Splash and Dash Searey Seaplane Delights
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What do you see?
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 Photo Info
Posted By: Don Maxwell
Date Posted: Feb 4, 2016
Description: As soon as possible after the recent big snowstorm I had to go flying.

What I saw was sort of like looking at negatives of black and white film. The colors are binary and reversed, and almost everything you see looks strange, inverted, almost alien. Sometimes you aren't sure of what you're seeing.

These tracks, for example, would hardly be noticeable without the snow. With it, they're obvious and stark.
Date Taken: 2016-01-26
Place Taken: Near Richmond, Virginia
Owner: Don Maxwell
File Name: Track in the Snow.jpg   - Photo HTML
Full size     - <img src="/show.php?splash=6yxTx3kODh">
Medium    - <img src="/show.php?splash=6yxTx3kODm">
Thumbnail - <img src="/show.php?splash=6yxTx3kODs">
Category: Max_Pix
Favorite option: If you want this item to be marked as a favorite, click on the black heart. After the Mid-Atlantic Snowstorm    Make Cover Photo     
Clear Cover Photo      

Click on photo to view the original size.
Viewers 

  

Read what others had to say:

Don Maxwell - Jan 29,2016   Viewers  | Reply
    Here's a similar one, but closer to civilization.


         Donuts 		    
  
Don Maxwell - Jan 29,2016   Viewers  | Reply
    The boardwalk through this marsh from parking lot to a park on the Appomattox River is all but
invisible in normal weather. Barney McGlaughlin's seaplane base is at top center, where the river
bends sharply. Alas, Barney has moved south.


         Bored Walking 		    
  
Don Maxwell - Jan 29,2016   Viewers  | Reply
    Barney's hangar is still there, though. I didn't get a photo of it this time--but it looks like a two story
house, with window boxes and all--except that one entire side is a door that swings up to admit and
discharge a seaplane.

Within a few miles of Barney's hangar there are various other kinds of housing. These cheese boxes,
for example, are just across the river and slightly downstream. Inside is not cheese, though. It's a
prison.


         Cheese Boxes 		    
  
Don Maxwell - Jan 29,2016   Viewers  | Reply
    Here are some civilian boxes. Whether they're more civil or not, I can't say. Good fences may
make still good neighbors.


         Yard Boxes 		    
  
Don Maxwell - Jan 29,2016   Viewers  | Reply
    Some boxes are built of sticks, <I>in situ</I>; others, of metal, in factories. Are the dwellers very
different from one another?

This neighborhood seems to be pointing toward the I-95 "river," just beyond it. There's no easy way
to ford that river.


         Manufactured Homes 		    
  
Nickens, Dan - Jan 29,2016   Viewers  | Reply
    Yeah, but do you have any pictures of the little houses made of ticky tacky covered with snow, Don?

Oh, wait! You do. You just have to click on the photos to see the detail and realize all the colors are black and white. 		    
  
Don Maxwell - Jan 29,2016   Viewers  | Reply
    Well, Dan, I was trying to keep this upbeat--it was a nice flight, after all. But now that you've said the magic words, ticky tacky, we'll just have to contend with Malvina Reynolds all over again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUoXtddNPAM

As for the details, clicking certainly helps; but the image you'll get depends on the size of your display--because the click-image exactly fills the screen from side-to-side. If it's taller than the screen, you can scroll up and down. But you can't pan sideways because there's no place to go. So the display width limits the resolution of the image, no matter how large the original uploaded image is.

On my 13 inch (diagonal) laptop, for example the click-image fills the screen from side-to-side--11 inches wide--but the file I uploaded fills about 2.6 of my laptop screens side-to-side and about the same vertically. So there's a lot of detail lost on the narrow display.

But on Carol's new 27 inch iMac retina display (which I covet!) the click-image is a little over 23 inches wide, so the resolution is more than four times as good on her computer than on my little laptop.

On the other hand, with an iPhone or iPad (and probably Android gizmos, too) you can zoom in by spreading your fingers apart, and then you can scroll and pan to see parts of the image in hi-res.
    
  
Don Maxwell - Jan 29,2016   Viewers  | Reply
    This neighborhood is more given to curves. And it keeps the residents well away from each other.


         Sweeping Curve 		    
  
Don Maxwell - Jan 29,2016   Viewers  | Reply
    This one is a planned community--although I'm not sure of what the planners intended. They had to
plow up a perfectly good airport in order to plant those houses and scour out the serpentine lake.
Then they had to install bubblers in the lake to combat the algae that blooms there, ruining the skating.

Ah, but there's no guessing about communities from the outside--or from 1000 feet above. At ground level this one
turns out to be filled with pleasant people from several different countries and many walks of life. A
century ago, some might have been masters and slaves. In our time they seem to get along just fine. Weird.


         JOJ middle 		    
  
Don Maxwell - Jan 29,2016   Viewers  | Reply
    Here are some unplanned serpentines. No airports were harmed in their construction. The river is
the Appomattox, just upstream from its confluence with the James.


         RR Snakes 		    
  
Don Maxwell - Jan 29,2016   Viewers  | Reply
    Not far downstream from that confluence is this DuPont chemistry set. Occasionally it vents vapors
that create yellow smoke while it produces fluids and materials used daily by the residents of all the
houses.


         Chemistry Set (Experimental) 		    
  
Don Maxwell - Jan 29,2016   Viewers  | Reply
    Not all is residential or industrial, though--and not all change is destructive. This used to be a
freshwater tidal marsh. Then someone with a lot of money built a dam and converted the marsh into
a private lake. More recently the lake was passed on to a university to become the Rice Center for
research purposes. The Rice Center blew up the dam, and now the marsh is reappearing more or
less naturally. The Rice Center monitors the local sturgeon population, among other projects. A
couple of years ago they caught, examined, and released a couple of nine-footers a short distance
upstream, where they had swum to spawn. The research station is lower left, with the solar panels
on the roofs of the boathouses.


         Was a Lake 		    
  
Don Maxwell - Jan 29,2016   Viewers  | Reply
    And about half a mile north of the marsh/lake/marsh is a brand new airport, Keith Brittle's "Pilots
Grove" (VA05), 2400 feet of the smoothest green turf a pilot could wish for. It used to be a horse
farm before Keith began improving it, and the hangar used to be an indoor horse exercise arena.
Now it houses a Rans S7 and the new plane that Keith is building from plans.


         Keith Brittle''s Field 		    
  
Don Maxwell - Jan 29,2016   Viewers  | Reply
    About a mile west, just out from Keith's runway 27 is what I call Wham-O Lake--now that I've seen it surrounded by snow. It's about the same length as Keith's turf runway, and every time I fly over it I'm tempted...

At the extreme right edge of this photo is a model airplane flying field with a N-S grass runway about 500 feet long.

That's the James River beyond, and in the upper right City Point, where the Appomattox meets the James. For several months near the end of the (so-called) Civil War it was the busiest seaport in the world.


         Wham-O Lake 		    
  
Don Maxwell - Jan 29,2016   Viewers  | Reply
    A few miles farther west I came across this tug and barge heading down the James River with a load
of... what? Gravel? Sand? Garbage?


         Barging Down the River 		    
  
Don Maxwell - Jan 29,2016   Viewers  | Reply
    ""Garbage""! Oh my, now I have to reply to myself with this ditty of Pete Seeger's:

Here's a link to my favorite rendition of the song, with Oscar the Grouch singing along: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvYAoAiPN80

And one with Oscar in person and Tom Chapin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAyom4zZUM4 		     Attachments:  

Garbage.mp3


    
  
Nickens, Dan - Jan 29,2016   Viewers  | Reply
    If Oscar likes it, it has to be REALLY good stuff.     
  
Don Maxwell - Jan 29,2016   Viewers  | Reply
    Just upstream from the barge (and just down from the site of the Citie of Henricus, one of the early
English settlements founded before John Winthrop & Co. alighted on Plymouth Rock) is this
supposedly clean electric power generating facility. (I.e., a coal-fired power plant.) Power to the
people in all the boxes!


         Power to the People 		    
  
Don Maxwell - Jan 29,2016   Viewers  | Reply
    Some things don't change much. Or they do. It seems to depend a lot on how we choose to think
about them. In any case, here's the James River a few miles down from Richmond, flushing the
snowstorm away. Soon all the pictures will be positives again and we'll be back to our normal way of seeing.


         Ice Floes Flowing 		    
  
Nickens, Dan - Jan 29,2016   Viewers  | Reply
    Even if nothing else changes much, a little change of perspective can be stimulating. Before I rose to summertime here on the other
side of the planet I lay in bed and enjoyed your winter tour. Strange, though, I got up chilled. Now Ann is sitting across the
breakfast table shaking her head at my hot chocolate and warmup shirt. 		    
  
Dave Lima - Jan 29,2016   Viewers  | Reply
    Pardon the pun..but *very cool* pictures professor...nice to see you out and about!     
  
John Dunlop - Jan 29,2016   Viewers  | Reply
    Indeed!     
  
D'Angelo, Kevin - Jan 31,2016   Viewers  | Reply
    looks like our world most winters- I think winter moved south     
  
Carr, Frank  - Jan 31,2016   Viewers  | Reply
    Interesting patterns in that cold world, Professor.     
  
Don Maxwell - Feb 04,2016   Viewers  | Reply
    The landing at the end of this flight was fun, with a gusty crosswind. Video at https://youtu.be/zLB2a3Swh7I     
  
Carr, Frank  - Feb 06,2016   Viewers  | Reply
    Actually quite an instructional video Professor. Including: the wisdom of a go-around when things are not happy, a stabilized
approach with the upwind wing down and rudder to point straight, and good use of the stick to counter the wind on the ground. Could
be used in some instructional syllabus. All except the naughty word. :-) 		    
  
Don Maxwell - Feb 06,2016   Viewers  | Reply
    Tsk. It was a compound naughtiness, beginning with the second person pronoun in the nominative case and invoking motherhood, sort of.     


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