Forgive the crosspost, but as both groups are low on relevant content at
the moment I thought it might be good to give both of them a boost.

My brother is in town this week for the holidays. He's with his
grandmother some distance away, but the gliderport is between us. He's
taken glider lessons up to solo and I thought that getting together to
fly would be a fun activity.

As chance would have it, the forecast for today was calling for wave. My
brother has done a lot of training, with tons of pattern tows, but very
little actual soaring. I figured that a nice wave flight would really
show him a totally new aspect to the sport.

Driving out to the airport, there were lennies stretching across the
sky, one after the other. Once there, I got everything ready as quickly
as I could. My brother showed up on time and we launched at about 10AM
in the club's Grob 103, hoping to catch the wave before it dissipated.

We towed through some fairly mild but still challenging rotor, then hit
a patch of what looked like wave lift at about 2,000ft above the
airport. Too chicken to try for it, I kept on tow looking to make it to
the next harmonic and a little higher before releasing. We spent what
seemed like a terribly long time barely climbing at all while on tow,
which I took to be a good sign (if air is going down, it must be going
up somewhere else!) and finally pegged the variometer coming out the
other side. Released into slightly chunky wave at 3,300ft above the
airport (4,000MSL) but soon established a solid climb.

The next three hours were some of the most pure fun and enjoyment you
can have. We had a solid climb up to about 9,000MSL averaging probably
3-4kts climb, and I introduced my brother to the basic ideas of wave and
how it all works. The lennies were scarce near the airport but more
solid to the north (northwesterly wind, so the wave bars were running
northeast/southwest) and we headed up that way.

After topping out the climb I got to teach my brother how to jump
forward to the next harmonic. Cranked it up to 90kts to push through the
headwind and the sink. Lost about 2,500ft making the jump but we were
rewarded with another nice climb farther in. (For those of you
unfamiliar with the structure of mountain wave, the wave generating
mountain sets off a series of ripples downwind, getting gradually weaker
as they stretch downwind. Running forward closer to the source will find
stronger lift.)

As the day went on we continued to work our way north and in. I think in
total we jumped in four times, ending up inside West Virginia and about
20nm away from home at the farthest reach. Our last jump also saw our
highest altitude, 11,100ft. Unwilling to keep pushing farther from home
(a Grob 103 is a cast-iron bitch to assemble, and my fellow club members
would have ritually sacrificed me to their god if I had landed it out)
and with the wave seeming to dissipate, I elected to turn for home.

On the way home, we bumped into another area of solid wave lift, with no
marker clouds to indicate where it was, and couldn't resist the
temptation to work it a bit. While we were doing that, we got the
long-awaited call from the ground that other club members were waiting
on the plane, so we hopped out of it, pulled spoilers to burn off the
7,000ft or so of remaining altitude before entering the pattern, and
landed. Total time in the air was 3 hours and 13 minutes.

All it all it was a wonderful confluence of events to have my brother in
town, to have such a great wave day, and to have a club two-seater
available for our use for over three hours (club limit is 1 hour if
anyone else is waiting to use it). I got to show my brother something
he'd never experienced before and give him new motivation to finish his
glider training, and I got to enjoy a wonderful day in wave for myself
as well.

For those interested, pictures can be had he

http://pix.mikeash.com/v/wave1109/

Commentary and constructive criticism are most welcome. Non-constructive
criticism of the type seen recently shall be met with great vengeance
and furious anger.

--
Mike Ash
Radio Free Earth
Broadcasting from our climate-controlled studios deep inside the Moon