The story begins about 6 am on a Monday in San Francisco in the late 1990s. This morning I saw a number of flyers posted asking for help locating a lost windsurfer. The previous weekend had been exceptionally windy and if a windsurfer was lost, his prospects weren’t good.
I punched the identifier for Tuli Block into my GPS and it came up, instructing me to fly a heading of 273 degrees for 300 miles, which would put us well into the Kalahari Desert searching for a non-existent dirt strip in the bush. Not a good outcome. How could that happen?
As I tied my light sport airplane down, I couldn’t help noticing the Ercoupe sitting adjacent to me. Not only is an Ercoupe a rare craft, this one was notable because it wasn’t tied down–it just had two straps hanging loose from the wings–as if someone started to tie it down and stopped mid-process.