Today I flew N569DS to Voyager Village Airstrip (9WN2) in northwestern Wisconsin for a little kayaking and exploration. It was a “proof of concept” flight, my hope is that this will become a yearly tradition on or around the summer solstice.
For the past several years I’ve flown to Boscobel for coffee at Timber Lane Coffee somewhere around the winter solstice. This gives me something to do with an airplane, aside from flying around in circles, when days are short and recreational opportunities are limited. The objective is only to do something and get back to Madison before dark.
This inevitably begged the question: if I can race the sunset at its earliest, why can’t I also race it at its latest?
I chose to establish solstice symmetry with a flight to somewhere to go kayaking. Didn’t matter where. I ultimately chose Voyager Village after looking into a few options in different corners of the state. It’s a two hour flight, there are options for food and various forms of recreation on the site, and it’s in an area that has been a part of my life since I was a kid.
So off I went! I chose to save myself some hassle on the trip home by stopping at Burnett County Airport (KRZN) to top off with fuel on the way to Voyager Village. Siren tends to have the best fuel price in the northwestern quadrant of Wisconsin. I filled up with about 19 gallons at $4.99 per gallon. This is a very good price for aviation fuel.
(Yes, I could have flown above or below the clouds rather than plowing right through them, but where is the fun in that?)
After I’d completed my fuel purchase in Siren, a guy pedaled up to me on a folding bike and handed me an “airplane for sale” flyer. I told him I was headed to Voyager Village. We talked a bit and then bid adieu and I departed for Voyager Village.
Another plane landed at Voyager Village shortly after me. To my surprise, a familiar face popped out: the guy I’d met at Siren a few minutes before. Turns out his name is “O.T.” and he’s an aircraft mechanic and inspector at Burnett County. Lunch at Voyager Village sounded like a good idea to him, so he grabbed a friend (Tom W., a retired Northwest Airlines pilot) and hopped over to join me.
He paid for my lunch. Spectacularly nice guy.
We had an enjoyable discussion over lunch at Voyager Village Bar & Grill, then they returned to Siren and I headed toward the pro shop to pick up a kayak.
Kayak rental was a simple matter of presenting a driver’s license at the Voyager Village Golf Shop. The cost was $10 for two hours. This includes the boat, the paddle, and a life jacket. You can also rent by the day. I didn’t think to ask about the price for a full day. I don’t much care about prices on trips like this.
The walk to Birch Island Lake is easy, taking ten minutes if you are in no hurry whatsoever. The kayaks are locked on a rack next to a boat ramp; you’re given a key that unlocks one of them. Unlock it, take it down, toss it in the water, paddle around to your heart’s content, then reverse the process and return the key to the Golf Shop. Painless. I had plenty of time to explore the property on my bike and grab dinner afterward.
The trip was a success and a delight in every way. The lake, the facilities, and the weather were lovely.
What did I learn about flying?
On the return flight I learned that it can be a chore to get an IFR clearance departing a VFR-only airport in the boondocks. Long story short, you can get an IFR clearance by phone from a VFR-only airport. I wasn’t sure about this at the time so I chose to do it in the air. Various circumstances interacted to make this a little sketchy:
- Minneapolis air traffic control cannot hear you, and/or you cannot hear them, until you’ve climbed to at least 5,000 feet in this area. You can’t get an IFR clearance until you can hear them and they can hear you.
- There was a scattered-to-broken cloud layer at 5,000 feet or so. I can’t touch clouds until I have an IFR clearance. I had no idea where the top of this layer was; it could well have excluded me from flying visually within about a 3,000 foot vertical block once cloud clearance requirements were taken into account.
- I think picking around for holes in the clouds to climb or descend through is a bad practice so I don’t do it regardless of whether I’m flying VFR or IFR.
The cloud layer turned out to be a little higher than I’d expected, so I was able to level off above 5,000 feet long enough to get my IFR clearance from Minneapolis. From that point onward clouds didn’t matter. But I got lucky. I should have done it on the ground.
(I always had the option of saying “screw it, I’ll just fly VFR until Eau Claire and worry about it there.” This was not a low clouds, low visibility, questionable safety of flight scenario.)
What did I learn in general?
Voyager Village is a special place! I hope that this trip will become an annual summer solstice tradition. I also wouldn’t mind spending a few days at one of the Vrbo/Airbnb rental homes on the property once or twice a year. Maybe once in the summer and once in the winter?