Best news, Dave.
Give us a "blow by blow" - what you liked, what you didn't, and (of course) what's up next.
I presume you're talking about the checkride itself? If so, quite honestly there was little not to like, the DPE as I mentioned was a very smooth & soft talking fellow from the UK (I can't lie, it did help that I kept picturing flying with Austin Powers lol) with a great attitude and what I belive is a great approach to the whole deal. Right off the bat he let me know that, despite what many pilots build up in their minds, he's not looking for perfection, mistakes WILL happen, but it's how I recognize and recover from these deviations that measure how 'compitent' a pilot I am, and that's the stressor.
The oral was fairly quick, maybe a total of 15mins, mostly on my 2 XC trips and on the sectional itself with airspace questions, elevations questions etc.. I did get tripped up on what the minimum equip. list is as per the AIM, but he finally asked me "well, where would you go to find this info?", of course I said "well the FAR/AIM will lay it out for me" to which he responded "well there you go, find it", and sure enough within a minute I found the right section and moved on.
The flight itself was pretty quick, or at least it seemed so to me. KAPF was bustling in the am when we were ready to go, so I had some extra time to just clear my mind and triple check everything I've done. Took off with a soft-field departure, nailed it.. moved right into some basic manuvers after leveling off a bit away from the traffic around Naples. No problems at all with the manuvers, VOR tracking, foggle time etc.., so off to a smaller local strip at Marco Island (KMKY) we went. My one genuine 'screw-up' was calling out the wrong way when I setup in the pattern. I decided to use the 35 approach but for whatever reason, I announced "..entering 45 to the downwind for runway 1-7" on CTAF. Thankfully there was nobody esle in the pattern, and I caught myself just as I aligned myself downwind, so I clarified the announcement immediatley and I could see a smirk on his face, glad I caught there error as much as I was no doubt. He did ask for a T&G, but with the crosswind making me dance all over the place, I didn't get the airplane down as short as I would've liked, with my CFI it would've been an easy T&G, but I didin't want to take any chances so I called it a full stop and we back taxied to the departure end.
Had a minor scarry moment when he asked me to go ahead and setup for a departure back to APF, my initial thought was that it was too soon to be completley satisfied with my landings so I think I just busted the ride.. but I decided to keep going with it as if all was well, did my requested shortfield take off, setup for a short field into APF, pulled a go-around when I realized I wasn't going to make the mark he asked for (1000' marks), so I firewalled the power, setup a another approach, still far from perfect (short fields are easily my biggest short comming) but I got it down in space, taxied to the ramp and was greeted by the DPE with a "...well Captain, congratulations...".
IME, 15 minutes for the oral is a bit short; an hour seems about the norm for the private. Three hours is over the top, unless he needed to really delve into something for some reason, which seems unlikely.
