The Art of Thermaling ...Made Easy!
A User-Friendly Guide to Finding and Using Thermals and Thermal Streets
Author:  Bob Wander
From Bob Wander's "Gliding ...Made Easy" series
Paperback, many illustrations and black and white photos, 56 pages
Dimensions: 8.31 x 11.0 inches (211 x 280 mm)

Guaranteed to make you a better soaring pilot. Finding, entering, centering, and leaving thermals. Finding and using thermal streets. Weather observation techniques. Thermal prediction. The most complete treatment of thermaling and thermaling decision-making in print. If you are not getting the most out of thermaling, you can keep on buying extra aerotow launches...or you can buy and read this inexpensive but comprehensive book and discover how to get the most out of thermals.

Author's Notes
When we soar, we use our wits, our experience, and our powers of observation to gain height in our motorless aircraft. We come as close as ever we will to being as free as a bird. The exhilaration of skillfully exploiting solar energy and using it to soar as long or as high or as fast as we want is the essence of the sport of soaring.

Climbing in thermals is part science, part art. Many new soaring pilots have considerable trouble keeping their glider in the air because they don't understand thermaling very well. Some of them even leave the sport in frustration after a season or two, because they despair of ever learning how to keep the glider up in the air. They see other pilots thermaling up and away, eventually disappearing over the horizon, but find themselves making numerous unsatisfactory short flights, falling out of the sky even as the pundits climb away in thermals and disappear for hours at a time. Frustrating! 

Perhaps this has happened to you. If so, don't despair! I have good news: the fundamentals of thermaling are not particularly complicated or even very difficult. But thermaling sometimes seems difficult or complicated because we haven't studied thermaling in a systematic way.

This book makes thermals easy to understand and to exploit. When you are done with this book, you will know where and how to search for thermals, how thermals are structured, what thermal streets are, and how to search out and center the best lift in thermals. You will know when it is time to leave a thermal and find another. You will have the mental tools you need to systematically search out and use the best lift. You will know how to keep your glider in the air for as long as there are thermals to support you. And with your new skills, you will be ready to enter the worlds of cross country flying, Badge flying, or competitive flying. 
Safe Soaring,
Bob Wander