Island hopping

One very positive aspect of being a pilot in the Puget Sound region is the existence of the San Juan Islands, as well as the other islands and coastal areas that make up the region. There are many airports, large and small, scattered throughout the islands and they make for fantastic flying opportunities. Today, I took advantage of that and made a flight out to Friday Harbor. The town of Friday Harbor is a picturesque community on San Juan Island, after which the archipelago is named. Friday Harbor Airport is a small, one runway airport located on the south side of the town.

I flew out there for a few reasons.

• I'm hoping to take my wife out there, hopefully later this year, and stay a few nights. We took the ferry to Friday Harbor a few years ago and had a nice time. Flying there would, I think, make for a wonderful vacation. I wanted to scout out the route, so to speak, and see what the airport was like.
• I wanted to practice talking with ATC and using flight following.
• I wanted to fly out the islands as I haven't done so since becoming current again.

It was a lovely flight. My route headed north and then west, essentially skirting the Whidbey NAS class C airspace. I had originally planned to fly at 4500 ft. on the trip out. However, there were scattered clouds at 4500 ft. so I climbed to 6500 ft. On the way back I flew at 5500 ft. The view was superb. White puffy clouds and a clear blue sky above them. Much of the areas of the islands is forested with evergreens so there was a lot of green to contrast with the blue of the water. When the weather is nice like it was today, there are few places on this planet more beautiful.

The flight out went without incident. As I was approaching my cruising altitude, I contacted Whidbey approach and requested flight following. I was given a squawk code, and I acknowledged radar contact. After that I just monitored the frequency until I was about ten miles from Friday Harbor. At that point I contacted Whidbey and requested termination of flight following, then squawked VFR and tuned in the Friday Harbor CTAF. Actually, the CTAF frequency is for all of the San Juan Islands, which makes sense since there are several airports relatively close to each other.

I made my descent to the airport, then entered the pattern for runway 34. At Friday Harbor, the pattern is right traffic regardless of which runway is in use. I made a decent landing, exited the runway, then taxied back to the end of the runway to take off again. When taking off from runway 34, there is a noise abatement procedure where you fly runway heading until you reach 1100 ft. MSL, or have flown beyond the north edge of town, and then you can make a turn. I did so, then turned east for the flight back.

As with the outbound leg of the flight, I called Whidbey approach to get flight following. However, I didn't receive a response. I fiddled with the configuration of my comms, then called again. As before, there was no response. I could hear transmissions from Whidbey and other aircraft just fine. I decided that, for the time being at least, I would continue to monitor the approach frequency and continued my flight back to Harvey Field.

As I came within visual range of Harvey Field, I switch to the CTAF frequency and asked for a radio check. I got an immediate affirmative response. I descended, entered the pattern, and made another serviceable landing. Given that the wind had picked up and it was a bit gusty, I'll take it. Since my radio and comms system appeared to be working fine, I don't know why I never received a response from Whidbey approach.

As those of you who have read my earlier entries may recall, I'd been having an issue with my communication system. The primary issue was that I couldn't hear the radios over my headset, even though I could hear them over the cabin speaker. I recently did a couple of things that seem to have alleviated that problem and it's worked fine the past several flights. I turned up the volume on the radio itself in case it is some sort of squelch issue. Also, based on a suggestion I received from the shop manager at Harvey, I turned off the cabin speaker. The hypothesis behind this is that driving the speaker and the headphones is a bit too much for the amplifier in the audio panel and it was cutting off the headphones.

However, the first time I encountered any problem, it was that it appeared I wasn't transmitting voice. I was clearly transmitting carrier, as I could trigger Harvey's automated weather system by keying the mike four times, but it seemed my voice wasn't transmitting. That only happened once, at least as far as I know. I'm wondering if it happened again today. It's also possible that they were just busy, though traffic in the area was relatively light and they were responding to other VFR aircraft.

One other possibility that occurred to me is that it has to do with the position of my antenna. My plane has three antennae on the upper side of the fuselage. One is the ELT, and I'm assuming that the other two are for the two radios. I say "assuming" because I actually don't know (at least not yet) how the radios are wired into the antennae. As I understand, it's always the case that each radio has its own antenna. These two antennae on my plane are of different designs. One is located above the cabin, about where the rear seats are, and it is a solid metal rod that starts out vertical, then curves 90 degrees to point backward. The other antenna is located much further back, close to the tail, and is a more traditional straight antenna that is angled back. It is actually located to the rear of where the vertical stabilizer merges into the fuselage and is to the left of centerline. I don't know which antenna is connected to which radio. What I'm thinking might be the case (though I couldn't say how likely it is) is that the rearmost antenna is connected to comm1, and it is partially obscured by the vertical stabilizer on its right side. On the flight out, Whidbey NAS was to my left, on the flight back it was to the right. I'm wondering if my transmission was being attenuated by the vertical stabilizer enough so Whidbey couldn't read me. Of course, if comm1 is connected to the forward antenna, this wouldn't be the issue. I need to investigate this further.

All-in-all it was a lovely flight. The entire trip there and back took less than two hours, much faster than driving a car with the included ferry ride. I'm looking forward to flying to other airports in the islands, as well as on the mainland.

Here are some photos I took on the trip. I took an actual camera this time, as it is much easier to handle with one hand and has a high power optical zoom. It's an old camera that I've had for, gosh, about 20 years, but it takes reasonably good pictures.