AEOLUS FEELING FEISTY
The strongest wave I’ve experienced in fifteen winters at Crystal occurred on the most brilliant of days with not a cloud in the sky. It was forecast, yes, but the only physical signs were unusual gustiness – plus that ineffable feel.We knew the launch would be especially wild and my student was content to follow while I flew the tow. As we passed lee of those trees at the mobile home park the turbulence exploded into lift gnarlier than I'd ever seen near any surface except in mountains. It kicked us up most of a thousand feet in seconds – then the tow plane found equivalent sink and dropped from sight. We nosed over to avoid pulling its tail up, but as the tug flew out of that sink we entered it. With us diving from above and it climbing again, a huge bow of slack line ballooned – on both sides at once. We’d been aloft now a minute, plus or minus, probably already terrified our tow pilot, and could only expect all this to grow worse before it got better. Stabilizing our relative attitudes before the line broke was looking impossible, so I released a mile from the airport at pattern height. Mentally I'd already surrendered and switched focus to getting safely down and calling it quits. However… even this low and in full retreat, the radical pitch-overs and pull-ups required to navigate such extreme rotor yielded lurching gains of altitude. We reached the pattern entry point hundreds higher than we released. Thus a dilemma. Landing now would involve maximum difficulty (read hazard), and there would not be another tow until this wildness subsided. Yet we were already aloft... Could we stay up until the fury between us and the ground moderated? This student was gutsier than most and eager as I to experience such dynamic air , so we chose to wait, wrangle the rotor a while and see what might happen. That gave us the leisure of observing the tug's landing, too. Each time we hit sink we’d dive straight into the wind and then zoom up again later like gulls cavorting over surf, lofting hundreds of feet. If every gain left us in stronger wind and bigger energy, we wouldn’t be bumping around near the airport for long. Soon, still only 2,500 feet above ground the chaos gathered itself into a kind of broad rolling chop that offers special treats for anyone lucky enough to be at the right place and perfect time. Due to some indecipherable combination of wave and rotor dynamics, the pull-up from nearly every dive through sink netted more altitude than the dive cost, making it possible to simply pound into the wind for miles, dolphining aggressively, and climb from low in rotor right up into the primary wave!
Once we established position in the wave our vario was pegged, so I measured the climb with my watch. We were gaining a hundred feet every three seconds, which is to say 20 knots, solid. Less than twenty minutes after takeoff we bounced off class A airspace, two and a half miles above our tow release.
From there everything below was ours, with incomprehensible volumes of lift in all directions. It was so clear we could see crisp detail on the mountains around Lake Tahoe, more than 300 miles away. In such embarrassment of wealth, what a pity we couldn’t bottle some to save for days when the sky offers famine, not feast!
Another time this happened, I started from 1000 feet right over Crystal's runway as a former student was launching for a wave tow – and when he released eight miles upwind and four thousand feet higher I was there too, still a thousand feet above him. No kidding, it happened that way and I ain't bragging. Can't brag 'cause I wasn't responsible for it, my patron spirit Aeolus was.
BTW: I saw Aeolus provide twenty-knot wave in New England too, but that time clouds made it a very different adventure...