High flying

After a few more days in Porto Heli I sailed alone the 30 miles to Poros which took 7 hours. There were very high and confused seas to begin with and I thought of turning back but on the other hand there was only a little wind so the situation was not dangerous. Then the sea flattened out to small ripples and the breeze became a flat calm so I used the engine most of the way. Strong winds and gusts came for last few miles so I did actually sail for a couple of hours. At Poros I managed to grab a mooring buoy on the second try which I was very proud of. The water at the edge of the channel here is very shallow so there's not much room for mistakes.

"Aquarella" (upper right) at the mooring buoy at Poros 

Some days later I decided to try the drone again. I wanted to have some footage from the air of myself painting on the beach. This is to be used in a coming art education video as a follow up for the ones I have produced for Pulsar Productions in Australia. 

The first scene is a general, arial view of the area, this I could do myself although it wasn't easy. After taking the drone up to quite a high altitude and turning left and right I wanted to take it back but it had other plans. It carried on going over the sea. On and on.

I panicked! 

I tried back and down on the remote.

Nothing happened

I tried turning left

It carried on sideways, but still over the sea. 

Then as a last resort I switched off the remote to automatically put it in GPS homing mode.

It obediently turned around and flew back to me, slowly descended and landed at my feet. 

Sigh of relief, good dog!

Me flying the Dji Phantom 2 drone with GoPro hero 3 camera at Poros                                  photo: Sam Butt

The next day I got my good friends Mike and Sam to help me with the scenes at the beach. The place I had found as subject matter for my painting was ideal with multicoloured stones at the water's edge. 

It was far from ideal for flying the drone. 

There, hanging right above the spot where I sat, were the main electricity cables from the mainland to Poros. Apart from that it was only a couple of yards from the road with heavy traffic! Then there was of course the water to avoid landing in. So the drone had to be flown and landed with utmost precision. Mike hadn't either tried a drone before but he quickly got the hang of it and manoeuvred it like an ace pilot with no mishaps at all.

After editing the sequences and encoding the video I had to go ashore to a cafe, with a good internet connection, to upload it to YouTube. After an hour YouTube informed me that I had 2456 minutes remaining. It was a nice cafe but I didn't want to stay there for 40 hours! I gave up, dinghied back to the boat and re-encoded the video in a smaller resolution.  

So here it is, the first short trial video. It's far from perfect but however it has given me a small impression of how I can make use of the drone and gopro camera's great potential.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toD2wZQ6dtY
Best seen at HD resolution 720p