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Bahamarama - Trip report

Following the request by several on this related thread, I hereby deliver the trip report of our recent flying trip to the Bahamas ex Florida.

Mind you, this report will follow the concept of this meme, as I started the report quickly after we finished the trip, but only got to finish it now, with fading memory:

The trip had been on the bucket list for me and a friend for quite some time. After several attempts were aborted due to personal time constraints in the previous two years, we finally agreed to do this in the Christmas holidays of 2018/2019. My friend, his wife, my girlfriend and I came together in September and agreed on the basics and made our long-haul flight bookings and I started investigating good rental options for a suitable aircraft in Southern Florida. From the many options out there, we soon agreed to rent a 1975 Piper Arrow in St. Petersburg. Although a pretty small aircraft for four people, it was fit to do the job, very good value for money, and we had a good feel about the rental company (from reviews and from interacting on the phone and via email). Our other option would have been a much newer Cessna 206 Stationair out of Fort Myers – definitely a very nice plane but it would have cost us a lot more and I would have needed more prep time to transition to a different, heavier type for me.

Unfortunately, a few days before Christmas, the company informed me that the Arrow wasn’t going to be available. This had me looking frantically for alternatives, but at such short notice in high season, we were not able to find any decent material with enough payload and the right conditions for us. So we were left with the alternative offered to us by the company we had rented the Arrow with: A vanilla Piper Archer II. Certainly the cabin room remained about the same compared to the Arrow, but the payload was somewhat less. Luckily, the older Archers are not as heavy as the newer ones, especially those with lots of avionics, so we went along with this, knowing that everyone would have to limit their luggage somewhat. That wasn’t easy for the girls and my friend who likes to bring his prosumer camera gear on trips.

My girlfriend Diana and I flew to Florida on Thursday, the day after Christmas. It was a long trip: Hamburg-Heathrow-Philadelphia-Delay-Delay-Delay-Orlando. We arrived in Orlando in the middle of the night and stayed at a hotel near the airport. The funny thing was that when we returned to the airport the next day to pickup our rental car, I recognized the American Airlines pilot who flew us from Philadelphia to Orlando the night before, after they had to fly him in from Dallas due to crew shortage (which had caused our multi-hour delay). I remembered him because he had announced the landing into Orlando on the passenger intercom with “Now please get ready for another GREAT landing” – which I found both a cheesy and cool thing to say in an awkward way – and also because American pilots tend to maintain the nice habit of coming out of the cockpit to bid their passengers farewell, so I recognized his face.

On Friday, we drove from Orlando to St. Petersburg and didn’t do much else on that day, just getting used to the timezone etc. On Saturday morning, I ventured out to the airfield (Albert Whitted just downtown in St. Pete, which is a very, very scenic as well as convenient city airfield) to get the paperwork (rental agreement etc.) done and to renew my BFR. I hadn’t flown for a few weeks before the trip due to weather and illness, so I was happy to have a chance for some airwork with an instructor, which went quite well. The instructor (originally from Germany, but had moved to the US when the wall came down and has lived and worked there since) noted that one thing he sees a lot with German pilots/renters is that they fly the approaches at a fairly low airspeed. I found that interesting – I try to fly “by the books” especially with an instructor aboard but he seemed to think it’s better/safer to add a few knots. Might be a cultural thing and have to do with the lack of short fields/soft fields/short soft fields in the region?

On Saturday evening after dinner, I returned to the aircraft as I wanted to fly some night patterns to regain night currency. I abandoned that plan when I found out that the panel lighting was in-op. This decision should come into play later on again – and again.

Sunday was a buffer day that we had put in to cover for unforeseeable events, such as weather, the instructor not being happy yet, etc. We were all set though in the morning, except that downtown St. Pete was pretty fogged in and it was forecast to remain so until noon. We used the time to setup a detailed loading plan for the aircraft – the first time since I started flying that I actually weighed all items to optimize the load. We could not load the plane yet, as there was another nuisance: The previous day, another renter (after my check flight) had topped her up to go on a local bimble – leaving us with a much too heavy plane for our tour. So we had to wait for the fog to clear and then fly for a good hour to get to our planned fuel level. Luckily we had a fun destination for that: An old uni friend of mine spent the holidays at his parents’ home in Sarasota, “just around the corner”, so once the sky had cleared up, we flew down to Sarasota/Bradenton to meet him and his girlfriend for a seaside lunch and then returned to St. Pete to finally load the plane and take-off to our evening destination Fort Lauderdale Executive.

As often in flying, things took longer than expected and sometime after we had set course to Fort Lauderdale, I realized that the moderate headwind we were flying into, our latish departure, and the slowish plane would prohibit a day-time landing in Fort Lauderdale. I felt this was a bit of a problem because I didn’t do the night currency patterns previously so I shouldn’t be landing at night with passengers – especially not with a broken panel light. As the saying goes, if there is a doubt, there is no doubt, so I decided we would not fly all the way to Fort Lauderdale this evening. Instead, we would pick one of the larger towns on the map ahead of us that had an airfield nearby. We chose La Belle Muni and landed there, hoping we’d find a place to stay overnight. One has to love the freedom in the US to land at any airfield regardless if it’s manned or not. However, once on the ground, we learned we were in fact the only people on-premise – with a fence all around and no open gate! Ouch. We tried calling up various contact numbers we found in Foreflight, but none worked. We walked along the fence in the setting sun to the other side of the field, hoping to find someone to talk to. We were lucky: On the far side of the airfield, the local Sheriff was having a break and saw us walking along the fence. When we explained our situation to him, he then made some phone calls and soon enough, he was able to set us free by opening one of the gates from the outside with a code. He then offered to drive the four of us to “the local hotel” – an offer we couldn’t resist. Doesn’t happen everyday that you get to ride with the Sheriff, does it? La Belle itself didn’t have much to offer, but we had decent tex-mex food and a good night of sleep at ridiculous prices (170 USD for a double room in the middle of nowhere…). Unfortunately, we also lost the money we spent on the prebooked hotel in Fort Lauderdale.

The next morning, we had “the” local taxi drive us to McDonald’s for the town’s best breakfast and back to the airfield. In Fort Lauderdale, we would have used an FBO for the border crossing formalities (eAPIS etc.). Since there was self-service AVGAS at La Belle (and MUCH cheaper than anything near the East Coast, anyway!), we didn’t need the stop in Fort Lauderdale anymore, though. I had done some of the eAPIS work the night before already after dinner. This morning, I completed the manifest and filed the VFR flight plan with a call to 1-800-WX-BRIEF. After we had completed the paperwork, refueled and loaded the plane, off we were to San Andros – for immigration into The Bahamas and the next planned fuel stop. We climbed above the scattered cloud layer to 6500 feet and soon enough, we reached the Florida coast line. There is a lot of traffic in that area, inbound and outbound of the many small and large airports around. There was one close encounter with a JetBlue aircraft crossing from left to right some 2000 feet above us and in front of us. ATC separated the IFR traffic from us and arrested their altitude for a few moments. I decided to fly reverse parallel to their flight path to avoid wake turbulence for a while, but I reset our original course a little too early – giving me and the passengers a startling, first real-life wake turbulence experience. For the briefest of moments, our aircraft and us were shaken through briskly. Lesson learned: There is little room to take wake turbulence lightheartedly and better fly on an avoiding course for a much longer time to keep everyone happy and save…

The rest of the flight was uneventful and soon we saw the first Bahamian island of Bimini appear on the horizon. A little later we landed in San Andros to refuel and get the immigration paperwork done. Everyone we met was extremely good-humoured and we felt we had arrived in “vacation mode”.

We then moved on to Grand Exuma, where we had our base at the recently restored Peace & Plenty hotel in Georgetown. My friend Michael called up the rental car company while we were on final and although it was a bit noisy in the cockpit, he managed to get the rental company lady to drive up directly to the FBO when we landed, so we could load our stuff off the plane and on the car immediately. Nice!

The following five days we spent mostly choosing an place to fly to for the day and thereby exploring the Out Islands piece by piece. We covered Staniel Cay (and the very touristy “must-see” Pig’s Beach), North Eleuthera and Harbour Island (which was my favorite place of the trip and I’d love to return one day and stay longer), San Salvador, and Rum Cay. We attempted to land at Farmer’s Cay but cancelled due to heavy cross winds. As there is no night VFR flying in The Bahamas (and you may not want to be regularly flying over large water bodies at night anyway), the evenings were spent on our home island, exploring the various food options by car.

Flying around The Bahamas was definitely great fun and a rewarding and relaxing experience. The reggae tunes we listened to via Spotify and the intercom helped. I do have to say that as the only pilot in the group, I felt there was not enough time to actually sit back, relax and enjoy the place(s) – which is really what you should do when visiting The Bahamas. Next time, I would like to add a few more days to a trip like this (it wasn’t possible for us this time due to time constraints back at home).


(One of our running gags on the trip was how nice it would be to have the Intercom Crew Isolation button in the car as well, when the girls are sitting in the back )

We knew that the day of departure was going to be a long day: We had decided to maximize our time on The Bahamas, therefore planning to do the entire return trip on a single day in order to catch the intercontinental return flight out of Orlando the next day. What we did not foresee was just HOW long that day was going to be.

Very early on Saturday morning, we drove to the airport, paid up all our fees for the week (while many airfields on The Bahamas are free to use, there are some charges on Grand Exuma, but we always had great service there with smiling, friendly people so we did not mind at all), loaded the plane and off we went – back to San Andros to clear outbound customs and other formalities (filing a flight plan for the border crossing, notifying US Customs & Border Patrol of our planned arrival at Fort Pierce) and to top up fuel. It was also going to be the place where we had to wait out the cold front that was about the only significant weather on that day in Northern and Middle America and that lay precisely between us and Florida and was moving in our direction and was putting our chances of making it back to the US in time for our return flight to Europe at risk. Maybe because I’m less familiar with the American WX sources (I actually used 1800 WX BRIEF for a weather briefing before the flight) or maybe because I was too optimistic, but we actually attempted the flight, only to be rewarded with a very impressive view of a very distinct, but also impenetrable front ahead of us some 15-20 minutes flight time west of San Andros, where we returned to and waited. We waited in the “lobby” of the airport (which is used for some scheduled island flights) and joined the lady on duty in watching “Pretty Woman” on Netflix – while we saw our options to return home safely and on time diminish.

When finally the front had passed us, washed our aircraft clean of sand and dust, and presented text book clear skies with some scattered clouds, we were too late for our planned customs and fuel stop in Fort Pierce (which does not have a 24h customs facility), but we managed to switch our destination to Palm Beach International and arrived there around sunset.

The next challenge was how to proceed from here. At first, I had a tendency to stay overnight at Palm Beach and continue very early in the next morning (although in this scenario, we’d again loose our original hotel booking in Orlando and it would have been very tight the next day). The other option was to continue on a Night VFR flight from Palm Beach to St. Petersburg to drop the aircraft and drive with our rental car, which was parked there, to Orlando. The only problem was that I still wasn’t night current and the panel light was still broken… After some discussion and also encouragement by another pilot who had parked next to us and who had praised the clear and beautiful night that lay ahead, we decided to due the night flight. I used the red light to compensate for the broken panel light and regained my night currency by performing a single take-off and landing alone – something that the PBI controllers don’t seem to see everyday: “So you want to fly traffic patterns here at Palm Beach International? Well.. Alright! Taxi holding point…”.

That last of our flights turned out to be extremely nice and peaceful, crossing Florida from East to West in a clear, but dark night and arriving at Albert Whitted airfield at around 22:30. After unloading the plane, retrieving our remaining luggage (left in St. Pete due to the W&B issues we had with the Archer), loading the rental car, and getting McDonald’s food, my friend drove us to our hotel in Orlando, where we arrived just after 1:00 – a very long day indeed.

Here’s the video I edited with some of our shots from the trip:



Hungriger Wolf (EDHF), Germany

Wonderful Patrick! What a way to spread your wings a bit!

Private field, Mallorca, Spain

Thanks for taking the time to write this! Great impressions and great flying!

always learning
LO__, Austria

Great to read things like this thank you!

Now retired from forums best wishes

Great trip! I’ve done Staniel and Rum Cay as well. Staniel a few times… it’s one of my favorite places on earth. NYC to North Carolina, then straight to Marsh Harbor and then Staniel. Long day of flying but worth it!

EHLE, Netherlands

Great writeup, thanks ! One Q, as it comes up here on a regular basis: how did you handle immigration? Didi you travel on an ESTA or a visa? I ask, as the Q ‘can you leave and re-enter the US in a private airplane haviung initially entered on the ESTA’ keeps being asked.

Fantastic report Patrick.

How do you manage to enjoy such a trip being the only pilot in the group? I could imagine that while others would be relaxing on the beach I’d keep checking the weather trend every hour planning the next route. It appears that you had relaxed companions and made best of the situation.

Thanks for sharing.

EDMB, Germany

What an amazing trip Patrick !
You managed it like a pro ! The idea of making the pattern in PBI was great, a great example of the flexible thinking that makes the most of GA.
I would dream to have friends like yours :)
Like Arun above, I hope you could enjoy the trip and not just be the group’s pilot, which is rewarding but you wee in vacation too ;)

LFOU, France

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

172driver wrote:

Great writeup, thanks ! One Q, as it comes up here on a regular basis: how did you handle immigration? Didi you travel on an ESTA or a visa? I ask, as the Q ‘can you leave and re-enter the US in a private airplane haviung initially entered on the ESTA’ keeps being asked.

All four of us traveled on ESTA and it was no problem at all. It was the time of the government shutdown, but we experienced no problems (on the contrary: Trump cancelled his trip to Mar a Lago, so we did not need to worry about the TFR in the Palm Beach area). The CBP agents we were in touch with were very friendly and professional and the process very smooth.

Jujupilote wrote:

Like Arun above, I hope you could enjoy the trip and not just be the group’s pilot, which is rewarding but you wee in vacation too ;)

Haha – yes indeed it was rewarding but not necessarily relaxing. WX trend on the day trips wasn’t an issue though, as the weather on The Bahamas was quite stable (as it is, during that season). Worst, worst case we would have stayed on our day trip island overnight, should we not have been able to leave in the late afternoon, but there was never even a remote problem apart from the return day.

Next vacation will be two weeks in an all inclusive resort with an airline flights, a few books and nothing more.

Last Edited by Patrick at 16 Jul 07:37
Hungriger Wolf (EDHF), Germany

What an amazing trip! I am currently flying in Arizona, but haven’t had the chance to fly to the sea yet.
Just one comment: If you where looking for night currency under FAA rules, you needed 3 takeoffs and landings and all of them must be to a complete stop. And if that was not enough, they have to be done after sunset +1h, not just during the regular civil night.
Check 61.57(b) for reference
Actually I think that’s one of the regulations where I prefer EASA, when you have an IR, that fulfills the requirement!

P19 EDFE EDVE EDDS
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