I flew over four hours tonight and had to go a bit high to avoid turbulence since there was a strong southerly wind flow and the expected resulting turbulence below 10,000 ft. The only problem was, it was about 15 degrees F up there and my heater was NOT cutting it. It used to always kick out plenty of hot toasty air but last night I could barely tell if it was working. I clicked it off and it did seem to get a bit colder, but there is definitely something wrong with it that needs to be looked at or I'm going to have more frozen fingers during this unusually cold winter! The other item on my squawk list is that the left fuel gauge seems to have become unreliable. A few times it dropped off to zero during the flight and then popped back up to full. Looks like I have a trip to the maintenance shop coming up.
With all that wind, I was sure glad to have excess power available. As I headed back north against the wind I had 55-60 kts on the nose, with moderate turbulence which was no fun at all. At one point I had WOT and 2500 rpm, nose high and 130 kts indicated and only a 300 fpm climb. In a lesser plane I would have been sinking at 1000 fpm. Once I finally got leveled out over 10,000 the turbulence died down but here I am doing only 117 kts over the ground!
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