I needed a little "me" time today. Too much thinking and figuring and planning and striving to remember names and who is who and who needs what, and I haven't been airborne in days. So when the other pilot on night standby asked if I wanted to walk to the beach for a swim, I was clad in swim trunks, slick with suntan lotion, feet in flip flops, snorkelling gear in hand, before he blinked twice.
The fish were in their regular hang outs, I'm getting a good feel for the reef now. Some reading in the shade, fell asleep, woke up hungry, so we made our way up to the most gorgeous little restaurant with a grass roof, overlooking the ocean, and waited forty minutes for someone to take our order. Coffee was another thirty minutes, this was hot water in a tea pot and a can of instant and a spoon. Not a Starbucks for miles! While enjoying the fine coffee, the view and the breeze and thinking just how lucky could someone be, off in the distance there was a "poof" and water shooting high into the air. Now the first time I saw this, while flying inbound from offshore at fifeteen hundred feet, I thought I was seeing a humpback whale. Flying two hundred miles out into the North Atlantic you'd often see whales, that tell tale plume of water shooting into the sky. If there wasn't much white water on the ocean, waves breaking, you could see them for miles off. If the whales were travelling, they'd blow every few minutes. If they were feeding, they'd blow once and head deep for twenty minutes or more at a time. I bought a guidebook to identify all the whales we were seeing. "Look at that one!" Out would come the guidebook and you'd quickly identify the humpback by the white flukes. After seeing and identifying hundreds of humpbacks, I stopped carrying the guidebook. They were all humpbacks. Actually, there was this huge pod of blue whales that came through the area almost every fall, and they were really something to see, and you'd catch sight of the odd greenland shark or mako, and one killer whale, and I always figured, any day that you saw a whale, regardless of type, it was a good day. But back to the beachside restaurant in Mtwara. Humpbacks are known to travel between Zanzibar and the mainland, but what would a whale be doing in such shallow water, right in the reef? My answer quickly came with the next "poof" of water, and a hand dug boat quickly scooted into the area to collect the stunned fish. The locals were fishing with dynamite.
I am missing the flying. I've always found I get a little irate if I'm not behind the controls for awhile. The East Coast operation was perfect as I flew quite regularly. This six weeks on, six weeks off touring drives me a little batty. I love my time off, although I've never had anything close to resembling six weeks, but when I'm back in country, I want to fly. There isn't much flying on this operation, and quite a few guys to share it with. I've been on jobs in Canada's North, where I've flown a hundred and fifty hours in eighteen days, my personal record, before the regulatory boards were looking too closely at pilot fatigue and it's safety implications. That's far too much, looking back, but I was less than twenty with energy levels far beyond anything I'd even dream about now. Nine years of air ambulance flying with lots of standby, and you were lucky if you broke two hundred hours in a year, and I found that far too little. The East Coast flying, which I did for eleven years, averaged around five hundred hours a year. Perfect in my opinion, and the extremely poor weather just brought an element of challenge to the table that I sorely miss. I'm hoping it's not much longer before I'm back there.
But, it's another perfect day in paradise. The sun is shining brightly once again, that light breeze off the ocean, Tanzanian radio from some motorcyle's small speakers that I wish I understood, it sounds so happy and inspirational, and I'm making some good friends, there's volleyball later this evening, and hopefully we'll head up to Livingstone's old place up the road for some curry and a swim.
And I'll get some flying in soon enough.
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