Flying Over The Sea Of Cortez

After weeks of planning our international flight to Loreto, Baja California Sur, we finally made it!

After 4.5 hours of flying south, Blair and I were greeted with a 17 knot crosswind on landing.

I entered the pattern in a crab. Blair said he felt like he was doing a side shuffle at wrestling practice.

“How much more power do you have to use to counter the wind?”

“You just feel it out based on your coordinates and the windsock, dude.”

He reminded me that we didn’t need a wind sock to gauge the wind.

“Look at the white caps on the water and you know exactly where to point the nose,” he said, reassuring himself.

“You got that right. Always have a plan B.”

Lifting off out of Phoenix, the sunrise greeted us over our left wing.

The sprawling city was just waking up. Kids were probably eating shitty cereal for breakfast…in 10 years they’ll have no idea why they’re diabetic.

Just over Phoenix Sky Harbor, I set the nose down for cruise. I looked below to watch the massive jets set their wheels on the runway. Then we were met with a screaming tailwind.

Smooth, cool air, we only felt it as mega-horsepower.

Blair joked, saying, “I bet you think your plane is a jet right now, don’t you.”

I reminded him that I always think my plane is a jet.

It ushered us to the border way earlier than expected. Less than an hour into the flight, we were staring at The Sea of Cortez.

We saw white, not blue.

Bleached sand framed the Vermilon Sea and marked our first water crossing. Far below, White caps folded over in the wind. Fishing boats trolled the waters.

(I thought of Facebook trolls sitting at their computer talking shit on topics they know nothing about…like starving apes, they feed off headlines in the media and think they’re being fed full meals.)

Blair insisted that in the event of an emergency landing, “try to make it to the beach so that we can at least rebuild our jet…Sure, we could do a nice water landing, but I don’t want this plane sinking to the bottom.”

True Blair.

I made him calculate how high we would need to fly to make the beach from the middle of the sea – in case of emergency – based on our glide ratio.

He worked on the math.

We took a few selfies to break up the time.

Looking at them, Blair was clearly a young man, not a boy anymore. And ever since takeoff, his enthusiasm and questions matched his maturity. I’m glad I didn’t miss Blair as a boy.

That’s why we do these trips.

If he was in a boring ass classroom as often as teachers insist, I’d never experience his progress. It would be shown to me in short bursts, over time.

To me, experience is life’s only true currency. Therefore, we try to get out of school as much as possible. Plus, showing him the Sea of Cortez is far better than telling him about it.

Same in any school subject.

Schools are dead-set on forcing kids to memorize useless crap. Parents are complicit. And kids are sick of it. After decades of being force fed useless crap, the smart ones eventually turn against parents and teachers…I don’t blame them.

Showing is better than telling.

So this week, I’ll be showing Blair aviation, whales and camping on the beaches of the Baja.

…Hovering over the centerline, we kicked in our left rudder and straightened our ailerons to stick our landing…we were eating clams on the beach soon after. Blair saved a crab from a hungry Pelican.