Some Personal Experiences

One one takeoff, I got the plane up on the step, waited for takeoff speed (or so I thought) and pulled back. The plane happily took off, flew about a foot, touched down with the back of the floats and then did the whole thing again. After repeating that oscillation six or eight times, my CFI told me to cut the power. "That was porpoising," he said. "Sometimes that happens, and the plane will do it all the way down the lake if you let it." I applied power and we had a perfectly normal takeoff.

The next day, my CFI took off once or twice to give me a break. On one of his takeoffs, we started porpoising. He played with the controls (pulled back a bit, rotated the yoke left and right) and we got off the water. I was interested to see that it happened to him, too. I used some of his techniques later to break the plane free.

We did a dead-stick landing. That was pretty simple - much like it is on land. We tried another dead-stick landing the next day. The water was flat, the sun was in our eyes, and the CFI called for an abort about 200' up because we couldn't tell where the water was. That was the best example I saw of glassy water - it was difficult to tell where the lake surface was in those hazy, glare-filled conditions.

One fun takeoff included a dog-leg around an island. It's pretty simple to include a turn in a takeoff run. Without enough rudder pressure in the early part of the run, the plane will turn to the left but it can be straightened out once speed picks up. Othertimes, there is a natural obstruction ahead but plenty of room to manuver around it during the takeoff run, as we did with the island.