Back in the Saddle

Many of my friends in Northwest Indiana do not know much about my past in aviation. I started flying when I was a Junior in high school and have been hooked on aviation ever since. I have accumulated over 6000 flying hours in everything from gliders to corporate jets since high school. I am a commercial pilot with the ratings of airplane single engine land & sea, airplane multi engine land instrument airplane. I am also a flight instructor with the ratings of airplane single and multi engine instrument. I am a gold seal flight instructor. The gold seal means I have an 80 percent or better success ratio with my students passing their FAA check rides the first time. I began flying professionally after my graduation from Lewis University in 1997. I began flight instructing and then moved up to flying corporate and charter jets. I have flown many rich and famous people, but the most memorable was flying Colin Powell during one of his speaking tours in the year 2000.That is me on the left. I had a little more hair back then.

Most of my commercial flying time is in the Cessna Citation Jet. Flying the Citation was fun and it took me all over North America, but what I really wanted to do was become an Alaskan bush pilot. The closest I ever came to becoming a bush pilot was flying the Citation into a dirt strip at Molsen Lake Lodge in Manitoba Canada. I do not think our Indian guides had ever seen a jet before the way the were gathering around the plane and carrying on.



I managed to catch quite a few big gators on that trip.

The most fun I ever had flying was getting my commercial sea plane rating just after graduating from college. I got the rating in a Piper Super Cub on floats up at Northwoods Aviation in Cadillac Michigan. I was quite a bit thinner and had all my hair back then. I has planning on heading for Alaska that summer, but the lure of flying jets and an eventual airline job kept me home.




I got out of aviation in 2003 because the events of 9/11 2001 made it hard to get into the airlines and I had opened my tackle shop, "Creekside Outfitters" in 2002. Creekside was doing well enough that I did not need the pay check from flying anymore and I got out. I closed Creekside in 2006 and tryed other jobs, but have recently decided to get back into aviation. I am currently working as a flight instructor for Eagle Aircraft http://www.jseagle.com/staff.php, at Porter County Airport,in Valparaiso Indiana. I will be flying corporate aircraft for a multi-national corporation within the next month.

I have had success as an instructor in the past week with two of my students passing their FAA check rides for Multi engine ratings.

Here is Loren Bailor with his Cessna 421 "Golden Eagle". Loren passed his private pilot multi engine rating check ride on 08/15/2008.


Today 08/18/2008, my student Dick Farina passed his commercial pilot multi engine instrument FAA check ride, flying Eagle Aircraft's Piper Seminole.


If anyone out there would like to learn how to fly with me follow the link to Eagle Aircraft in my links. Don't worry folks. I still consider myself as an angler who likes to fly, rather than a pilot who like to fish.

We have been having fun all summer long.

I really have to say that the steelheading in Northwest Indiana and Southwest Michigan has not been very good this summer. We had to work very hard and cover a ton of water to get any numbers of fish. Of course we have our honey holes that always produce, but fishing has been tough in general. I started off my summer on the Lakefront. The action was slow on average, but I managed a fish or 2 each time out. I did have a few awesome days, but they were much fewer than in past years.

Here is one of my best fish of the summer.














I even had a few evenings out on the pier were 2 of my rods had fish on at the same time and I had bystanders catch the second fish. Young Avery just happen to be standing by my rods when I had a double and he got to catch his first steelhead.














For me, the evenings were more productive than the early mornings.














The creeks yielded a few fish also, but we really had to work for them up until the past few days. We have manged to catch steelhead fly fishing, spinner fishing, and float fishing with various baits.Greg took this fine chromer on a white flying bunny.














The awesome #3 Indiana Orange spinner did the trick for Jeff. This silver bullet nearly ripped the rod out of his hands when it struck.
















The creeks have been fishing very well the past few days. I have been averaging 3 fish per hour spent fishing. It looks like the summer run steelies have finally began to run. The fish are chrome and the fights are unbelievable.