Saturday May 6th, 2006

Greetings from Jacumba!

Yesterday evening we pulled into a little airport named Jacumba (L78), about 80 miles east of San Diego. Its a gravel strip, 2,508 feet long, in the middle of, well, nowhere... Situated about 1,500 feet north and parallel to the Mexican border (as you can see by the photos), flying here gave us a rather unique perspective of the immigration problem. (There are at least 3 border patrol agents assigned to this small stretch of border... That probably indicates something.)

Upon waking at 5, there was a relatively steady breeze out of the southwest of 7 miles per hour. It wasn't until 7 that the ceiling was above 1,000 feet, and then Michael and I took off. It was important for us to inspect and test our PPCs after hauling them across the country. Fortunately, with the exception of a slight communication problem on Michael's PPC, which he later corrected, all systems checked out fine.

I was particularly interested in how the Voyager performed at higher field elevations. The field I usually fly from is at 500 MSL, and Jacumba is at 2,844 MSL. After checking the border for any potential stray immigrants, I took Voyager up to 2,000 AGL, and was quite satisfied. But I'm fairly certain I'm going to put the 550 chute on after the first few legs, to more easily get over the higher elevations.

We were planning on staying here through Monday morning, but with absolutely no way to communicate with the outside world (there's no Internet access, nor cell phone towers anywhere in the area), we've decided to move on to a location a bit closer to civilization this afternoon.