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on teaching and i m not growing any fonder of minnesota winters there s really nothing keeping us here my airline has seven different 7er bases and msp is one of the most senior and is slowly shrinking we talked about various places we could move and then i broached an idea i d been mulling over for some time what if we moved onto a 40 sailboat and cruised the bahamas and caribbean for a few years surprisingly dawn loved the idea once upon a time she would have rejected it outright but we ve since done a number of bareboat charters in california the bahamas and the bvi she s been getting a lot more confident not to mention competent with the sailing part and in fact has really enjoyed the weeklong stints of living on a boat when i brought up the idea we had just returned from another bvi charter on a 50 foot beneteau with six friends none of whom had sailed much before and dawn was a fantastic first mate i guess that experience was a turning point because her reaction to my cautious suggestion was to immediately start brainstorming ways to make it happen and so over the course of the next few days we crafted an ambitious plan to sell everything buy a boat dawn quit her job go cruising for 7 8 months of the year for the next three years drop my schedule to a minimum and commute from the caribbean during the cruising season and come back north and earn most of the year s income while the boat is stored on land during hurricane season this part time pilot plan is possibly largely because my airline my airplane especially is so seasonal with summer block hours much higher than winter in high season it s all hands on deck but the rest of the year it s pretty easy to take time off pretty slick that our high season correlates with the caribbean hurricane season our original plan was for dawn to teach the 2016 2017 school year buy the boat this fall and sell our house next year moving aboard in june 2017 we started in on the plan with research budgeting and prepping our washington townhouse for sale it s been rented out since we moved back to mn in 2008 the real estate market out west has really recovered strongly within the last year including for townhouses which were even more severely depressed than the rest of the market for several years to our surprise and delight the townhouse sold on the very first day of listing for our full and ambitious i thought listing price we have since moved our plan up by nearly a year for two reasons first dawn is just completely 100 burned out on teaching this has been the worst year since she started it s really taken a toll on her and she s just flat out done for now anyways at the least she needs to take a break and perhaps in a few years she ll be ready to go back to it secondly considering how hot the real estate market has been lately and the potential for market volatility and interest rate hikes after the election we decided to sell our home in minnesota a year early this has happened really quickly we made the decision to sell at the end of march put in new carpet and paint in early april and had an even more ambitious full priced offer on april 21st a full nine days before we were planning to officially list the house we close on june 7th and have been very busy packing and downsizing and preparing to move to our interim housing a one bedroom apartment in a historic building in downtown st paul this has involved selling donating giving away or borrowing out the majority of our possessions with a few pieces of furniture retained for the five months we ll be in the apartment we re keeping a few personal items with sentimental value like gifts from good friends or the artwork in our house all our own photography from our various travels these will be stored for the duration otherwise the only stuff we re keeping is that which will be helpful enough on the boat to merit valuable stowage space you re probably wondering about the pacer i initially concocted a parrothead fantasy of bringing it to the caribbean with us and island hopping around whilst keeping it abreast of the boat but soon concluded that a tropical marine environment would be murderous on a fabric covered airplane left outside and also that our new boat would need the full attention of her two crew and our pocketbook i then considered storing it for the 8 months we re on the boat and using it during the 4 offseason months when we re supposed to be devoting our attention to earning income but eventually decided this was a waste of resources and in direct contravention to my resolution to fly any airplane i own at least 10 hours a month and so we decided to sell the pacer this summer but in the meantime to embark on a grand adventure flying clockwise around the country visiting friends and venturing down baja and getting in some backcountry flying in idaho and montana before making the bucket list pilgrimage to alaska where we would sell her it was a grand idea and we had a wonderful time for the 75 hours and 3 4 of the way around the country that it lasted that all came to a screeching halt in portland oregon when i received the news that every plane owner dreads during the annual inspection this led to me selling the plane earlier this month at a significant loss but that s a tale of woe best left for another post so now we re pretty seriously into the search for our floating home for the next three years our perfect sailboat is a medium displacement cutter or ketch between 40 and 45 feet long preferably a center cockpit design with two good sized staterooms and private heads fore and aft it will be set up to be easily single or double handed while offering comfortable living quarters for four we plan to bring friends and family down to sail with us regularly the onboard equipment will allow for sustainable living on the hook in serene anchorages away from marinas for weeks on end our midrange budget means that most potential candidates will be 30 years old but we can still afford to look at only those that have been well maintained with most major systems replaced and or upgraded we re unlikely to find a boat that s exactly what we want and in bristol condition and so our budget includes money to upgrade and refit the boat both at the start of our cruise and each off season we ve whittled the field to six models that particularly suit our needs the tayana 42cc the bristol 41 1 43 3 45 5 the brewer 12 8 44 the gulfstar 44 the kelly peterson 44 46 and the whitby 42 of these there are about ten specific boats currently on the market that we re interested in and we re making our way down that list as time allows given everything else going on one tayana that i ve already seen windbird is a strong candidate and we may end up making an offer on her but i m trying to be logical and not get my heart set on a specific boat yet being inexperienced boat shoppers we really do need to see quite a few more in person before deciding to that end dawn and i will be taking a boat searching roadtrip down north carolina south carolina and florida this coming memorial day weekend windbird is one of the boats on the list as dawn hasn t seen her yet but there are a few others that could well end up being stronger candidates and really nothing says we have to buy right now or even this summer or even this year i don t want to be rushed into buying a boat simply because we sold the house earlier than planned it wouldn t hurt us to go back to the original timeline and build our cruising kitty in the meantime this is all rather outside the scope of an aviation blog and dawn and i have decided that our new adventure merits its own blog one to which we ll contribute collaboratively many cruising blog titles incorporate the boat name but we don t have one yet so we ve decided upon weigels on the water mostly thanks to the catchy url wotwater blogspot com you can follow our maritime adventures there although my posts here will likely include some of the highlights posted by sam weigel 22 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook labels milestones pacer sailing friday may 06 2016 six months in sorta considering my lack of posting you might think that my airline is working me to death but no that s not the case recently i passed 120 hours on the b757 767 just over six months since i went to class keep in mind that i was originally awarded the slot way back in feb 2015 meaning i m only nine months away from my seat lock expiring i m not planning on going anywhere but it keeps options open basically what happened is that my airline was originally planning on retiring a significant portion of the 7er fleet didn t train many new pilots on it for a while then decided to keep many of the airplanes after all at the same time that a bunch of senior 7er fos took captain slots on other fleets whoops big training logjam it s just now finally clearing so here s basically how my training went oct 6nov15 home study for 7er course we basically teach ourselves the systems on our own time via computer based training honestly not my favorite way to train 6nov15 6dec15 7er initial training you may recall from mad dog school that we break our initial training into four blocks numbered 100 to 400 that roughly correspond with systems training procedures training maneuvers training and line oriented training these all end in checkrides but the two most important are 34x maneuvers validation and 44x line oriented evaluation unlike mad dog school i was paired with an fo rather than a ca which complicated things a bit in that we each had to learn left seat duties and got only half the time we otherwise would in the right seat however my sim partner who is only a few numbers senior to me is an extremely sharp guy we worked very well together and we made it through the course without problems one happy footnote we weren t stuck in the schoolhouse the entire time our 300 series sims were all down at the boeing training facility in miami we passed our 44x checkrides easily on december 6th and were sent home indefinitely waiting on ioe 31jan15 05feb15 initial operating experience ioe i flew with a super nice detroit based line check airman he was completely understanding that i hadn t been in training for eight weeks and might take a little more time to get spooled up my very first leg was in a b757 200 and operated from detroit to cancun for a 24 hour overnight a very nice way to kick things off our subsequent layovers were in orlando fort myers and atlanta i ended up flying the b752 for 5 legs the b753 for 2 legs and even our ge powered domestic b767 300 for 2 legs i liked the legendary power and performance of the b752 but i loved the fingertip light control feel of the b763 due to the additional inboard ailerons you simply think about turning and she s turning 29feb 04mar transoceanic operating experience toe 2 crossings of 4 required there was less time off before this so i didn t have much catchup on the airplane itself but there s a lot to cover over the course of the first 8 hour crossing during which i was in the rest seat for 2 hours and it s all stuff that i d last covered in mid december i crammed to catch up in the days before the toe and the lca was happy with my preparation we flew one leg from atlanta to london heathrow in the b767 300er and after a 18 hour layover flew an etops b757 200 back across to phl we even got tagged for a couple domestic legs the next day the better to increase my landing count i gotta say though i ve found all the variants pretty easy to land it just takes the first few to adjust to the higher sight picture 06mar 10mar toe crossings 3 4 only one day off before straight into my 2nd toe which was based out of seattle and consisted of only two legs sea pvg sea this was my first time to china and i had a really nice 48 hour layover to explore shanghai the takeoff out of seattle at 407 000 lbs is my heaviest to date like i said the b767 is really light on the controls so you don t feel that heavy but acceleration obviously takes longer and you have to be really sharp with your pitch control to avoid overspeeding the flaps while retracting them at the proper speed and keeping the airplane accelerating on the way over we were in vhf coverage the whole way flying north via alaska the bering sea russia and arriving from over beijing the russian and chinese controllers weren t too hard to understand but once in china you switch to flying metric altitudes which is a little different the weather really stunk in shanghai when we landed with a big gusty crosswind but the rainy runway made for a nice landing on the way back we flew via japan and then over the water because this is such a long flight it was a 4 man crew meaning i spent nearly half of each crossing in the bunk and these particular b767s actually have bunks so nice pretty easy work if you can get it and that s it i was released to the line on 10mar didn t work again thanks to creative bidding until early april and have done a few trips since all domestic i m getting pretty comfortable with the airplane as expected it s superior to the maddog in every way possible but there are also a surprising number of similarities that make for an easy transition i ve been quite busy taking advantage of all the free time for the last six months and have done the following trips mid october interline regatta british virgin islands christmas new years dawn and i flew the pacer from minnesota to connecticut and then down to key west early jan flew around florida visiting friends mid jan dawn and i flew the pacer from florida to phoenix mid feb dawn and i flew the pacer down baja with our friends brad and amber they rented a 182 out of san diego awesome epic trip story is coming out in july issue of flying late mar went to thailand to visit my sister and her kids in chiang rai flew down to phuket met my parents chartered a 39 leopard catamaran for 5 days of sailing the andaman sea mid apr dawn and i flew the pacer up the west coast to portland or besides all that there are some pretty major developments in my and dawn s plans dating back to last august as a result we sold our rented out townhome in vancouver wa back in february and just sold our house in minnesota a few weeks ago we close on june 7th and are renting a small apartment in downtown st paul for the summer before taking off for new horizons yes i have some pretty serious catch up blogging to do posted by sam weigel 14 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook labels b757 b767 major airlines training tuesday march 15 2016 modaero this is rather last minute but i wasn t entirely sure i was going to make it until fairly recently the modaero nextgen aviation festival will be happening in conroe tx just north of houston this weds sat march 16th 19th and i ll be speaking on the main stage at 12 30pm on friday i ll also be participating in a few panel discussions throughout the day modaero is an interesting concep...