Take the opportunity to go with, or have ride with you, an experienced VFR SE pilot. Ask for some coaching on landing and taking off with minimal ground runs (for wet, boggy surfaces) if they know how and are prepared to do it (ie. check with your CP). These are techniques that were taught to me for better or worse by an ex-WW2, New Guinea pilot that you won't find in the flight manuals.
On take-off, get the nosewheel out of the mud asap. Keep the nosewheel off the ground...but just off the ground. The control column will creep forward to hold the attitude as the speed builds. Get the rest of the wheels up and into ground effect asap. With a little experience, the plane will tell you when it's ready to come unstuck. Stay in ground effect until you get the airspeed to fly away. (You physically can't fly out of the ground effect anyway until the speed's up, but you want to lower the nose and fly just above the ground as you build speed: not hold the nose up and wallow slowly upwards, which can get you into a lot of trouble, which is probably why these techniques are not in the flight manuals.)
Landing: pick the spot you want the wheels to touch down. (Get good at it and you'll be able to hit a newspaper with your mains, which is handy if you're trying to get the aircraft into a space between two bogholes while trying to minimize the chance of swamping the engine intake with buckets of water as you plow into the second.) Get into ground effect the normal way (as per the flight manual) with the mains less than a metre off the ground. (Any higher and you can get into a LOT of trouble again if the aircraft stalls out. As a side benefit, it's a far easier thechnique to accomplish, the lower to the ground you are. It is far more difficult to do, the higher you are off the ground.) Hold the nose up, keep the mains off the ground and increase power as the speed washes off. You'll get to the point where the plane is hanging off the prop and the tail is not dragging on the ground. (And if the tail tiedown does hit? You're on a boggy strip. I don't think it ever happened to me with a wide variety of singles, but it was on boggy strips...I wouldn't have felt it anyway.) If you happen to look at the ASI, you'll be surprised at how slow you're flying, if it's reading at all. Cut the power when appropriate. The mains will drop onto the ground. Then get the stick back into your chest to avoid the nosewheel plowing into the mud.
I await the flaming with anticipation as horrified pilots advise you to FOLLOW THE TECHNIQUES IN THE FLIGHT MANUAL.
Last edited by Lodown; 14th Feb 2010 at 23:58.