The show had several highlights, not the least of which is Sean Tucker and his tiny red biplane. He can hang the plane in the air, nose up, then do incredible convoluted twists as he regains lift on the way down. The photo below was taken two or three years ago, at Kaiser Air in Oakland. The plane weighs only 1200 lbs, probably most of it in the shiny red paint. I looked into the cockpit, and it will hold one very small human, wedged in tightly. The pilot had a piece of yellow notepaper scotch taped to the yoke, his line up of tricks was hand written on the paper!
I always like seeing the C-130 "Fat Albert" as it reminds me of the Coast Guard plane that dropped water for us four years ago 350 miles from Hawaii. A kind of weird pleasure was the United Airlines 747, coming low over the Golden Gate bridge, in almost a stall with the nose up. First pass with the landing gear down, then again with gear up. It moved so slowly, and in such a "hey look at me" position, it was like a 747 fashion model on a runway. And indeed, it was pretty.
Blue Angels are the highlight, and their low passes over the boats is the highlight of highlights for boaters. Saturday they made a couple of direct passes, Sunday we had one low overhead, in a 90 degree bank. So we looked right up the wings to the far tip. I was impressed.
Saturday we had a surprise engine overheat, in the middle of all the boats watching the airshow, but we had a double reefed mainsail up, in case of just such an occurrence. This happened towards the end of the Blue Angels performance, so we went into performance mode too, sailing in and out of all the water traffic. As soon as we got clear of the bulk of the boats, we were able to tack back and forth easily, and then sailed to Berkeley. The engine was fine coming back into the marina, although we set up plans A, B, C and D. Maybe even an E. No problems though.
On Sunday, I called the diesel mechanic, who was not able to come look until Monday after the working day. Sure enough, the first suspect was the cause of the failure, which occured at low rpms. The raw water (cooling system) impeller had lost two of it's "vanes" and they were lodged in the heat exchanger. Once everything had been put back in working order, we were able to depart (Tuesday morning) for Drake's Bay in Point Reyes National Seashore. See next post for that trip!
(more photos to follow)
