Chapter 52

We learned to fly the Cub ... Piper was a willing passenger during my lessons. Charlie Arthur thought she might be a trifle much but she had her own harness and a battened down cushion if she got bored. She never did.

FAA license in hand, the three of us transitioned to the SNJ after Candy was moved up to the Beech. Charlie passed us rapidly and Grace and I spent the wait for Candy to get her instrument license mapping our route to Detroit. Some people think that Lake Michigan and Lake Huron are two lakes. They're not. They're one lake with a narrow spot ... and not all that narrow either.

The Straits of Mackinic is five miles wide. The reason Lake Michigan and Lake Huron are called two separate lakes is because the French ... well ... they're French ... If you were Canadian you'd understand.

There isn't a speck of difference in the water level of this great big lake that wraps around the Michigan mitten. It probably ought to be Gran Big Lac qui s'enroule autour de la péninsule ... but the explorers were French ... and that makes it self-explanatory.

Gran Big Lac qui s'enroule autour de la péninsule is down about two feet from last year. This helps end the massive beach erosion from the high-water of 1954, two feet doesn't sound like much but it added nearly 45 feet of sand along Oceana Beach. In 1954 the water was so high it undermined the State Park beachfront road.

Rocks, reefs, shoals, islands and wrecks are very visible from a thousand feet and we planned to hop from port to port and field to field. Ludington by first intention and a close pass at Manistee, Portage was too far for a single day from Pentwater but fine from Ludington. We'll plan on going to the races Saturday night. From the air it looks like a good track.

The next stage is Portage to Arcadia for lunch and on to Lake Betsie and Frankfort. The SNJ has a range of 730 miles at 140 mph but there's no sense in being stupid about it. Landing fees and gas is lots cheaper than running out up there.

Frequent landings would allow us to check things. Our SNJ is VERY used, a 1944 model. The logs document a thousand arrester gear landings and there's nothing like a controlled crash to find weak spots. Since there hundreds of air ports, airfields, and assorted backyard grass strips that are close enough to a town with a fuel truck we would be fine.

We had just begun plotting and planning when we had an added attraction.

The added attraction was when Carole Ann Olsen discovered what we were planning for our summer. Carole Anne gossips ... no ... wait ... Carole Ann GOSSIPS... (all in caps) ... and she happened to mention our move to Lieutenant Olsen and HE gossips too.

Lieutenant Olsen gossips to interested people in the Coast Guard and they gossip to other interested people who might or might not be in the Coast Guard and the word passed from on high was that the Coast Guard would obtain low altitude permission from the FAA and supply us with a recording magnetometer and pay for our fuel if we would fly our intended route twice; once at the 16 fathom line and once at six. We wouldn't be able to exceed 100 feet. That's not to say we couldn't fly lower. The magnetometer would record the variations and anomalies. Anomaly: circle back and fly it again.