I’m sitting aboard the MS Roald Amundsen as we make our way north, back across the fabled Drake Passage and towards the Falkland Islands in the southern Atlantic. Given that the trip across the famously treacherous Drake takes severals days to complete, I thought perhaps this would be a good time to record some of the highlights of our journey.

Getting There

Our voyage began with a flight from Victoria, British Columbia, across Canada to Toronto. From Toronto down to Santiago de Chile, then on to Buenos Aires in Argentina. We had planned to stay in Buenos Aires for a few days before our trip, but wholly by accident we happened to get into town the day before the 2022 World Cup Final between Argentina and France. It was incredible to watch with bated breath as the greatest football match in history unfolded before our eyes, but no sooner had the game ended than it was to head back to the airport and continue on to Ushuaia.

Upon arriving in Ushuaia, we headed straight for the port and boarded our vessel. Just a few short hours later, the ship cast off and headed due south into the Drake.

It took us about two days to make the journey from the southern tip of South America to the northern edge of the Antarctic peninsula. The passage itself is widely considered to be among the most treacherous voyages one can make at sea. It’s a capricious expanse, and can flip between its polar moods in an instant. On this particular set of days, however, we lucked out with the relatively calm “Drake Lake” — the more placid of the passage’s comportments (we’d have no such luck on the way back, and would become well acquainted with the “Drake Shake” instead).

In the morning of the second day (insofar as “morning” has any meaning in the Land of the Midnight Sun), we arrived at last at our first port of call: Orne Harbour.

Day One: Orne Harbour

Orne Harbour is a frigid cove about one mile wide situated on the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, and was the site of our first opportunity to set foot on the continent itself. While much of the continent is covered in a thick layer of ice and snow obscuring any sense of an actual landmass, here the dark and ancient peaks of metavolcanic rock tower forebodingly over the frozen desert below.

Our landing party came ashore on a tiny zodiac (a robust, inflatable boat designed to make passage between ship and shore more convenient). My first impressions of the area were one of striking contrasts: the blackness of the rock against the blinding white snow, the vivid light blue of the sky against the deep navy sea, the warmth of the sun against the freezing air, and the earnest curiosity of the penguins to our presence.

Oh, and if you are curious if Antarctica has a smell, yes, it does. It smells like penguin poop, everywhere.

After spending some time marvelling at the unique geology and getting to know the local chinstrap penguin colony, we headed back to the ship and took off to our next destination.

Day Two: Damoy Point

The following day, we struck out further southwest for Damoy Point, which is a small landing site on the western side of Wiencke Island. There’s a small, abandoned hut here built by the British in the 70s as part of a summer air facility. As it was Christmas Eve, I am told Santa was hiding out in the hut to say hi to some of the younger travellers on our journey. We also found a number of seals and gentoo penguins on the island.

Departing here, we travelled further south still, weaving our way through the Wilhelm Archipelago and past the Vernadsky Research Base to the Yalour Islands.

Day Three: Yalour Islands

Perhaps the most astonishing sight at the Yalour Islands were legions upon legions of adelie penguins in numerous colonies dotting the fridgid plains. As penguins have no natural predators on land (seals and orcas are very happy to eat them in the water), they view humans with little fear and no small amount of curiosity. We were of course under strict orders not to interfere with the penguins’ activities, but they would often come up to us to investigate us and enjoy our relative novelty.

That evening, as we continued our journey, we enjoyed a delightful Christmas dinner and headed up to the aft deck to spend some time in the outdoor hot tub (an amenity we availed ourselves of quite a bit during our stay on board the Roald Amundsen). It was hard not to be struck by the imposing mountains rising far above our comparatively tiny vessel. I was reminded of Lovecraft:

I could not help feeling that they were evil things — mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething, half-luminous cloud-background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial; and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.

— H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

Day Four: Deception Island

Eventually the time came to make our way back out of the peninsula and toward South America once again. On our way, we stopped off at Deception Island, so named because, from the surrounding sea, it appears to be an island. It isn’t until one crosses through the narrow gap of Neptune’s Bellows that one can discover it is in fact a volcanic caldera, and the vast majority of the area inside the “island” is more ocean.

One can find the remnants of an old whaling station here from the early 19th century, in addition to a number of research stations and even a derelict aircraft hangar. The island’s only year-round residents these days are the penguins, seals, and sea birds who call it home.

One task remained as-yet undone for us — the Polar Plunge — and time was running out to commit to this “honour”. So we stripped down to our skivvies and dove into the Antarctic Ocean.

Day Five: Yankee Harbour

On our last day on the southern continent, the weather was starting to turn. While we had largely been blessed with fair winds and following seas thus far, it was clear we had finally worn out our meteorological welcome. Dark skies and sharp winds took hold, and the slate grey waves began to churn with a uniquely dispassionate menace.

We stopped by Yankee Harbour for a quick “thank you and goodbye” to the local penguin population before heading back aboard the ship and setting out once again across the Drake.

Getting Back

We’re on our way back now by way of the Falkland Islands — it seemed an awfully long way to go and not stop by one of the most fascinating extant vestiges of Britain’s colonialist history. I think I will put the laptop away for now, however, as I’ve just been thrown into the ceiling by a very large swell and I anticipate the Drake Shake is going to have its way with us for a good while longer before we see land again…

I’m sitting in YVR for a nine hour layover on our way back from New Zealand, so I feel like now is as good a time as any to write up some notes on our adventures across the Land of the Long White Cloud.

Te Ika-a-Māui: The North Island

Day One: Auckland

We began our journey flying into Auckland. After a thirty hour aerial odyssey originating from our home in Halifax and connecting through Vancouver, we touched down in New Zealand’s largest city and rented a car, as all the things we especially wanted to see on the North Island (called Te Ika-a-Māui — “the fish of Māui” — in Māori) were quite drivable. After being stuck in various airports and aircraft and cloaked in more or less perpetual darkness since our departure, stepping out into the cool autumn sunshine in Auckland was a welcome breath of fresh air.

From there, we wandered down to a cute little café called Amano for some breakfast and a little jet lag recovery (New Zealand is almost as far as one can get from Nova Scotia without leaving the planet). Auckland has a great hop on/hop off bus, so we busied ourselves about the various sights of the city while waiting for our room to be ready. After exploring Auckland a bit, we headed back to the hotel for an early bedtime, as we were slated to set out to Waitomo the following morning.

Day Two: Waitomo

Honestly, just driving around the countryside was enough for New Zealand to enthrall me. We headed south from Auckland and drove through sun-dappled rolling hills and wooded fields. Upon arriving in Waitomo, we delved into a couple of glow worm caves. Our first cave, the eponymously named Waitomo Cave, required some navigation via boat through the pitch-black depths, but the glowworm displays were spectacular. The on-foot trek through Ruakuri Cave was longer and more geologically interesting, but its population of glowworms were a little more shy.

After we’d had our fill exploring the depths, we returned to the surface and drove back up toward Hamilton. Our destination was a small town called Whatawhata (I believe pronounced “fata-fata”, as the “wh” digraph in Māori is pronounced like an “f” in English). We pulled into a small driveway on the edge of some farmland and ditched the car for a tiny four wheeled farm buggy, which we drove down the hill and into a secluded glen for our evening accommodations at Underhill Valley.

No small part of our journey was a pilgrimage to the lands that inspired and played host to the film incarnations of the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and believe me when I say that Underhill Valley is as close to a genuine hobbit hole experience as you can get anywhere outside the books themselves. The environment is perfect, with a small lake, elegant footbridge, and suitably rustic composting outhouse. The “cave-house” itself is gorgeous and well-appointed with everything you need to live like a Hobbit for the night. There’s no power, but plenty of candles, firewood, and suitably hobbity décor. And so, we stoked the fire in the wood stove, cracked open a bottle of wine, and slipped under the sheepskin blankets to await the morn.

Day Three: Hobbiton

The following day, after tidying up our erstwhile hobbit home, we struck out once again — this time, bound for the Shire proper. As we were quite close by, however, and our prearranged engagement wasn’t until the afternoon, we decided to stop by Hamilton Gardens on the way, and what a great decision that was.

Hamilton Gardens is actually a series of eighteen enclosed but interconnected gardens, each themed after a specific region, time period, or concept. Favourites of ours included the Japanese Garden, Indian Char Bagh Garden, and the Surrealist Garden. After our brief diversion through the gardens, however, it was time for the main event: our evening tour of Hobbiton.

It’s rare to go into something with high expectations and leave with them exceeded in every way, but that was our visit to Hobbiton. Each visit is fully guided, and we had booked the last tour of the day, known as the “Evening Banquet” tour. This is a walk around Hobbiton at sunset followed by a banquet at the Green Dragon, and then another stroll through the Shire by lantern-light.

Having watched the films, I had anticipated that no small amount of “movie magic” had gone into depicting Hobbiton. I figured a few Hobbit holes had been built, perhaps modularly to allow them to look like various different homes as necessary, and a lot of the rest of the environment had been composited together during post production to look like a whole town. In fact, the Hobbiton that exists on screen is almost entirely extant in reality. The road into town where Frodo first greets Gandalf with a mock-accusatory “You’re late!”, the gardens at the foot of the hill, the Party Tree and its surrounding grounds, Bagshot Row, and Bag End are all there, precisely where they appear to be on screen.

As we arrived at the Hobbiton sign, our guide gestured to the trail before us. Behind us, he said, laid New Zealand. And ahead — Middle-earth. Indeed, as we crossed into the lands beyond, the rolling hills out to the horizon were indistinguishable from Tolkien’s fantasy landscape. Rounding the corner, Hobbiton came into view — forty-four hobbit holes all painstakingly built, decorated, and arranged to reflect the town in all its cinematic glory. All the plants, gardens, and walkways meticulously grown and maintained year round as a living, breathing town.

Our journey took us around the town, winding up to the top of the hill, where we found the Baggins family home — Bag End. Overlooking the patchwork fields of the Shire, Bag End is more than just a charming hobbit-hole; it’s where Gandalf first arrived in The Hobbit to nudge Bilbo toward adventure. Years later, he would return through that same round green door in The Fellowship of the Ring, seeking answers about a certain gold ring. Standing before it, you can almost hear the clink of teacups and the distant echo of dwarves singing in the pantry.

Strolling back down from the top of the hill we made a stop off at Bagshot Row, home of the Gamgee family. While most of the hobbit holes in Hobbiton are merely well-designed façades, here the production team has taken the time to fully build out a hobbit home interior, complete with den, kitchen, larder, bedrooms, and all the comforts of a cozy hobbit home.

From there, we walked back down and across the Bywater Bridge to the Green Dragon, where a panoply of ales and a glorious banquet awaited us. In hobbit lore, the Green Dragon has long been the heart of Bywater’s social life — a place for lively gossip, old songs, and second helpings. It was here that Samwise Gamgee first nervously eyed Rosie Cotton across a crowded taproom, and where Frodo, Merry, and Pippin often passed quiet evenings before the world grew too wide

As everyone knows, the only brew that is tried and true comes from the Green Dragon, and the famous pub appears here just as it does in the film. The taps were overflowing with Southfarthing Ale, the feast was monumental, and Pickles the cat was on hand to clean up the leftovers.

Just a note about Pickles — apparently, she was found in a sack thrown off the back of a truck. The sack was filled with a litter of kittens, and sadly she was the only one to survive. One of the workers on set figured she was “in a real pickle” and the name stuck. She now lives in the Green Dragon as its only permanent resident, and I can think of no better place for a hard working seventeen-year-old cat than this glorious pub.

After dinner, the fields of Hobbiton were now bathed in the last light of Durin’s Day. As we walked out into the cool evening air, lamps in hand, we took one last stroll through the twilit Shire before packing up and heading home. Truly, it was as magical an adventure as we could have hoped for.

Day Four: Rotorua

The following day, we departed our B&B in Tīrau and drove down to Rotorua, stopping by Blue Spring to appreciate its incomparable natural beauty on the way. The spring supplies around 70% of New Zealand’s bottled water and maintains a striking clarity thanks to its slow underground journey — up to 100 years through volcanic rock. The vivid turquoise hue and gently swaying aquatic plants gave the whole scene a dreamlike quality, as if we’d stumbled into the hidden source of elven waters.

In Rotorua, we took at look at its famous geothermal pools, filled with copper, sulfur, and steam. In the evening, we took a ride up the hillside in a gondola to enjoy a cocktail and look out at the village from above, before heading back down to check out the Night Market.

The following day, we spent a bit more time with the locals (the furry variety) at the Agrodome — a working farm and demonstration facility on the outskirts of town.

That evening, we drove up to Tauranga, out home base for the next several days. Part of the impetus for our trip was the marriage of Erin’s cousin Alex, and we were delighted to be asked to attend. In between evening dinners and the ceremony itself, we spent time around the town on the island’s north-eastern coast — truly a lovely spot.

Day Six: Tauranga

From Tauranga, we struck out on various adventures, including a visit to the National Kiwi Hatchery, the Māori village of Te Puia, and a sailing trip across Lake Taupō in search of Māori rock carvings.

Te Puia, in particular, was fascinating. A cultural and geothermal hub nestled in the Whakarewarewa Valley. The scent of sulfur hung in the air as plumes of steam rose from the ground. At the heart of it all, the mighty Pōhutu Geyser surged skyward — sometimes reaching heights of 30 metres — reminding us that the earth here is very much alive. Alongside the geothermal wonders, Te Puia is home to the New Zealand Māori Arts and Crafts Institute, where master carvers and weavers carry on traditions passed down through generations. The combination of natural spectacle and cultural depth made it one of the more memorable stops on our journey.

And though it felt like we had just begun to scratch the surface of the North Island, it was time to hop on a quick flight to Queenstown to continue our adventures further south…

Te Waipounamu: The South Island

Day Ten: Queenstown

Upon arrival in Queenstown, we headed to our lakeside lodge for a marvellous degustation and then headed to bed early — our next adventure arrived bright and early at 6am the following morning with a journey out to the Fiordlands, carved by a glaciation process over several million years.

No journey through New Zealand would be complete without venturing into the vast, untamed wilderness of Fiordland National Park. Carved by ancient glaciers and draped in mist, the landscape here feels primeval — towering granite peaks plunge into ink-dark waters, and waterfalls cascade down sheer cliffs in silver threads. The route out to its crown jewel, Milford sound, is long and circuitous. Despite the fjord sitting only about seventy kilometres from Queenstown, the drive is closer to three hundred kilometres (about a four hour trip one way) due to the terrain and the necessity of circumnavigating Lake Wakatipu.

Eventually we made it past the mountains, valleys, waterfalls, and cheeky kea birds to the fjord itself, where we boarded a shipand cruised through the storied waters of Milford Sound, once called the “eighth wonder of the world” by Rudyard Kipling, with dolphins playing in our wake. The park, one of the largest in the world and part of the Te Wāhipounamu UNESCO World Heritage site, offers a rare chance to witness nature on its grandest scale: raw, remote, and humbling in its beauty.

Day Twelve: Christchurch

After Queenstown, it was off again to Christchurch, which I have to say is perhaps my favourite of any of the towns and villages we stopped in during our journey across New Zealand. We had the opportunity to stay in an old former observatory, part of the science complex of what used to be the University of Canterbury. From there, we toodled around town, visiting the botanic gardens and riding around on the trolley. Their art gallery was enthralling, and we whiled away our afternoon there before holing up in a cute gin bar on New Regent Street. In the evening, we struck out on the trolley once more, this time for a magical dinner tour around town.

The following day, we struck out again, this time for Arthur’s Pass by way of Castle Hill (another filming location, this time from 2005’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe). Scattered across a golden tussock plain, the massive limestone boulders of Castle Hill rise like the ruins of some ancient, giant-built city. Known to Ngāi Tahu as Kura Tāwhiti — “the treasure from afar” — the site holds deep cultural significance, once serving as a place of learning and seasonal gathering. The surreal landscape has earned it the nickname “spiritual center of the universe” from the Dalai Lama, and wandering among the monoliths, it’s easy to see why. There’s a timeless energy in the air, a sense that myth and geology are inseparably entwined here.

From there, we headed up to Arthur’s Pass, went on a quick hike up to the Devil’s Caultron waterfall, and then headed over to the train station to board one of the most scenic trains on Earth: the Tranzalpine.

And with that, our epic journey across Aotearoa had come to an end. The following morning, we packed our bags for the last time and headed out of our room. But in a final stroke of celestial providence, who should we run into outside our little observatory chambers but the one and only Wizard of New Zealand himself!

And with his blessing, we were off again, back to Auckland, and then Vancouver, and then Halifax, and then home.

It was May of 2018. After an agonizing four hour oral exam, and a no less demanding several-hour flight test, I emerged from the Oakland Airport FBO a newly minted Private Pilot. In these early days, every flight was an adventure, and my relative inexperience afforded frequent learning opportunities as I flew my first passengers to many a $100 hamburger at various small airports around Northern California.

Now, just over three years on in 2021, I am still very much a “student” pilot, in spirit if not in certification. But the small day trips and bay tours have become relatively routine, and while it’s all well and good flying from runway to runway in the relative comfort of a PA28 or C172, sometimes you want to dip your toes into something a little more adventurous. That’s how I discovered Foothill Aviation’s seaplane add-on program.

Program Structure

Thankfully, unlike the initial Private Pilot Certificate and accompanying Airplane Single Engine Land (ASEL) rating, the process for adding Single Engine Sea (ASES) is pretty straightforward. There are no specific hour or experience requirements as there were for your private certification. You need only demonstrate proficiency in the maneuvers and concepts involved in managing an aircraft on floats, rather than on wheels.

The output of your training will be two endorsements in your log book from your seaplane instructor:

• 14 CFR § 61.39(a)(6)(i) and (ii): Prerequisites for practical test
  This endorsement attests to you having received and logged appropriate training time within the preceding two months in preparation for the ASES practical test, and that you are indeed prepared to take the test for your add-on rating.
• 14 CFR § 61.63 (c): Additional aircraft class rating
  This endorsement essentially says the same as the above, but is specifically targeted toward the addition of a rating to your existing certificate.

With those two endorsements in hand, you can take the ASES add-on practical test, the successful completion of which will add the rating to the back of that fancy plastic card you carry around in your wallet.

Scheduling

My initial email to Foothill resulted in being connected to CFI Terry Hayes. Terry coordinated with the DPE and helped me set up a weekend slot of four contiguous days in early June—three for training and one for the check ride. With the dates in hand, we booked an AirB&B, loaded the dogs into the car, and drove out to the foothills.

The Aircraft

Before I get into the actual structure of the course, I think it’s worth a brief digression to talk about the aircraft you’ll be flying.

N818TA is a PA-18-150 on EDO 2000 floats. It features a Lycoming O-320 150 horsepower engine, tandem seating, and various accoutrements that make water operations a bit easier (like water rudders).

The aircraft itself is as straightforward as it gets in general aviation. In the cockpit, you’ve got (from left to right on the top row) two independent left and right magneto switches, the airspeed indicator, whiskey compass, and an altimeter. Below those instruments, you’ll find the mixture control, oil pressure and temperature gauges, a slip/skid indicator (colloquially known as the “ball”), vertical speed indicator, engine tachometer, and the starter button.

The throttle, carb heat, trim, and fuel tank selector are on the interior fuselage to the pilot’s left, and the control to raise and lower the water rudders is on the right. In true Piper fashion, 8TA sports manual “Johnson bar” flaps and a single door.

Things you will not find in this aircraft include: brakes (for obvious reasons), radios, attitude indicators, directional gyros, navigation equipment, or much in the way of storage space. But I daresay most of those things would be useless for the mission at hand anyway. I didn’t even use a kneeboard.

The Instructor

Terry is an amazing instructor. She didn’t overload me with data or leave me to figure too much out on my own. She’s got a ton of flying experience, especially on floats, and it shows.

As someone who flies both land and seaplanes on the regular, she understands what sorts of experience you’re likely to have and tailors her instruction to your particular experience level. I had zero stick and rudder experience prior to 8TA, and within a few minutes Terry made sure I was comfortable and proficient with the new control scheme.

Training

Day 1

At the crack of dawn on Friday morning, I was up getting 8TA’s weight and balance information into ForeFlight. As it would turn out, that and logbook functionality is about all I’d use ForeFlight for on the trip. There just isn’t room in the PA-18’s tiny cockpit for luxuries like iPads or kneeboards.

At 8am, Terry and I met up in “downtown” Angel’s Camp, spoke briefly about the structure of the training, and then headed down the road to a nearby cattle ranch with a sizable pond where 8TA was docked. We did a thorough preflight, got in, and took off.

The first day was mostly seaplane basics like various methods of taxiing, sailing, and generally navigating the aircraft on the water, as well as normal and specialty takeoffs and landings. We did most of this practice at New Melones Lake, whose muddy shores were already presaging a serious drought season.

After a few hours of flight time, we returned to the ranch and then headed up to KCPU for some ground instruction and a recap of the day’s activities.

Day 2

The second day was mostly about focusing in on some of the trickier aspects of special operations in a seaplane. These were things like rough water, glassy water, dealing with confined areas, and the like.

The real “trick” with seaplanes is that you can land pretty much anywhere on a lake, so long as you can parse the wind and clear the area. I spent a lot of time on day two just honing my sense of the wind and the waves and trying to improve my judgement on where and how to put the aircraft down on the water.

We also spent some time checking out the nearby New Hogan Lake, practicing various takeoffs, landings, step taxiing maneuvers, and beaching techniques over there. The seaplane textbooks call out several times how important it is to avoid “personal watercraft” (eg. jet skis) due to their erratic turning tendencies, and this was underscored for me at New Hogan.

Day 3

After being exposed to all the key material, it was time for a mock checkride. Terry ran me through some practice questions during our preflight and then we headed back to the lake to validate my skills on the material that would be assessed during the actual checkride the following day. Satisfied with my performance, she annotated my logbook with the requisite endorsements.

We also took some time out for a fun diversion to Don Pedro reservoir for an incredible canyon run over a bridge, through the canyon, and down under some power lines for an amazing sight seeing tour that only a seaplane pilot can experience.

Checkride

On the morning of our fourth day up in the hills, I set out not to the pond, but to KCPU, where DPE Richard Conte was flying into meet us.

We began with a normal takeoff at the pond and then flew out over the hills to New Melones. Over at the lake, we began with a normal landing, then switched to a glassy water takeoff followed by a glassy water landing. Then it was time to practice a little step taxiing, with some gentle S-turns left and right, followed by a rough water takeoff and a trip over the hills back to the pond.

Back at the ranch, we overflew the pond to get a sense of the wind conditions, then entered a right pattern and brought it down one last time for a rough water landing, then taxied back and docked the airplane.

And that was that — after just three days of practice, I became the world’s newest seaplane pilot!

Many thanks to CFI Terry for her thoughtful and patient instruction, and to DPE Richard for a thorough but efficient checkride. If you’re looking to add a little versatility and a lot of excitement to your pilot journey, I can highly recommend the ASES add-on.

As for me, I’m looking forward to more adventures on floats as PIC in the near future.

TL; DR: If you have an existing class in Objective-C that has a property whose type is defined by a forward declaration (the @class keyword) and you subclass that Obj-C class in Swift, you can’t use the superclass’ property unless you include the property’s class’ header in your project’s bridging header.

It happens to the best of us: here you are in the Year of our Lord Two Thousand and Sixteen, writing beautiful, protocol-oriented Swift, when you turn a corner and are confronted with some ancient piece of Objective-C code. We all have to deal with dated code now and again, and a rewrite isn’t always possible. Thankfully, Swift has been thoughtfully designed to work (relatively) well with its older sibling, Objective-C. There are some gotchas, though, and I ran into one earlier today involving forward declaration.

What is forward declaration?

In Objective-C, classes have both an interface (“here’s how you interact with this class”), and an implementation (“here’s how the class actually works”). The interface is defined in the class’ header file, and the implementation is defined in a file of the same name, but with the .m extension instead.

Sometimes, you’ll want to refer to another class in a header file for the purposes of adding a property to your interface whose type is defined elsewhere. You could use `#import “OtherClass.h”` in your header, but since all the header really needs to know are the types to expect, you can instead tell the compiler that OtherClass will be defined later using `@class OtherClass` instead. In other words, the class of this property will be defined in the future.

Take a look at the following header and implementation files for my car, the inimitable 1981 DeLorean DMC-12:

As you can see above, the DeLorean is an object, and it has two properties: a readonly pointer to an object of type `FluxCapacitor`, and a read/write integer called `speed`. The FluxCapacitor class exists somewhere, but the header doesn’t need to know about its details — it just needs to know the name of the type of the `fluxCapacitor` property.

When do we need to know specifics about the FluxCapacitor’s interface? In the DeLorean’s implementation:

Here we’re actually importing the FluxCapacitor’s interface, as well as instantiating one in the DeLorean’s designated initializer method. You can also see that when the speed reaches 88 miles per hour, we’re likely to see some serious shit.

Pretty straightforward, but hey, this is 2016 — we can do better.

Subclassing with Swift

I want the behaviour of my trusty DMC-12, but I want it in a more attractive and energy-efficient form factor. Thankfully, Sir Musksalot has my back. Enter the DMC-12 Tesla conversion:

We’ve subclassed the original DeLorean, but we’ve got some fancier stuff under the hood. Thanks to the combined powers of Swift and 21st century battery technology, our new car can reach critical velocity in half the time. We achieve this by overriding the superclass’ property implementation and substituting our own.

You would very reasonably expect that we would have access to our superclass’ properties in this context, such that we can call `fluxCapacitor.activate()` in the subclass and have everything work as desired. Unfortunately, you would be wrong. In fact, this won’t even compile:

What? “Use of unresolved identifier”? How can that be? It’s defined right there in the interface of our superclass!

The reason why this doesn’t work is hiding in the one file we haven’t talked about yet.

The Bridging Header

Somewhere in our project, there is a file called “<ProjectName>-Bridging-Header.h”. In reality, this file can be called whatever you want, as long as you specify its location correctly in the project’s Info.plist file.

Currently, the file looks something like this:

Not very exciting, but the key to our problem is not what’s here, but rather what isn’t.

Because our superclass’ public interface does not import the definition of the property we’re using, the Swift compiler can’t find the details of the class. Apparently, rather than going to find the appropriate header in the project, the Swift compiler appears to just erase the whole property from the superclass, and we’re left with a somewhat cryptic error about it never having been defined in the first place.

Thankfully, the solution is simple: tell Swift about the details of the forward-declared type by including its header in the project’s bridging header:

Now Swift can figure out what a FluxCapacitor is, what public methods and properties it has, etc.

Xcode is happy once again, and we can hop in our newly-souped-up time machine and speed off to relive the glory days of the early 1980s in style. Or, we can go back to binge watching Stranger Things on Netflix for the fifth time. You know, whatever.