Posted by The second and final leg of the first day was a shorter hop to Germany. After lunch had settled down, and a little walk around the site, it was time to depart. We spent about two hours on the ground.
The local danger areas were all inactive for the weekend, so I was able to fly a slightly different route from the original flight plan, just to the North outside the Frieschen Islands. I couldn’t raise Dutch MIL Info, as shown on the charts and also advised by Texel, instead talking with Amsterdam Information who gave a very good service. There seemed no need for a dedicated squawk because we have Mode-S, except to show who we were talking to.
At the German border near Borkum, I asked to change frequency. We switched over to Bremen Information, but had difficulty communicating with them. Their radio coverage in this area isn’t very good and we were relatively low down (about 2000 feet) – at one point we heard “All stations standby” and then no change later.
By this time we were approaching Wilhelmshaven, so called them direct and were given a straight in approach from about 20 miles out. I called final ridiculously early (embarrassingly so) and was called again when about 3 miles out asking for my position. Fortunately there was no other traffic reported and the area very quiet. For practice, I setup the LNAV approach procedure on the GPS, but this didn’t intercept using the autopilot, so I manually commenced the descent at the FAF for a good glidepath down to an 8/10 landing in gentle winds.
Our friends were already waiting for us (we had called them from Texel) and we had a very enjoyable two days staying with them. The weather was very hot (28C), so we went outside to the swimming baths and I also enjoyed my first outdoor German sauna. The local Jever beer was of course good, as was the Weissbier.
Flight time: 1:20
Next: Leg 3: Wilhelmshaven JadeWeser (EDWI) to Braunschweig-Wolfsburg (EDVE)