Kit shares his experiences in soaring from Truckee this summer --

Most of my soaring experience is in 'paper airplanes' or similar (2-33, 1-26, L-13) so I'm quite familiar with the limited L/D is in those aircraft.  Flying the Grob 103 offers a better glide ratio but my instincts are still tuned to the lower performance aircraft.  Soaring in the Truckee area can be quite intimidating as there are few good land out locations.  So I think it is good that my instincts didn't let me stray far from the airport and then, only at considerable altitude.  As such, I never strayed more than about 12 or 13 miles away when upwind.  Most of my tows were to 1500 to 2000 feet over airport elevation before releasing, but I did have one flight where I got off tow at 1000 ft AGL and went up without a problem.  Once off tow, working the thermals were pretty standard...its just a matter of learning the local terrain and where thermals have a tendency to develop.  With the varying terrain of the Truckee area, it is quite common to have multiple cloud bases...so a few times, I thermaled up to one cloud, left it, and found myself higher than most of the other clouds in the area.  Most of my flights, I spent a considerable time above 15,000 MSL.  I made it up to 17,350 MSL on one flight, but had to break off the thermal as my drift component was pushing my instinct button. 

Being in a club ship meant returning to terra firma so other members could enjoy the good soaring conditions.  So most of my flights were limited to around 2 hrs in duration.  Luckily for me, my work schedule allows me to get up to Truckee during the week when there are no others in line to fly the Grob...that meant longer flights at my leisure.  I had a couple flights in excess of 3 hours and one close to the 4 hr mark.  I could have stayed up longer, but then the Soar Truckee staff would have gone home for the day leaving me with no one to help park the ship.  The pattern for landing is steeper and tighter than what we fly at Byron due to the landscape the runway lies on.  Lastly, final approach is much different than landing a Byron...similar to landing a powered aircraft.  I'm looking forward to soaring Truckee next year.
Kit