EAA Sport Aviation

do. Then, I silence her voice by pushing a button on the device. For the 10th time I marvel at how easy that is while wishing other people in my life were so easy to dispense with.

The glide is just about perfect as we sink toward the water. And then comes the moment, as it always does. About 100 feet in the air a surge of anxiety briefly courses through my veins. I’m about to land on a lake after all! For 35 years my flights have almost always began and ended on a runway. Well, almost always.

I feel for the water just like I would pavement or grass. The floats start to skim across the surface, and I quickly pull the throttle to idle. It’s pleasant enough until the speed slows and the floats fall off the step. Then the Cessna 172XP mushes into the lake as if someone punctured the floats and we are headed for the bottom. We slow rapidly as the weight of the water being displaced by the floats brings us to a stop.

FLOAT SCHOOL

I’m in northern Wisconsin for a seaplane instruction weekend. Curt Drumm of Lakeshore Aviation in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, owns and operates a Cessna 172XP on amphibious floats. He and one of his instructors, Dave Smeltzer, give seaplane instruction in the amphib to unsuspecting landlubbers like me. Curt also owns a cabin on Planting Ground Lake near Three Lakes, Wisconsin, where students can get the full immersion (pun intended) seaplane course. I’m here for a five-day weekend getting seaplane ratings with a couple of new friends.

Beau Bradley won a flight in a seaplane
with me, at the Gathering of Eagles auction
at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2011. His bid
benefited the Young Eagles program and, in
all honesty, it was the seaplane ride, not a
flight with me that Beau wanted. We both
came away from the experience wanting to
learn how to do it for ourselves. He and his
lovely wife, Deb, flew out from their
Ponderosa-sized cattle ranch in Montana
for the occasion.

The floats start to skim across the surface, and I quickly pull the throttle to idle.

capabilities of the pilots up front and in the intervening months and years has learned how to fly himself. He received his private pilot certificate last June and came up from North Carolina to join Beau and me for our seaplane weekend. Perhaps it’s because of his experience of standing on the wing of a sinking aircraft, but Clay has proven to be