Friday Harbor is on San Juan Island in Washington’s Puget Sound. In Flight Sim X, a flight simulation, Friday Harbor is the default airport. I have been flying from that airport for months without knowing where San Juan Island is located. Imagine the excitement when I learned that we were a ferry jump away from Friday Harbor when on a Road Trip in August. Imagine my disappointment when we missed our ferry and had to settle for Orcas Island.
Hmmm.. Talk about disappointment.. until while walking around Eastsound on Orcas, that we ran into this:
It just happened that this was the weekend for the annual “Fly In”. The pilots there were rather disappointed that there were so few planes this year. It turns out that the weather proceeding the event had been pretty bad and most pilots were not willing to take a chance on the trip just for bad weather. You can get a fair idea of the weather from these pictures. By the way, I think there were over 50 planes there.
There were some “Experimentals”, planes that people build themselves. I spoke to one guy that took 10 years to build his, spending quite a bit of money. He said you can now buy the plane for $60,000. I think he assessed his investment as over $110K. But much of what he put into the plane was not available when he started.
There was a fair bit of low pass flying which was the excitment of the FlyIn ..
Until the real fun began as this pair of T-6s made their way down the runway and started some very nice formation flying.
Their low passes were thrilling to watch/hear/feel !!
Here is the view of Orcas Island Ferry Port as we were leaving.
Ask me what I now think about missing a ferry…
