Lake Ocoee

Another great day for flying. I spent Friday afternoon with some friends up at Lake Ocoee and then took the wife and youngest two kids up Saturday afternoon. I've got a friend whose family owns a little cabin on the lake with a dock, pontoon boat and Jetski. Having spent two days enjoying the lake in real life, I thought I'd fly over it in FSX to see it from the air.

I chose the Aeronca Champ as it's a good low-and-slow plane for this sort of sight-seeing, and because the Lake is not that far from Dalton, so the Champ's slow cruising speed (about 70 knots) wouldn't be too much of a problem. Here's my cockpit view approaching the south end of the lake:

The large mountain on the other side of the lake is Chilhowee. I use to do a good bit of mountain biking up there back in the day. My first flyover of the lake was rather high, probably 200-250' over the water. I flew up the section you see above, turned right at the mountain, and flew east along that part of the lake, then climbed out and banked hard around for another pass:
During the second fly-over, I got down lower. I'm probably about 100' off the water in this picture:
It's really hard to judge distances visually though in a flight simulator. The extra screens I've added help, and higher resolution would help more, but it's just not "real" enough so everything seems closer than it is. I would have guessed I was about 50' off the water during the flight. I didn't check on-line to get the lake's altitude (about 840' above sea level) until after the flight, so at the time I just knew my altitude above sea level and had to guess at the Lake's.

After the second fly-over, I crossed over the dam itself, which is not modeled in FSX. In the image below, the straight line section of the lake right under my wheels is the dam, but as you can see, there's not even a river coming out on this side:

My friends cabin was just around the corner to the right of the dam (left side of the airplane). We swam within sight of the dam on Friday and Saturday.

Sightseeing over, I climbed back up to about 2500' and headed south-south-west back to Dalton. My approach and initial landing were pretty good:
But then I had another one of those control reset issues. I had set the toe brakes on the rudder pedals to work as brakes, but they occasionally want to reset to their default control, which is to control the ailerons for some reason. After touch-down, I hit the left toe brake a bit trying to straighten out on the runway and accidentally banked the plane left, lifting the right wheel back off the ground:
You'd have to click on this picture to get a better view of it, but the wheel is definitely off the ground. Doesn't look too dramatic from here, but it caused me to veer left pretty hard after I got her level again and I ended up half on the grass before the landing was over.

I've really got to devote some research time to figuring out that glitch and fixing it - before it gets me virtually killed!