Article and Photos by Ted Luebbers
Seaplane-A-Palooza for 2021 began on Friday, April 9, 2021, with much promise for the weekend but Mother Nature intervened and blew it away on Saturday afternoon and Sunday with heavy winds and rain.
Seaplane-A-Palooza is an annual seaplane fly-in held in Tavares, Florida, America’s Seaplane City, which attracts numerous amphibians and floatplanes from around the country. The seaplane base ( FA1 )is located at Wooton Park in downtown Tavares on the shore of Lake Dora. Usually, the two large ramps and the grassy beaches of the seaplane base are filled with aircraft but the weather gods had other ideas this year.
Starting on Saturday the wind picked up into the high 20’s with higher gusts. By the late afternoon, there were gusts reported from the nearby Leesburg International Airport as high as 53 miles per hour issuing in a strong weather front from the west with rain and some embedded thunderstorms.
Due to the strong winds building during Saturday all the competitive seaplane contests and plane rides had to be canceled. As the wind increased during the day and the weather forecast for the rest of the weekend worsened, many pilots decided to fly away looking for hangar space and tie-downs. A total of 18 planes had arrived on Friday and early Saturday. By late afternoon on Saturday, there were only eight planes on the two large ramps and none on the docks or on the shore.
The theme of this event had been “Planes, Tunes and BBQ”, so there were several popular bands appearing in a new large bandstand each day and evening. There were numerous barbeque food trucks, and vendors’ tents filling Wooton Park.
When the squall line hit at about 5:30 with strong winds and rain, things pretty much came to an end in the park.
The vendors and food trucks packed up, and the evening program consisting of an airshow by the Aeroshell Aerobatic Team and fireworks were canceled.
The only good news to come out of this was that a young lady by the name of Chloe Kadletz from Tavares was honored by Jones Brothers Air and Seaplane Adventures with a $10,000 flight training scholarship to become a new Private Pilot with a seaplane rating. Jones Brothers is based at the Tavares seaplane base and offers a variety of seaplane rides thought the year as well as flight training for a seaplane rating.
This scholarship is funded by money raised through the Jones Brothers exciting Seaplane Bingo program during Seaplane-A-Palooza with additional funding provided by the Seaplane Pilots Association.
Although the Seaplane Bingo game was canceled on Sunday because of continued bad weather, Bridget Fitzpatrick, Marketing Coordinator for Jones Brothers stated that it has been rescheduled to May 2, 2021, at 2 PM.
Also canceled because of severe thunderstorms and rain on Sunday was the pilot’s pancake breakfast, put on by the Experimental Aircraft Association Chapter 534 and the popular watermelon bombing event.
It is always difficult to plan large outdoor events such as this as they are so weather dependent and pilots have to look at the weather closely far in advance of their flights. A lot of people spent time, money and effort to make Seaplane-A-Palooza a success. It was nobody’s fault that it didn’t come off as planned. You just have to chalk it up to bad luck with the weather.
