It's that time of the year again.

Line transect surveys.

I tried to schedule my flights last week, but the feds got in first, and booked almost the entire week to count their feral horses.

And got rained out every day.

Come Monday morning and we had sunshine. Or at least, enough sunshine.

As I bragged to the wife... either Mother Nature likes our outfit a whole lot more than she likes the feds...

Or she likes her wild pronghorn more than their loose livestock.

So five of us spent last Friday setting up the plane. Clamping the band markers onto the struts, mounting the laser rangefinder to the wing. And making sure the various PDAs to be used in the surveys all bluetoothed properly with the laser.

The pilot was off on flights, but his mechanic stopped by the hangar once, just to see how we were doing. With a look of slight dismay as we crawled in and out of his baby, ripping pieces off (literally) and screwing our pieces on.

We needed to add the outfit's newest gadget, a satellite transponder that would allow folks on the ground to track our flight over the internet, with a new location every two minutes.

There's only one power plug on this Cessna, over a half-century old. I asked the pilot how many times we could safely split that power source.

"Maaaybe twice," he answered.

Okay. So maybe we won't tell him we've already split it three times, and are trying to figure out how to split it yet again...

This is what the pilot's lap looked like when we took off:

You got three sets of headsets tapped into the one box (run off the power plug) and then a second box that ties in the portable radio with state frequencies to our headsets (which we couldn't figure out how to splice into the powerplug, to it ran on batteries). Then you got the PDA mounted on the co-pilot (my) yolk, with its powercord and another cord running to the GPS antenna on the dash. Also on the dash is the satellite transponder, (which we tried on batteries, but that didn't work so it also was spliced into the powerplug). And then there was the powercord for the laser, which runs up from the powercord splitter hanging by my right hand up through my fresh air vent and threaded through the inside of the wing to come out midway and drop down to the laser.

And yeah, I got my camera on my lap, too.

We had only two problems all day. One minor, one major.

The minor problem was this:

Clouds nestled down on the Continental Divide.

Problem is, our western-most transects need to go over that Divide.

But not today. As the pilot said, "Don't think you can fly your survey under 50 feet..."

And the major problem?

Well that didn't surface until we finished our first three-hour flight and were preparing to go up again with a new observer. But you can see the problem in some of the following pictures.

And no, it wasn't the wind.