BATTERIES!!!!

Saturday 16th July

Flat ones, that is.  I shall start at the beginning, though.
Our eldest daughter, Eleanor was up from Wellington for a long weekend (middle daughter's 21st) and, as she enjoys a flight with me, I had booked Archer III, WIT for the afternoon with the intention of going somewhere for an expensive coffee.  After all the terrible weather of the past week the probability of going up did not seem good.  However, Saturday started with a bit of fog which cleared by mid-morning and, with only light winds, it all looked good.  There was a front on its way later but the skies were clear at 1245 when we arrived at the club so I thought a quick hop over to Taraunga and back would be OK.
After pre-flighting WIT we got in, switched on and I pressed the primer button and didn't hear anything - hmmmm.....  Pushed the starter and the prop managed a turn of about 20º before all power died.  Oh dear!  I tried twice more with ever decreasing results so it was pretty clear the battery was as flat as the proverbial Shrove Tuesday food.
So, we unstrapped, got out and I strolled over to the club to report the problem.  A junior instructor and a student brought over the external starter pack and tried to connect it but, in spite of following the flight manual instructions could not get any juice to flow!  We unloaded our gear and changed over to UFS (an Archer II).  
We were now about an hour behind schedule and the front appeared to be on its way from the southwest so I cancelled our flight plan and decided a local scenic was the way to go.  We took a Scott (NE) departure and headed over to Morrinsville.  Looking over to the West the visibility was reducing significantly and so we headed back over to the city and got a North arrival clearance.  We had good views of flooded paddocks and broken river banks after all the rain - Eleanor took some video which I will try to get edited and posted sometime soon.
The airfield was quite busy with several aircraft in the circuit and a lot of radio traffic - I guess CTC were playing catch-up after a week of no-VFR weather.    It was a surprisingly uneventful approach, cleared to join right base for 18R (the short runway) and I did a pretty nice landing {Eleanor thought so and it is always good to impress the passenger(s)}.  The rain started soon afterwards but was very light and we could have been up for longer but you are almost never wrong if you take the option which looks safest!  At least we managed to get up in the air which, with the recent weather and then a near-totally dead battery, did not seem likely for a while.