My resolutions.

Short-term:

1) I will get working on Alderney this week and finish it off.
2) I will sort through and post all the millions of photographs gathering virtual dust on my hard-drive.
3) I’ll go back to thinking about this one island at a time rather than get overwhelmed at the total number of islands.

Long-term:

1) I’ll book my travel times and hotels more than 3 days before the day I wish to leave.
2) I’ll do regular updates here aiming for a post a week.
3) I’ll do at least 10 islands this year (don’t panic! One island at a time).
4) I’ll find the perfect fry-up.

Broken down like that, it doesn’t sound so bad…

The Isles of Scilly are said to be the most isolated islands in Britain, which I have a hard time believing — in England maybe, but in Britain? It’s a total of 150 islands (five inhabited) but in line with my other destinations, I’m staying on the chunk of land with the airfield on it.

The Cornwall Wildlife Trust (www.cornwallwildlifetrust.org.uk) do some great PDF pamphlets including “An identification guild to the Carnivores of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly” which I immediately downloaded with excitement. “There are six species of Carnivore found in Cornwall,” is said in the introduction, continuing on to say “None of the Carnivore species are found on the Isles of Scilly.”

Ah well.

There are half a dozen small mammals though, including the “Scilly shrew” which apparently isn’t a reference to the women, and I have a recording form in case I should stumble across one (hopefully not in the hotel room). As far as I know, it’s too late to see puffins but I’d like to go seal watching and maybe even search for orcas. I’ve packed a bathing suit in hopes of experiencing the “sparkling white beaches” and St Mary’s has enough prehistoric sites to keep me occupied for months. And then there’s the intriguing mystery of Lyonesse.
I’m quite looking forward to this!

Finally have confirmed the trip to St Mary’s and the Isles of Scilly for next week. Looking forward to this, especially as I did all the leg-work last month. The flight in looks a bit confusing; I might go a bit of a roundabout route.

I was a bit amused by the local online news, reassuring me that “The proposed strike by air traffic controllers at St Mary

What chaos. Isle of Wight is happening as planned, but when it came to Isles of Scilly, we found a definite reluctance to let rooms for 2 nights during high season, when they could get people staying for a week.

So we gave that up and looked at Anglesey instead. Seems there’s a sailing festival happening that weekend and the recommendation of the woman at the B&B we chose was to stay well away until it was over.

Meanwhile, Cliff was looking into Lundy, an island with an airstrip that wasn’t on our original list. It has a 400m runway, “rough ground, rabbit holes.” Not the most heartening of descriptions. He managed to prove that the Saratoga was capable of landing there, not so definitely capable of taking off again. Possibly with an ace pilot. I’m not.

I’m meeting up with my ex-instructor to mess around with some more difficult flying and short-field landings, so we can do a fly-over and take a look at it, but I’m not holding my breath.

Next on the list? Walney Island. Closed weekends. *sigh*

So we decided to give it up for next week, we’ll do Isle of Wight and then drop the plane in Wycombe to get maintenance sorted out and look at options again next week. Perfect flying weather, it’s just the bit on the land that’s a pain. :)

The first stage of this has been quite a learning process. As I’ve worked through the Channel Islands, I’ve realised that I’m trying to do a final draft which is effectively doubling the time spent per section. Now there are big benefits to this, including being able to show people the work in progress, but realistically it’s not the best use of time. The weather right now is good and the likelihood of being able to fly into small airfields is at it’s highest. In the dark days of winter, there will be little or no chance of planning flights, especially to the northern islands, but plenty of time for writing.

So I’ve been struggling quite a bit with tone of voice, tense, transitions and markers and I think that’s the wrong thing to be focusing on right now. I need to do a basic write-up while it’s fresh, locations, history, people, what happened and how it felt. But it doesn’t need to flow, in fact it doesn’t even need to link up. As long as all the pieces are there. I can make sense out of the jigsaw later at my leisure.
Planning for the Isle of Wight and Scilly Isles has put this into sharp relief. Sensible would be to write down now my expectations and worries (600 meter runway!) in preparation for the trip rather than re-writing the previous prose over and over again. I have 16,000 words which means I have enough to cut liberally, always a dream, and I am not relying on hazy memories or scribbled notes, I’ve written the detail.

I do need to work out technical writing issues and the sooner I’m happier with the “house style” for this particular project, the easier it will be. But I need to prioritise the the content over the technique.

…plans are afoot for the Isle of Wight and the Scilly Isles for the first week of August. Time to dive into those guide books again. As always, any must-see recommendations are greatly appreciated.

Ben, who was going to be flying with me, contacted me on Sunday to say that he was stuck in Copenhagen with a jet whose wheels would not retract.

A nice young man named Alistair agreed to adopt me for a few days, so we flew out to Shobdon yesterday where we got stuck on in the mud of the grass runway and needed 4 strong blokes and a Landrover to tow us back out. The propellor has frightening green streaks on the edges of the blades but luckily only tickled the grass and didn’t run into the ground.
Today has been better, to be fair, I’ve done some decent flying and been given a grand tour of Enstone which has a great club although the runway is somewhat bizarre.

No idea what the plan for the rest of the week is although I am trying to find some brave young pilot who will join me on some cross-country flights for practice (read: keep me from getting lost). At least the weather is good.

I can’t complain really, at least there are plenty of stories to tell.

I’m flying. And I have a plan.

I’m flying to the British Isles. All of them. Well, all of them that have an airfield.

After a lot of peering at Pooleys and pondering maps, it appears that we have a total of 38 islands that fit the criteria of having a runway that is useable (not all of them by the Saratoga, sadly).

First stop is easy: “The British Mainland” … I’ll be flying to somewhere near Oxford and asking a lovely instructor to make sure I’m up-to-date and help me with short-field landings. That at least kills the decision of which country to choose, let alone which airfield.

The intro is written. Dates are set and all the basic research is done for the next three stops: Jersey, Guernsey and Alderney. All that’s left is for me to stop mispronouncing Guernsey.

That, and to start collating information. That’s where this blog comes in. I’ll be posting my locations, my must-see lists and my dates here. I’ll be trawling web forums and mailing lists asking for more details. I’ll be grovelling at people to come here and check that my information is right. I’ll be using it as a scratch pad of sorts, I suppose, while I try to get everything coordinated over a two-year period.
And in the end, this will be the outline for a book about the results: Fear of Landing.