We arrived in Guam after drilling a nineteen and a half hour tunnel into a mostly 28 knot headwind. The night landing on the brightly lit runway was a true heaven send, after a long slow flight in a lot of rain and cloud.
We had a good night’s rest in a fine hotel overlooking the main bay with its turquoise sea. We enjoyed a leisurely breakfast and planned our day. The main challenge was getting fuel. Being a Sunday of a long weekend, Monday labor day holiday and very few AVGAS requirements out there in the Pacific, it looked like we were going to have to settle for MOGAS by plastic jerry cans. We needed 90 gallons, about 340 litres. And these we would need to get into a large American airport. Without the cooperation of someone, this was not going to be easy. As much as we would have loved to kick back and enjoy the island and wait till Tuesday, we were it a hurry to get to Taiwan, because of promotional arrangements with press in Taiwan. While waiting for answers from our ground handlers, we took the opportunity to go down to the beach. The well run hotel had free snorkel and other gear available. We slid into the warm tropical water and dissapeared into another world for the next hour.
It was fantastic, a rich world of all the colors under the sun in both the coral and the fish. Life on this planet never ceases to amaze me. After begrudgingly dragging ourselves from the centre of
this beauty, we had room service lunch in the comfort of our air conditioned room, and made phone calls to get the fuel arranged. We needed to get it done and have the plane ready before sunset, in order to leave at 2am the next morning.
Eventually, the two girls Tracy and Stephanie, who were running the ground company hatched a plan. They managed to round up fifteen 5 gallon plastic jerry cans that are used for MOGAS for their various pushback tugs and pickups on the apron. Lucky us, so a few hours were spent getting fuel through the security and onto the apron and into ZU-TWN. A very big thank you to Stephanie and Tracy, they made it a fun afternoon and then facilitated us in their office to get flight plans and cutoms sorted.
Back to the hotel for a short night. We hit the sack at about ten and alarms went of at one fifteen. I had tossed and turned and only got a little over an hour of sleep. The rummble of thunder while we were dressing was a little concerning.
