Rookery Bay

Every Friday night there is a sunset  cruise of Rookery Bay organized by the Conservancy of Southwest Florida. Rookery Bay is south of Naples just west of the road to Marco Island.  The bay and its islands form part of the Ten Thousand Islands region.

The Good Fortune II

The pontoon boat, Good Fortune II (it does make you wonder if her predecessor had some bad fortune?), holds about thirty people plus a captain and two naturalists. We set sail a little early, about 4:30 p.m., from the dock on Shell Island Road because the tide was scheduled to be especially low this evening.  The captain did not want to get stranded on return.

After the standard safety briefing we pulled out into Hall Bay and began immediately spotting things.  First was a dolphin who surfaced and dived about 200 yards from our boat.  He was near shore, alone, and obviously hunting for dinner in the shallow waters as the tide was running.

Soon we came upon a spot where some bald eagles had set up a nest and raised their brood.  The young eagle have grown a lot and gotten bigger.  A little like teenagers, they got angry when their parents did not bring home as much food as the young ones thought was proper.  And, again like teenagers, they tore up the eagle nest where they were raised.  So now, everyone is simply sitting in trees.  This is of course also the way the adult eagles teach the young eagles to hunt for their own dinner.  But it makes a nice story for the tourists.

Bald Eagle on Slash Pine

We hung about for a while to see what might transpire, but the eagles simply sat in the trees and watched the tourists. I began to realize that either because of the depths (shallow) or concern for the wildlife (it is the Conservancy, after all), the boat was not going to get very close to the trees or the birds.  The Conservancy naturalist told about DDT and how it nearly wiped out the bird population until it was banned in 1974 as a result of increased attention to the environment ("Silent Spring" and all that). The male adult bald eagle simply sat there, looking regal.  He did not move much.  Eventually, we simply moved along the bay to see what else might appear.

Tricolored Heron

We did have a pretty good luck spotting the tricolored heron which sports a distinctive white breast and blue-grey feathers on his back.  We saw several of them as we motored past the red mangroves that predominate here. When the bird is in breeding plumage, they have long blue filamentous plumes on the head and neck, and buff ones on the back. This is a pretty bird, walking in the shallow waters and hunting for fish who might mistake his shadow for a protecting tree.

The highlight of the trip might have been the osprey, simply because we were able to get

Mother osprey with fledgling

close to them and watch the mothers feeding the fledglings with fresh fish that the fathers had caught and brought in.  The parents will tear the fish apart, and for the very young, they eat the fish and regurgitate it into the mouths of the chicks.  As the chicks mature, they don't need the pre-eating service anymore, but they still wait hungrily for the parents to deliver dinner.  And they are pretty vocal about their hunger pangs.

This mother sat vigilantly up on the next, tearing a fish apart and feeding the pieces to her chick beside her.  They both kept a close eye on our boat as we hovered nearby, but clearly they also felt they had little to fear from tourist snowbirds.  A little bit further along, we saw a male osprey

come swooping in with a very large fish in his talons.  It must have weighed nearly as much as he did, and he found it necessary to set the fish down on a tree and recover his breath from the battle. Indeed, we wondered if he would have difficulty flying off the tree branch with the fish in his claws.

The Good Fortune II circled around for a while, but the osprey family kept watching us and not making a move to shift the fish over to the nest.  We suspected that our presence made them cautious.  So, we motored on.

Brown Pelican

On our left side was Keewaydin Island, one of the barrier islands that protect the Everglades from hurricanes and storms.  People do own property on the island, but today they are restricted from selling it to anyone but relatives.  There is no power, water or sanitary facilities on the island, so it is a pretty rustic lifestyle.  The sand is shallow and sits on a bed of shells. This is a favored breeding ground for the loggerhead turtle, but we did not see one.  We did pass a trio of young brown pelicans who seemed to be waiting for better fishing conditions. 

At last the Good Fortune II turned into Rookery Bay itself.  We could see large numbers of birds resting on the islands in the bay, but our captain seemed not to want to get too close.  The naturalist told us that the guano smell can be pretty fierce if you're downwind because the birds really do pack themselves into the trees on these islands. We motored by at a considerable distance. Oh well.

Pretty soon we were returning to the dock at Shell Island Road.  We met a Wyndemere couple with similar travel interests to ours, so we agreed to go out to dinner together.  We drove a little further south on highway 951 to the Isle of Capri Road and stopped at the Capri Fish House.  It's a little restaurant in a building on the beach with a tent for overflow seating, and one very small but busy kitchen.  The food was great, my seafood platter being both enormous and fresh -- I could not finish the frog's legs -- but the service a little more than disorganized.  I thought Diego would never get us any bread or wine, but he eventually came through in most important respects. It was a good meal to finish off a pleasant evening.

Different Airports

This is a very different airport environment from Leesburg.  The big difference: no Washington DC SFRA to worry with, of course.  On the other hand, Naples has a tower.

Naples airport (KAPF) has a lot of general aviation jet traffic, a control tower, two intersecting runways, and what seems to be a zillion taxiways and ramps.  It can be very confusing until you catch on.  Moreover, the tower has the habit of telling you to "Report the courthouse on left base" (a big white building in south Naples) or "Report the toll booth" on left base, meaning the toll booths on I-75, conveniently about 2 miles from the runway.  Fortunately the runways are long and wide (6600x150), and the weather is usually, well, perfect. 

Approaching runway 05 KAPF

The airport is right on the coast.  When approaching runway 05, you turn base over the Gulf of Mexico, and it is not unusual to see dolphins in the water and sunbathers on the beach below while you're descending to the runway.

There is a good deal of student pilot work going on in the area, especially by foreigners who have been sent here by their airlines to get their pilot license -- what is called "ab initio" training in the airline business -- so some of the accents and pronunciation leave me puzzled.  But the tower controllers usually seem to understand and make themselves understood. 

Despite being a little testy at times with those who don't know their way around, the tower controllers can be very helpful too.  They don't mind clearing you to land on the grass beside the runway if you ask nicely, especially when they're not too busy.


The Citation and Gulfstream jets come zooming in here at their usual high speeds, and they have to mix with the Cessna 172's and taildraggers.  More than once I've been asked to "make maximum speed" because some Gulfstream is coming up behind me.


The neat thing is that our house is about 2.9 nm from the CYY VOR on the field, and just about directly under the flight path for runway 05-23.  I get to watch airplanes all day long, even while standing on the driving range at the club. And when I take off on runway 05, I fly right over our neighborhood.  The other day departure asked us to stay below 500 feet for separation from some incoming traffic, so we flew right over the house at 500 feet.

Social Media: Lessons for Public Diplomacy

Some of the bloom is "off" the social media rose.

Two years have passed since the initial demonstrations in Tahrir Square, and today not many journalists or other “new media” enthusiasts still claim that Twitter started, sustained or steered the 2011 Egyptian uprising.  Indeed, many of the participants vociferously challenge the idea that Twitter or Facebook were anywhere nearly as important as their own determined efforts.

As part of the reassessment of social media’s role, Marc Lynch, George Washington University’s leading Middle East political analyst, writes an immensely intelligent commentary in Foreign Policy. The subtitle foretells his principal point:   “How social media is hurting the Arab Spring.”  

(Image from Foreign Policy)

In his article, Twitter Devolutions, Lynch defines seven lessons, seven ways the Internet and social media played a role in the post-uprising struggles in several Arab countries. I think he is right in concluding that social media may have done more harm than good.

While Professor Lynch targets his critique on the impact social media made on the Arab countries, his article offers an equally valid insight into how Western diplomats, journalists, and academics misappraised the role of social media in those revolutions.

Indeed, there is a strong argument that in the Arab Spring, mis-reading and over-interpreting social media led to leaps of faith, even Western policy mistakes. There was too little attention to just how few individuals in the region actually use social media, where information comes from, and the insights obtainable from data-driven network analysis.

Marc Lynch

Marc Lynch believes social media serves academics, journalists and government analysts as a source of information and insight.  He says he relies on social media for information and unfiltered opinions from hundreds of Arab citizens every day.

This is the key lesson about social media, especially for public diplomacy: you go into social media to listen, not to talk.

Just recently, Twitter announced its intention to buy Bluefin Labs, a social analytics company that specializes in data about what people are saying about television programs while they are on the air.  For example, companies like CBS or HBO pay Bluefin for information about what is being said about them online, while shows are airing. It is invaluable to get those indications of opinion trends and sentiment shifts early, while you have time to act on them.

By now, everyone has heard of the “United Breaks Guitars” case and the viral video. As an example of how much the corporate world has learned since 2009, listen to the Airplane Geeks podcast  interview with Jon Bird, director of social media for American Airlines. Companies large and small are listening intently to their customers every second of the day.  And, more and more, corporations are agile in reacting to what they hear.

Is public diplomacy listening enough? Is our diplomacy agile enough?

[See the Public Diplomacy Council website for the original version of this post and comments.]

Tail Wheel Endorsement

I got my tail wheel endorsement today! We flew Naples (KAPF) to Immokalee (KIMM) to La Belle (X14) where they have a grass strip alongside the runway, and back to Naples.

All in all, it took a lot of three-point landings, wheel landings in crosswinds, zooming around the runways (but never a ground loop!), grass field landings, and soft field take offs. In fact, counting up all three separate days of flight training here in Florida, I believe we did 75 landings and take-offs.

Here is a link to Cloud Ahoy's record of the flight, recorded by my iPad as we flew it today.

I assembled some in-the-cockpit camera video into a YouTube record of what some of the training looked like.  As the below video shows, there were a few bounces, some "go-arounds", and for me -- a new landing technique -- the turning side-slip in a crosswind to make a landing. 

Getting my tailwheel endorsement was a great learning experience for me as a pilot.  Thanks go to my CFI, Ted Brousseau and his trusty, ever-so-forgiving Cessna 140A. 

Sunset Over The Fourth Fairway, White Course

It was just one of those very special sunsets over the lake at Wyndemere this evening. 

 

There is an eagle who roosts in one of the tallest trees near here, and I'm determined to get a good photo of him too. — at Wyndemere, Naples, Florida.

 

Number 4, the White Course

 

Key West

 We drove to Key West this morning, departing about 7:00 a.m. to drop off Luniquan at the Wigglebutt Inn, stopping at MacDonalds for breakfast to go, and heading south on highway 41 -- the Tamiami Trail or "Alligator Alley," as it is known.

On Duval Street

Around Miami, we slipped onto US Highway 1 -- the old road that runs from Key West to Maine, the entire length of the United States East Coast.  The ride on the causeway was pretty, too.  Water on both sides of the road, and an ever changing view of old and new Florida.  We stopped briefly at the John Penneykamp Coral Reef State Park -- an underwater park -- but decided to return tomorrow for some snorkeling and glass bottom boat tours.

So, after checking in at the Marriott Beachside Hotel in Key West, we headed over to the Conch Republic for lunch.  A walk down Duval Street was enlivened by the tee shirt parlours, bars and the occasional "gypsy chicken."  

   

In the mid-1800's, chickens were big business in Cuba. Breeders had purchased several varieties of Filipino fowl in Spain and brought them to the island, where they were selectively bred for size and aggressiveness--and  named the Cubalaya. The handsome gentleman here is a black breasted red. By the 1860's, when Cubans began to move to Key West, they brought their love for cockfighting (and their chickens) with them.

The Hemingway House

We did the tour of the Hemingway house. The mansion is replete with its collection of six-toed cats, now under some kind of unnecessary protection from the Department of Agriculture. It is still one of the largest properties on Key West and is owned by a private owner. The tour guides know their stuff and weave the Hemingway story into the history of the period very nicely.  It's at least the fourth time Marcia and I have been there and heard it, and there is always something new.

Bob, Natalie, Marcia and Brian

Well, it was nearing dusk, and so time to wander down to Mallory Square by the water.  There is a famed Sunset Celebration, a nightly arts festival that occurs at Mallory Square Dock every night. We stopped to take a photo of the four of us as headed toward the square.

Get me a drink!

It seemed only appropriate to have a libation with which to celebrate sunset, so we lined up at one of the sidewalk bars that were doing a brisk business.  

Sunset from Mallory Square

Soon the cruise ships began to pull away from the dock and the sun began to sink lower in the western sky.  A number of sailboats criss crossed in front of us, sails silhouetted against the sun and the cloud streaked sky. Toasts were hoisted, while street performers did their acts on the dock -- one guy pretended to do a show with trained cats, but in fact the cats seemed to be doing whatever they liked and the guy made up a commentary to fit their random actions. 

Mallory Square trinkets

Duval Street at night

There was stuff for sale, and  lots of traffic on Key West's Duval Street, which was very much alive tonight.  We dined at the Grand Cafe Key West.  We walked back to the Margaritaville bar and caught the shuttle back to the Marriott.  (The shuttle is by the way aplus for the Marriott, because taxis and other transportation in Key West seem very expensive.)

IFR to Shenandoah

The weather today looked great for some IFR practice, as well to get the rust off my unused flying skills.  I reached Jean-Pierre Leal Garcia, newly minted CSIP CFI, and we agreed to meet at 1300 at JYO. The avionics needed updating, and I was just finishing that when Jean-Pierre arrived.  After a quick look at a new Cirrus in an adjoining hangar, we filed for an IFR flight to Shenandoah Valley Regional in southwestern Virginia.

Upon lift off, we were in the soup almost immediately.  Jean-Pierre cautioned me about flying at less than full power in cruise climb and showed me how to use the IAS or Indicated Air Speed climb on our DFC-90 autopilot.  We set her for 130 knots and the plane set it's own vertical ascent rate.  I'll be using this trick from now on!

We got a few vectors from Potomac which gradually turned us toward CSN (Casanova VOR), and then gave us direct to KSHD.  While the MFD continually gives weather along the route of flight, I could not seem to raise the KSHD weather (AWOS broadcast) on the radios. I had about given up when Jean-Pierre pushed the squelch button.  Immediately we had sound. That's the second thing I learned in the first half hour!  With the weather in hand, we asked for the RNAV 23 approach to KSHD.

We were in the clouds all the way, with no sight of the ground since we left Leesburg.  Weather at KSHD was reporting about a 1000 foot ceiling, but we did not really have good visibility until we were about 600 feet above the ground.  We caught sight of the runway lights just a few hundred feet above the decision altitude, and slid in to a near-perfect landing.   The video here is compressed (I cut out many minutes of looking at the insides of clouds) but shows the landing and roll out.

After a little difficulty reaching Potomac Departure on the radio, we called on the phone to pick up our clearance.  Jean-Pierre swears by his new Bose aviation headset with the Bluetooth feature that connects your phone call through the headset.

Potomac gave us a SID, Shenandoah Two, because of the conditions.  You fly a climbing left turn off runway 23 to a 200 degree heading until you intercept the Montebello VOR (aka MOL) radial 036 inbound, and then continue to Casanova and STILL enroute to KJYO.

The requirement to pick up that MOL radial 036 was unexpected for me, and the SID did not pop up on the Garmin 430W "procedures" page.  Jean-Pierre explained a couple of different ways to do it, using the heading indicator with the VOR dialed in, or using the OBS key on the Garmin 430W.

We rocketed home with a 35 mile per hour tailwind, making about 185 knots over the ground (213 mph).  Requesting the RNAV 17 approach, we set up for HOAGE but in fact got vectored in at KORNY.  The glide slope refused to come in, so I hand flew the approach.  Later, on the ground, I realized that I had kept the PFD locked on VLOC-1 and so even though I had switched to GPSS on the autopilot, it could not pick up the glide slope without being in GPS mode.

Things were busy at JYO, with several planes jockeying for position in the pattern and one guy in a Cessna who appeared lost.  We chose the safe way and flew upwind, crosswind and downwind to enter final for Runway 17.  I'll post the video  of that landing too.

It was two.one hours of good fun and good training too.