'Splash-In' Held Sunday At Tavares, FL

The EAA Chapter 534 was invited to host the Sunday morning, pilots pancake breakfast at the “Seaplane-A-Palooza” splash-in held in Tavares, Florida, America’s Seaplane City, on Sunday April 8, 2018.

This two-day event was held as a prelude to Sun N’ Fun week which takes place in Lakeland, Florida and gives seaplane owners from around the country a chance to show off their amphibian and float planes.

Tavares, Florida, located in Lake County, is in the center of the state and claims to have close to two thousand lakes, fourteen hundred of them are big enough to have names. The Tavares Seaplane Base is found downtown on Lake Dora. This seaplane base was almost totally destroyed in Hurricane Irma in September of 2017 but it is about to come back bigger and stronger than ever, thanks to the perseverance of the Tavares town fathers.

Although a number of aviation contests, such as the watermelon bombing and the shortest take off had to be cancelled on Saturday due to strong winds blowing off the lake with gusts at 30 miles per hour. Despite this, everybody who attended had a good time showing off their planes and swapping flying stories

EAA Chapter 534, based at the Leesburg International Airport at Leesburg ,Florida , only a few miles away, brought their mobile  kitchen and set it up outside a covered pavilion in which there were large picnic tables that could accommodate about 50 people at a sitting. They served blueberry pancakes, sausage, coffee, and Florida Orange Juice from 9 to 11 AM.

The chapter has a lot of experience doing this kind of thing as they provide this service for their fly- ins as well as fly- ins for other airports around Central Florida. They have a team of chefs’ that that work like a well-oiled machine and get that mobile kitchen up and running in no time at all and produce either a breakfast or lunch for what ever group they support. All this is done with a volunteer membership staff and they are paid by donations from those who attend.

The mobile kitchen is mounted on a trailer which they constructed and is easily pulled along with a pickup truck. It contains two commercial grills that run on propane gas, as well as other gas operated cookers. It comes equipped with all the cooking utensils needed, coffee makers, a tent for inclement weather, storage for the food and serving tables and chairs.

(Image provided with EAA Chapter 534 news release)

FMI: www.chapter534.org