Westbound (Part 2 of 3)

Part 1 is here.

Part 2 covers our onward flight to Cornwall, our stay there, the onward flight to the Scillies three days later and our stay there. Some excellent photos to come…

Since our plan was to stay in St. Ives (Cornwall) for a few days, we decided on the Land’s End Airport (EGHC) as our best base. Land’s End is a bit closer to St. Ives than Perranporth. Also, I have been to Perranporth before and wanted to get that other airfield with the characteristic name into my logbook. They have also paved their two main runways recently, taking the uncertainty about surface condition out of the equation. We PPR’ed them a couple of weeks before, and while they were very friendly, I thought “what an utter bullsh… making such a fuss about an arrival notification….” Anyway….

Since we still had a little bit of time to spare (our rental car at Penzance was booked for 5:30), we also decided to make another short stop at Bodmin (EGLA) airfield, further in the north of Cornwall.

Here’s the Skydemon map showing the first leg, with a calculated ETE of 23 minutes:

We were back at the airfield at around 3 o’clock, and a Robin had joined us in the meantime.

The winds were out of the west at about 15 knots. This, in combination with the good runway condition and our light TOW allowed us to be airborne after a little more than 200 meters (with 620 metres of runway available). Here’s an overview of the airfield and the scenery around:

It’s a place I really want to recommend to you all. Lovely!

We then turned westbound, along the shoreline…

…and quickly reached the outskirts of Plymouth. It’s quite a vast city, I’ve noted.

Here’s a glimpse of the closed Plymouth (EGHD) airport.

Beautiful!

Here’s the cute little Bodmin airfield. The main runway 13/31 is 610 metres long and has a noticable hump in it. It’s also relatively narrow, all making for an interesting, but not overly demanding landing.

We paid our landing fee, had a short talk with the people at the airfield and off we went (we didn’t refuel here, since we still had 17.5 gallons of fuel on board, which would allow us to land at Land’s End with about 12 gallons or one hour’s fuel). Here’s our planned route to St. Ives (via overhead Newquay and then along the shoreline all the way to Pendeen Lighthouse, then direct EGHC). You can also see St. Ives here. ETE: 28 minutes.

Here we are, approaching the overhead at Newquay (EGHQ) which was quite busy (understandably, given the season and the nice weather):

No comment.

Newquay town.

Perran Sands. In the background: Perranporth.

Perranporth airfield (EGTP).

More beaches.

And here is St. Ives. The sun wasn’t in a perfect spot for photos, but I did my best.

Here we are on a righthand base for runway 25 at EGHC. Sennen Cove and the the very southwestern tip of mainland Britain are in the backgound.

Backtracking to the apron. The new runways are obviously silky-smooth.

Since the cancellation of the regular helicopter services from Penzance to the Isles of Scilly (a few years ago), the Land’s End airport entered into a “boom”. Commercial traffic is both piston type (Islanders) and Turboprops (Dash 8s). Not only did they pave the runways, they also built an all-new terminal building. It has now become quite a pretty little airport.

We got Avgas from the self-serve fuel pump. 261 litres of fuel loaded, which meant that we still had about 50 litres of fuel on board. Fuel-computers are great!

By the way, the fuel price was a decent 1.70 £, which, after figuring in the drawback rate of roughly 38 Pence, worked out to 1.32 £ net, which, despite the miserable Euro/GPB exchange rates at the moment, comes out to about 1.87 € per litre. A tad less than in most places in France.

Parking for visiting light aircraft is on the grass, just in front of the tarmac. This worried us a tiny bit, since by now, we knew there would be quite a bit of rain over the next two days and we didn’t fancy having the aircraft sink into the mud. More on that later.

Since there are unfortunately no rental cars available directly on the airport, one has to go to Penzance to pick one up. Sadly, Enterprise didn’t offer us to bring it over (not even for a fee), so we had to take a taxi there. After picking up the car, we drove straight to St. Ives.

Call me mad, but I didn’t pre-book any accomodation at St. Ives. That’s because there were just too many unknowns about our arrival beforehand.

Quite expectedly, Trivago was showing no vacancies (at least not at reasonable prices). Also, the local tourist office didn’t offer any help at all. So, we ended up doing it the classic way, i.e. walking into a few hotels / guest houses and bingo, the second one had rooms available for us. That place (“The Regent”) turned out offering one of the most wonderful views over St. Ives one could imagine:

This once again showed the limits of Trivago. Even though they do in fact summarize all the information from various booking sites, they still don’t even remotely cover it all, since all too many places just don’t bother working with these booking services.

Anyway, as you can see above, the first evening was just wonderful. Here are a few more impressions:

Unfortunately, the next two days were cloudy (first day) and even rainy (second day). We still managed to get a nice round of Golf in at the local golf course. No real “beach time” though and no swimming. What a pity! But that’s flying in Britain. We mostly spent the second day at the sauna of the St. Ives Harbour Hotel, which comes recommended.

These photos are from the morning of day 3, our day of departure from St. Ives:

The weather was now very good for our short VFR flight over to St. Mary’s (EGHE). Here’s the Skydemon chart for that very short hop to reach the most westerly point of this trip:

We drove back to Penzance and took a taxi to the Land’s End airport (all went very smoothly). When we left the airport building towards the parking area, the place was “buzzing” again.

We were impatient to see the condition of the ground where we had parked, but to our relief, the grass was almost totally dry (after 35 mm of rain less than 24 hours before!).
Here we are, lined up on runway 34.

And here’s a nice look back at the airport:

Sennen Cove:

The Land’s End Monument:

The airspace between Land’s End and the Scillies is technically class Golf, however, in reality, it is treated much like class Delta by ATC. They asked us to fly at 3000 feet due to an Islander at 2000 feet heading the opposite direction.

Here’s the wonderful view of the Scillies, approaching from the east. Looks like the Bahamas!

We elected to make a low-level tour of the islands, which turned out, well, fantastic.

St. Martin’s:

Tresco (foreground) and Bryher (background):

And here’s the main island, St. Mary’s:

Our approach was via a lefthand base to runway 34:

Yippeee, we are on the Scillies!

In the parking area, we also saw the SR22G5 of Peter H. (the “other” Peter H. on the British GA scene; we also met him the next day as we both departed at the same time):

When “on tour”, the nice thing about short flying legs is that this leaves most of the day for activities at your destination. We landed at 10:30 local time, so we pretty much still had all the day ahead of us.

We had booked our accomodation the day before (no way I will fly to small island in high season without having booked something!). In this case, the local tourist office had been very helpful and pointed us towards “Beechfield House”, a friendly guesthouse just north of Hugh Town.

Here’s the view from that place:

And here we go with some impressions from St. Mary’s and Hugh Town:

We had a light lunch and then walked over to Porthcressa Beach, which is probably the nicest one on the island. It was also protected from the wind, so we could finally enjoy some real “beach time”. The water was crystal clear, but quite cold (expectedly so!) at about 15 degrees I would guess. We spent the early afternoon there.

What was remarkable was the amount of commercial traffic at the airport. On that Saturday, we counted a total of about 30 arrivals and departures. Well, it’s an island and it was high season after all.

In the late afternoon, we decided on another round of golf. The island’s golf course is a little basic, but the views over Hugh Town and over to the neighbouring islands are spectacular and we really enjoyed it.

As you can see on the photos, the next front was approaching already, but this time, we were lucky, in that it rained all night and when we got up for our all-English breakfast, the weather was back like this:

Our departure to France was planned for 3 o’clock in the afternoon, so we still had some time to enjoy the scenery…

…and of course those Cornish beef pasties!

This sight nicely rounded off our visit to the most southwesterly place in Britain:

Stay tuned for part three and the French side of this trip!