On a typical winter day in the Seattle area, I planned a VFR hop from Boeing Field to Bremerton, just across Puget Sound. As you’ll see, the weather was VMC, with a ceiling above 4000 ft and good visibility despite scattered light rain showers. The wind usually blows from the southwest in these conditions, but on this day, the winds were out of the northeast at about 10 knots, favoring runway 02, which has a right-hand pattern.

KPWT is a good place to practice instrument approaches, and when I announced on the CTAF, I wasn’t surprised to hear a C172 pilot report that he was flying the ILS RWY 20. I wasn’t in a rush—flying is fun. So I loitered east of the airport until the Skyhawk was on short final before I joined right traffic for runway 02. A lazy 360 added at most a couple of minutes to the flight time and let that IFR student and his instructor fly an approach to simulated minimums without dodging traffic landing the opposite direction.