First day of Minden Wave Camp, 2009

We had a good (but not easy) first day of wave camp in Minden. Gordo
called around 8:00 to say "surf's up!" and he was right. He launched
first with one of the wave camp participants and puttered around at
about 16,000' between here and Reno for an hour and a half. We opened
the wave window but the lift just didn't go that high. Three more Wave
Camp participants got into wave -- what our weather guru wouldd
probably call wavelets marked by len-teasers, but all topped out
around 14,000' -15,000'. We broke for lunch and I gave a talk on wave
generation, then we launched another 4 gliders, all of whom played
around in rotor for an hour each.

It was a fun day, and three camp participants who had never been in
wave at all were happy to experience the morning wavelets. It's fun
to restart a tradition that had been allowed to languish too long.
Tomorrow Rick Walters will talk about how to use rotor to climb into
wave. It was a talk we needed to hear before this afternoon's flying.

Wave camp is not just about flying, though. We have three great
presentations scheduled in addition to Rick's tomorrow:

Kemp Izuno will be talking about XC in wave Friday (along with
sensational visuals), Doug Armstrong (our wave guru) will talk about
sources of weather forecasting Saturday, and Gordon Boettger will talk
about extreme XC in wave above FL 180 Sunday.

And wave camp is also about companionship: come join us for pizza at
the Pizza Barn Thursday evening, our banquet at a local Basque
restaurant Friday, or a barbecue Saturday in our hangar. We'd love
to see you there even if you're not able to sit in on our
presentations.

Fred LaSor
SoaringNV
Minden, NV