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This was a good flight. Turned out I hardly used my Ketchikan sectional. I had been spending the last few days in Ketchikan. I met the A.E. at PAKT, and he agreed to have me take him to the land-based airport at Klawock instead of the seaplane base. So we climbed into the plane at 10:47, while the weather outside was marginal, pretty good for a bush flight.
I tuned in the ATIS, and found that the active runway was 11, like normal. We rolled out of the parking spot, headed down the taxiway, got to the runway, announced our intentions to depart to the west, taxied the length of the runway, and turned it around. I opened up the throttle, and sped down the runway.
We got airborne, and I climbed to 1500 before turning. I settled into cruise at 2000, just below the overcast cloud layer. I followed my ADF west, which was set for 229. Here I am, saying goodbye to PAKT.
This turned out to be a shorter flight than expected. It wasn't easy though. Shortly after takeoff, the overcast layer's base descended to 900 feet, and I went down to get under it. I decided to go over water, keeping an eye on the ADF. I went down and began to cruise at 800. I followed a waterway, which I later found out was Twelvemile Arm, which dead-ends in some low mountains. I reached the end of it, saw what I thought was another shoreline, and headed off towards it. Not long thereafter, I realized it was a road, and the two most feared words in aviation escaped my mouth: "Oh s***!" I was at 800 feet, mountains were all around me, and they went up into the clouds. I was forced to get up above the cloud layer, something I hadn't particularly been looking forward to, since the Beaver isn't the best with instruments. But I went up to 2500, and turned the plane directly in the direction the needle on my ADF was pointing, and started(if you could call it) navigating using the mountain peaks as my landmarks. I tuned the ATIS frequency for PAKW, and found out I would be landing on runway 1. I came to 8 miles out on PAKW, and I knew it was OK to descend. I descended at 500 FPM, and at 1500 I broke out below the clouds. I saw the airport, and I knew that I would have to enter on downwind instead of base, since I was going straight at the runway. I made the turn, and after about 45 seconds, I turned base. Here I am at about 1000 feet, on base to runway 1.
I turned final, and began my final descent. At 700 feet, I broke below the last cloud layer, and the visibility dropped to 3. Here I am, about 15 seconds before touchdown.
I was drifting slightly to the left, but made it down just fine. Here I am, on touchdown.
I stood on the brakes, and the rollout turned out to be pretty short, even for the Beaver. I turned into parking, and shut her down. The engineer thanked me for the ride, even though I knew it wasn't the greatest I have ever made. I'll probably fly up to AVSim Base, and sleep there.
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