We'd all like to read the account of his first approach to minimums or the first 4 hour trip saved by 5 minutes of instrument flight.

I'll tell you mine. Ok, not the first, but a recent one. We'd departed
VFR from Seattle, with Santa Rosa as our destination, something like
five and a half hours away. Yreka (Montague) was our fuel stop (a
wonderful place to stop by the way!) and, as we did on the way up, we
got the courtesy car and a drove into Yreka to have a fresh baked pie
and burger before heading south on our final leg. The weather was
perfect, though we did need to go high to stay on top of a broken layer
from Seattle most of the way to Yreka. It was a beautiful flight, and
the departure from Yreka was uneventful, as we pointed the nose towards
the South Pole and climbed out. OF course, by now it was getting late,
and much of the rest of the trip would be at night.

Santa Rosa sits in the valley, quite a ways inland from the coast, but
the fog does roll in. It was expected between 1 AM and 4 AM, but as we
came over the final hills, it was clear that the fog had its own ideas.
STS was reporting 200 foot ceilings. I could see the fog, and were I
not instrument rated, there were other airports I could have gone to.
But Santa Rosa was our destination, and I had the ticket (and the
plates) so I asked the controllers for an IFR clearance into STS. This
was a few minutes in coming, meanwhile the controller vectored us to the
South and around a few hills (maintain VFR for now) to get us set. Soon
we got a hard IFR altitude and our clearance for the ILS. I think we
entered the fog at two thousand feet or less, and after keeping the
needles in the center for four minutes, the runway appeared two hundred
feet below us (and a little bit in front of us letting us touch down
right where we wanted to.

We were renting the airplane from STS, so it would have been a real pain
in the tucus if we had to divert and then retrieve the airplane the next
day from someplace maybe fifty miles away. But out of the five hours
and something, we probably spent five minutes in the clouds.

But those were the five minutes that count.

Jose
--
"Never trust anything that can think for itself, if you can't see where
it keeps its brain." (chapter 10 of book 3 - Harry Potter).
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.