Day 3 of our 4 day trial flight. You may remember from my blog yesterday that my fuel cap had come off & I’d lost a lot of fuel while flying around so this morning we arrived early at the Murray Bridge airfield to see if we could get this cap fixed – and thankfully we did.

I’d like to greatly thank Chief Flying Instructor Mike Chapman for all his help with getting this sorted out – he gave us a part of his own aircraft to enable us to carry on our journey this morning. Thanks Mike!

After repairing the fuel cap & managing to get all 3 planes fueled up (which was fantastic as we thought this wouldn’t be possible at Murray Bridge), we got a photo of the team – see below.

Members of the OWC team at Murray Bridge:
Front (L-R) – Dave & Gordon
Back (L-R) – Paul, Linda & Michael

As we left Murray Bridge, the team split up as one of the OWC team members Michael, headed back to his home town of Griffith. On this trial flight, we were fortunate to have an additional person come along & help out.

Thanks to Adrian Lucas for stepping in while 2 members, Bob & Lida were unable to join us on this trip. Adrian had been flying together with Michael & he too went back to his home town of Griffith with Michael.

Adrian Lucas helped us out greatly on this trial flight. Thank you!

Next stop was Mount Gambier in the round trip back home, however like the heat that his us on Day 2, on Day 3, it was the smoke. As you can see in the photo below, the smoke was so dense that at times you could barely see the ground.

The dense smoke we flew through from fires nearby.

We arrived at our end-point today of Ballarat in the early afternoon & met many members of the Ballarat Aeroclub. We greatly appreciate their kindness & generosity in helping us get the planes tired down, made us coffee & drove us to our hotel that we had booked in the centre of Ballarat.

Just one last leg of our journey to go tomorrow. Linda & myself will head back home to Melbourne while Gordon & Paul head back to their home of Griffith.

Stay tuned for the final part of this trip tomorrow.

Over & out,

Dave.