About Me
I was born on Christmas Island and have Australian and Fijian Commercial Pilots Licences with over 3,500 hours of Seaplane experience. I have just over 3,500 landings on Floats and just over 1,000 in floating Hulls. I have flown Lake Buccaneer's, De Havilland Beaverson Straight Edo Floats and Whipline Amphibious Floats as well as a Grumman Mallard an Otter and C206's on both straight and amphib floats. This has been obtained working in Northern Queensland and the Kimberlies Australia, as well as the Fiji Islands while working in the Tourist industry and covered Reef, Island and Open Water conditions.
As well as working with Seaplanes I have done many things. Some examples are, Computer Tech, Glass bottomed boat driver, deckhand on several cruise boats, Taxi driver, Semi Trailer driver and just about anything in between, I even trained as a StuntMan for a while but that hurt too much. As of July 2006 I work at the Argyle Diamond mine as a controller for the Underground Project.
My greatest love is travel and photography of which I just can't get enough, I also had a tendancy of dissapearing on my yacht in the Whitsundays for up to 3 weeks at a time since I bought it in 1996 but sadly I had to sell it in the middle of 2001. However I can't resist a boat so just had a brand new custom built 5.1 Quintrex Coast Runner with a 90 Mercury Optimax delivered at the end of June 2006 so I am back on the water again.
Other than that, I have more interests than I can ever remember with my main ones being, Photography, Archery, Computers, Sailing and Travel. I am, unfortunately, interested in just about everything, especially outdoors stuff so my hobbies tend to wax and wane with my situation.
Advice to Seaplane pilots?? Well the two most important pieces of advice I could give a hopeful seaplane pilot, are 1/ never ever ever get to thinking you know it all, keep watching and learning and never ever ever commit yourself to a landing without an abort option firmly in your mind up till the point you have dropped off the step, because if you do a Seaplane just may kill you one day. 2/ Be flexible. Most times a skilled pilot can cope with anything as long as he stays flexible and never stops learning. Flexibility is way more important to a seaplane pilot than it will ever be to a landlubber. Also pilots by their nature have largish ego's but not all pilots are suitable to be seaplane pilots so be flexible and self critical there as well as there is no shame in saying "it's not for me" but there is much sadness if you die and shame if you take others out with you because of a large ego. Be humble, careful and be safe out there