Whoooa, what a day! And what an emotional arrival in Guam. We can’t believe that a whole bunch of friends at home were busy listening to us and following our every move on ATC live while we were out there in the cauldron trying to make sure that nothing went too pear shaped. Ah well, thankfully it all seems to have worked out!
We’ll update you on our plans from here on out tomorrow, before we leave for the Marshall Islands. This time we’ve actually got our permission in advance, so what can possibly go wrong?
Meanwhile, here are just a couple of images of the day –
We started early, sad not to have seen central Taipei at all. Arriving at Taoyuang International early (00h30 am to be precise), we found the whole Sunrise Airline team there. See http://www.sunriseairline.com/sunriseairline/web_en/index.php if you ever intend to fly to Taiwan or ever need handling there. What heroes – and bearing gifts, flags and unlimited support. Thanks Gordon, Emily and your colleagues.
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Things changed tone a bit when, on request for startup, the Japs again delayed us by more than a half hour. (Even going south we had to pass through a corner of their airspace and they felt our chosen flight level of 070 was too far off their minimum of 270. There were a bunch utterances about how, since Pearl Harbour, no nation has made a decision so detrimental to aviation in the Pacific area and so on. But finally, after some subtle but powerful lawyerly explanations regarding potential radio communication techniques and so on we were given the go ahead.
The first half of the day really turned out quite comfortably. A moderate headwind for the first 7 or so hours with no adversity, save some puffy white ‘forerunners’ of what may be to come. It was really quite a beautiful day over the Phillipine Sea and we took the time to enjoy the views.
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Sadly things just couldn’t continue that way, given all the funny squiggles we’d seen on the synoptic charts and eventually rude reality intervened. We started a little unrealistically by climbing and climbing to try steer clear of the CB’s between their heads. It was quite an experience for us to be relying messages to San Francisco Radio, whatever the hell that is, presumably more than 5 000 nautical miles away. Anyhow, when San Francisco relayed a sigmet report with the exact GPS co-ordinates of the 9 closest storms to us through one or other boeing I suddenly realized how much I love the Americans and how wrong Osama and his mates have been all along. I almost wept with relief, got out my pad and rules and started drawing latitude and longitude lines with our position, our destination, a line in between, all the storm positions and so on. It was really quite an instructive academic exercise. Jean meanwhile was conducting an in depth investigation into where to fit in the stormscope he won’t be doing this trip again without.
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As you can see, the day took quite a bit out of us both.
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But we were received in Guam with incredible warmth and kindness and we believe we’ve lined up some evening entertainment that may result in it all having been forgotten tomorrow. We’ll report further then, Inshallah.
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J and J
