Ann soars light conditions at Benicia, photo by James Smyth

As we look ahead to the new year, I want to welcome our new officers including Alex Koorkoff as Secretary, Atta Pilram as Treasurer and Gregg Hackett and James Smyth as Activities Co-Directors.

We also have a new newsletter editor – Richard Hammer has volunteered to be the editor of the Ridge Dancer going forward.  The Ridge Dancer will be a monthly online newsletter with articles, columns, photos and links to information such as the BAPA calendar, classified and so forth.  (For anyone who prefers to read hardcopy, it’s easy to print out the online Ridge Dancer.)

I would like to encourage BAPA members to submit articles to the Ridge Dancer by the 15^th of each month for publication.  You can email your articles and photos (we love photos!) to Rich at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .  If you have recently gone on an interesting paragliding trip, attended a useful clinic or class, or had some other experience that you would like to share with our club members, please feel free to write an article.  In addition to BAPA members reading the newsletter, we also have many visiting pilots who say that they have read our newsletter online and enjoyed the articles.

In 2006 I will be in charge of arranging entertainment for the meetings as Gregg and James are both geographically distant from the Bay Area and won’t be attending most meetings.  If you would like to do a presentation or slide show, show a video or have any other ideas about entertainment, please let me know.  My email address is This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .  So far I have lined up several month of entertainment including Josh and Eric’s Top Ten Thermalling Tips, Flying in Peru, the Caribbean XC Challenge and Flying in Alicante, Spain.  In addition, Jug Aggarwal will do a presentation on using your GPS in the XC League.

The Activities Co-Directors have a good slate of upcoming activities including fly-ins at Potato, Elk, Dunlap, Hat Creek.  We’re hoping to hold not only the annual Thermal/Mountain Flying clinic but also possibly an XC Clinic (heck, Josh offered to lead it, so let’s do it).  In addition, Wally Anderson has offered to hold a reserve clinic for members.  It’s likely that we will have the Jody Lucas Picnic at Ed Levin in the spring and resurrect the Beach barbecue at Linda Mar Beach in Pacifica in the early Fall.  It’s important not to be too ambitious when planning events – we can all get burned out if there are too many things going on.  But I think our club always has a great variety of well-organized events that we can be proud of.

I hope that all BAPA members will consider participating in an event or writing an article for the newsletter or doing a presentation at a meeting in 2006.  Our club’s strength lies in the talents and efforts of its members.

Thanks for being a part of BAPA and I look forward to a great year of flying and hanging out with all of you.