Early season Sierra Wave flight

Reading about the ridge flight in Utah reminded me that I should post
some details of the wave flight that I had on the 23rd of Sept. I fly
with the Sierra Soaring Club out of Inyokern CA. Friday I was
scheduled to take a family friend for a ride. He is a 17 year old who
is interested in flying fighters for the military someday. I left for
the airport at around noon and the wind was just howling in the valley
but once I got to the airport the wind was light and variable. I met
up with the friend and his father and we started to preflight the
Blanik L-23 and get it ready for flight. Our tow pilot takes the 182A
towplane out for the warm-up flight and reports that he is flying
through rotor. He lands and we get set up for the tow on runway 33.
Normally we tow out from runway 20 but by this time the wind is aobut
15 knots blowing straight down 33. We launch and I found myself in
probably the roughest air that I have experienced in a long time.
Typical Sierra Wave rotor as I am told. We towed up into the mouth of
the Indian Wells Canyon and at 4,400 feet above field elevation we
released into the wave. I flew figure eights always turning into the
wind and about 15 minutes later we were skirting along at 14,000 feet
MSL. The challenge at this point was to stay under 14k. The Blanik we
were flying is not equipped with an oxygen system, otherwise I think
that we could have easilly rode the wave up to 18k. So we skirted
along flying a racetrack pattern from Inyokern to Pearsonville. After
our half hour at altitude was up I opened the divebreaks all the way
and brought us below 12,500. Once again it was difficult to stay at
this altitude and not climb. After about an hour and 45 minutes of
wave flying I brought us back into the valley and we did some zero-g
porposing and some lazy-8's to blead off altitude. My friend loved the
minor acrobatics, one of these times we need to get him up in the
ASK-21 and do some real acro. I landed the Blanik on the dirt runway
parallel to runway 20 and we had a total of 2.2 hours flying. It was
unexpected to find wave so early in the season. January through April
is typically the best time of year for wave at Inyokern in my
experience. So it was a great fun flight that I thought that I would
share with everybody.

Alex