RGSA 30th annual meeting minutes 2011
January 15, 2011 Margo's Restaurant, Alamogordo, NM
by Robin Hastings, Secretary
We had a pretty good day in RGSA country last Saturday. Conditions for flying were very light, with northwest winds and cloudless skies. Hadley Robinson and Luftwaffe WSO Tobias had PG flights from the La Luz NW launch. Doak Hoover, last to try it, finally had to bag it as we couldn't get his PG inflated in the very light air just before sunset.
Then we had an excellent RGSA club meeting, at Margo's Restaurant in Alamogordo. Along with the 10 or RGSA members in attendance, we had Finis Miller and Lee Boone's wife Erika as guests. (Erika is ready to produce a future pilot any day now.) It was a very productive meeting. We began with a treasurer's report from George Woodcock, and the club is doing well financially, with over $1000 in the bank before we pay our site insurance and other expenses, and before annual dues are collected. (Hey, send in your checks! Or cash will do... $25 for RGSA alone, $50 for dual membership with the Sandia Soaring Association.)
We voted to insure the Sod Farm training site in Santa Theresa, NM; that is our third insured site, along with Dry Canyon/La Luz, and Agave Hill/Lee's Lookout. We resolved to work with local groups (Sierra Club, Franklin Mountains Wilderness Coalition, New Mexico Wilderness Coalition, etc.) to maintain our access to sites within the proposed Dona Ana County wilderness area, like the Potrillo Mountains and Mount Riley. This might just produce a national precedent that foot-launched soaring is a completely benign activity in national wilderness and parks, which would be a huge advance for our sport. We settled on having three flying events this year: The Dry Canyon Fly-In over Memorial Day weekend, the Columbus Day Fly-In in October, and the Franklin Mountains Gathering over Veterans Day, at the Franklin Mountains State Park sites in El Paso. We voted to present a plaque thanking the supervisor of the Franklin Mountains State Park for his support of our activities there. We settled on a next meeting date of March 26th, again in Alamogordo, and a roadwork day for La Luz the same day. Finally, we held club elections, and your RGSA officers for 2011 are: Robin Hastings, president; Lee Boone, vice president; George Woodcock, secretary/treasurer. We adjourned about 9:00 pm, after a three-hour gathering, pretty well satisfied with the day's events. See you all on March 26th, I hope - or in the air long before that.
-Robin
Our happy crowd (L-R): Denae Nemanic PG, George Woodcock HG, Velma Woodcock HG, Lee Boone PG/HG, Erika Boone, Doak Hoover PG, Had Robinson PG, Mike Ellsworth HG, Robin Hastings HG, Finis Miller, Lee Baker PG, Bill Cummings HG, Tobias Schug PG, Matt Watson PG
