After visiting our respective restrooms, I continued narrating at the plane. "I always check the fluids again; gas, oil and my bladder. It's a safe assumption that nothing else changed. The rest of the routine stays the same as far as starting up, taxiing and takeoff. My plan is to climb until we're more than half way across the channel. That way, if anything goes wrong we can glide to a shoreline in either direction."

We lifted off Catalina to the southwest. The terrain fell away to the ocean. If the engine quit then, our best option was to put it in the water, as close to a beach as possible and swim or walk in. We turned back toward the mainland. Half way across the channel, I called a controller and set up another instrument flight plan and received routing through the complicated L.A. airspace.

For this flight, I took the left seat and showed April how I navigated. With her significant past in sailing she had no trouble understanding the compass principles and directional radials emanating from the VOR stations on the ground. The behavior of the needles on the instruments wasn't quite as straightforward but I knew she would catch on quickly.

"You'd think they'd make a more user-friendly display," she said.

"They have. But this panel has sixties technology that still works. You can follow along using the iPad if you like. I'm allowed to use it for navigating but only if all this other stuff is working. In other words, it can't be the only tool."

"Who's watching?"

"No one."

The radio chatter quieted. "I have a story about this place," I said.

"And.."

"No, another thing to read."

"This place being?"

"Here. Five thousand feet up in the middle of the channel. It's something I wrote for a writing class many years ago."