The forecast for Saturday was looking really good earlier in the week with warm weather with nice high thermals predicted. Then the clouds turned up. The skyat Stonefield was entirely covered by a mid-level layer of stratus and it was appeared that there wasn’t going to be a lot of thermal action. But Wolfgang commented “That’s a really ‘interesting’ sky…” and “Hmmm, could be some wave there”. His prediction of wave was dubious since the wind wasn’t coming from the west, which is needed to get lee wave off the nearby hills. But once we got up in the air, it was apparent that he was quite right. There was smooth 2-4 kts of wave lift all over the place! Not orographic/mountain/lee wave, but gravity wave where the air is very stratified, there are no thermals breaking up the pattern and little ripples between layers can turn into big lift.
Derek and Keith got the first flight of an hour! They got up to 10,000 feet without too much difficulty. Leigh took a K8s up and found that the ceiling had dropped a little by the time he got there. He only managed 8100′ and also completed the MiniXC course for the first time. When the flight log was checked after the flight, the GPS-generated flight trace read the high point of the flight as 8442′.
Everyone else got as much flying as they wanted during the day, to the point where Leigh was practically twisting folks’ arms to fill the front seat for a hangar run in the Janus at the end of the day! Leigh volunteered and filmed the launch with the camera pointing backward.