to our own recently restored supercub.
With very similar performance the type of flying available is synonymous with our cub and we talked at length about various places and trips we’d all been on.
After all that it was starting to get a bit late for planning a further trip so we decided to stay at the local hotel, the clanree which, unlike our flying attire was very grand and austere.
We got cracking with the three S’s and soon were walking into town to hole up for the evening.
We discussed at length what we thought the plan would be for the next day but much depended on the weather.
In the end we filed a GAR form and a flight plan over to Bellarena glider site in Northern Ireland and we’d just have to see what the weather delivered.
Chris’s photos:
Steve’s photos:
