One leg down, 5 to go

Well, the first part of the trip was a good stretch. The initial plan was to fly to Jesup, GA then to FT Pierce but after tooling down the road a few hours it was clear that I could make it all the way to FT Pierce in one hop. In this case that one hop was 4 hrs 37 minutes, ~725 nautical miles, longest leg I've ever flown. This was a great verification that I've got the legs to make it to Aruba. All my calculations say that it isn't a problem but when I leave the southern side of Hispaniola(Hati and the Dominican Republic) all that math doesn't make me feel much better. What does make me feel better is having proof in a really long flight over land where there are plenty of places to land should I come up short. I didn't come up short and so I'm feeling great about the 2 legs tomorrow.

The first leg will be, 569 nm out of Ft. Pierce, FL over the Bahamas into Provinciales, Turks Caicos, more commonly known in little airplane pilot circles as just "Provo". Lots of small aircraft making their way to and from South America come through Provo. Ahem, Insert drug runner joke here.
It's really sad I'm not taking some time to smell the roses along the way. I'm sure there is Scuba Diving and all kinds of other tropical Goodies I could get into but alas I've got a schedule to keep and a Job to get back to...

From Provo I'll motor 589 nm to Aruba. This will be the leg that gives everybody the willies. After I pass over the south side of the Dominican Republic I've got ~340 nm of nothing but deep water. I even checked the Depth: ~4000 feet. That is deeper than I can stand in so I brought a few things to keep me safe:

1. Personal Locater Beacon or PLB
2. Life Jacket
3. 2.5 gallons water
4. Raft
5. EPRIB
6. Hand Held Radio
7. Granola bars

I put them in the order in which they are valuable in the event I get forced down in the water.
First Item is a PLB. This gadget is the reason why the idea of this over water stuff doesn't bother me so much. It has a GPS receiver along with a transmitter. When you "hit the button" (actually when you press the 2 buttons for more than 5 seconds) it takes your coordinates and sends them up to military satellites and they look up the info associated with the PLB. They try to call you. If they don't find out that you are OK then they send out the cavalry. The US Coast Guard will tell you that if you are a lone person in a life jacket in the ocean you are dead. The ocean is just too big and you are too small but since this technology has come along they have actually picked up people in the ocean with just a PLB at night! So this PLB technology is pretty good stuff and takes the worry out of getting lost at sea. When it works this takes all the guess work out of search and rescue. Even if they have a good idea of where you went down the uncertainly about how you glided and where you drifted leads to huge areas to search in but with this gadget they just come and pick you up.

Life jacket: Treading water gets old after about 15 minutes. With the PLB I've been told that ~4 hrs is a reasonable wait time for a rescue so Life Jacket seems prudent. It's also required. The water is 80 F and you can survive a long time in 80 F but not treading water.

2.5 gallons of water: You can survive a long time without food but water... not too long. this should let me survive for ~3-4 days.

Raft: Well if your going down in the water a raft will make it much more comfortable. This is really a necessity in the North Atlantic but a bit creature comfort here.

EPIRB: Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon. This is an old school PLB. it's just a beacon that they need to pick up the signal of an then home in on you. They are not tied to a particular person, there is no body to call when one goes off, they all look the same electronically, and so the have to track down every single one that goes off as if there is an emergency. This slows down the response time greatly. The number of False alarms is very high and the emergency response to an EPRIB isn't nearly what it is for the PLB. Still its way better than nothing.

hand held Radio: Well its always nice to have someone to talk to... This would let me tell aircraft overflying me about my predicament and try to get help. This is like a 3rd level backup.

Food: Not going anywhere for a while? If you're stuck in the middle of the Caribbean sea you might was well have something to munch on. Not really all that necessary though.

As for the actual landing in the water part. This has been done with favorable results:
http://www.vansairforce.net/articles/Ditching.htm

So really, the water isn't all that bad. If I get forced down for some reason I'll lose the plane for sure but it is insured for that sort of thing. I'll miss it, I don't want to lose it but I built it to fly where I want to fly and in the end I can build another.