Trip to Alaska July 4th

Well, we had one of those nights again. I woke up to very loud bangs shortly after 12:00 mid night, which was fireworks going off. This went on for quite some time. I really don't know for sure but I'm guessing this may have been from one of the cruise ships docked in the harbor putting on a display after a 4th of July party??

We had some long flying to do the next day so were trying to get some sleep but that didn't work out too well.

When we finally got up and down to breakfast at 7:00Am the weather outside didn't look to inviting. I think they were reporting the ceilings at 3o0 to 500' . We headed out to the airport and got an updated weather and it appeared as though we were going to have to depart IFR because there didn't appear to be any lifting of the ceilings in the forecast.

We had originally planned to fly from Ketchican directly to Bellingham, WA non stop, which would avoid two customs stop, one in Canada and the other in the US. But with the winds being forecasted with a 20kt head wind, we decided to not take the chance of running low on fuel and flight planned for a fuel stop in Port Hardy, Canada. We had to notify the Canadian custom folks when we would be arriving so they would be there to meet us.

We left Ketchican IFR at around 10:30 and remained IFR all the way to Port Hardy at 7000'. We broke out occasionally between layers but never got on top. We experienced some rain in the clouds while in route and Ron said he picked up a little ice along the way. We never did experience any icing though.

The ceilings were fairly good in Port Hardy and we were able to pop down through an opening in the clouds and cancel IFR and fly into the airport visually. We cleared customs, had lunch and got updated weather into Bellingham. The ceilings were such that we decided to fly below the clouds at lower altitudes on our flight into Bellingham.

By the time we arrived into Bellingham and cleared customs it was pushing 7PM. We lost an hour with a time zone change. We had originally planned on making another leg after Bellingham
into Twin Fall, ID but we were all getting tired and it was a little late so we decided to bag it in Bellingham and get an early start the next morning, seeing if we could possible make it all the way back home, if the winds gods would co-operate.

There was a Hampton Inn near by that had shuttle service so we bedded in for the night there. Boy I've got to call them up, their bed was really comfortable, either that or I was just really tired.

Wayne