Wow!  What a great couple of days my brother and I just had up at Skydive New England (SNE).

We’ve heard plenty about this drop zone from friends and SNE regulars.  It’s always been positive stuff, with the caveat that the landing area is a little small and rough.  We pulled in Friday night just in time to watch the sunset load landing.  Right away we got a good vibe from the place.  Everyone was quick to welcome us, show us around and just generally make us feel like it would be good place to hang for the weekend.  There was an open mike night at The Ripcord Cafe, a good size fire and fun conversations.

Shawn and I made our pre-second jump a simple goof around 2 way back fly effort with a high enough pull time that we could work our way into the “tight landing area”.  Really, it’s not that tight.  It’s long and narrow, so the landing pattern must be north/south.  We were jumping with significant winds from the west all weekend, so we got to go to school on lading cross wind.  All that said, at least this weekend I didn’t feel like I was working too hard too get in there. In fact,  I still was comfortable putting myself close to the peas, or several other areas in the field when traffic or thermals suggested I should.

The field is pretty boney, and has a few places that should be avoided.  I had one T.J. Hooker style roll when I went to slide in a fast landing and hit a wheel-rut that pitched me up and over (I don’t think anybody saw).  With that in my mind, I just made sure to dial in my landings enough that I would want to go for the home plate slide as an out.

After our pre-second jump we met up with Brian Touhey who was load organizing for the day.  We let him know we were looking for small stuff, nothing over a 6-way so we could get some skill building and have fun.  He put together a four way dive with us and one of his 4-way competition team-mates, Sarah.  Brian and Sarah are part of an intermediate 4-way team called T Minus :01.  Last year they won at nationals… so ya, they’re pretty much good to fly with us. 😉  When I logged this jump I started with the words “Awesome Awesomeness”  It was a blast!  We ran through a 5 point dive about 2 and half times.  HELL YA!  OK, so this is what it’s like to dive with people who really have their shit together in the air!

The winds got ugly, so there was a shut down for most of the afternoon.  When it started up again we picked up another visiting jumper in Sarah’s place and jumped a new dive flow putting together 6 points. Finally we ended the day with a sunset load from 10.5 with one other jumper.

Saturday night there was a party with a band at The Ripcord crankin’ loud and late.  They played pretty non-stop with short breaks (how many bands actually take short breaks anymore?)  By the end of the night they had the dance floor full for pretty much every song.

Sunday winds were a little easier on us, but they weren’t going to just let us have the sky with out a little challenge.  There was some good thermal action, and the same push from the west as on Saturday, but not nearly as strong.  Still, there were some funky cross wind landings to negotiate.  Waiting for the plane to land we watch one jumper after another make successively less graceful, and more comedic landings.  Everyone on our load sat on the van watching and laughing a little more with each landing, until just about everyone on that load had some sort of biff in.  As I laughed along something occurred to me and I spoke up.  “Hey before we all laugh too hard, they’re landing the load before us, and we all have to land where they did!”

Shawn and I did a two way head down for a wake-up jump.  It didn’t look like much out the door, but we hung tight as it rolled. Finally on about our third effort, we pushed our legs out hard, relaxed our shoulders, and watched the ground get above us.  We both started screaming like monkeys.  Free Fliers we are not, but maybe one day we’ll get to play with the cool kids.

By the time we were packed, Brian had a new set of dives for us, and three more people to join to make it a 7 way. We started with a stair step accordion, then essentially did side by side 4 days, sharing Brian as the 4th guy.  We did some cool formations based on this.  It’s really neat to get out of that round-star-round thing that we’ve been in or not in on for a lot if dives.

One of the very cool things about these dives is that they were planned to go on with or without all of the members of the group.  In other words, we started turning points, and kept turning them even if someone didn’t show up, or dropped out.  This is a huge difference to what I’ve experience so far which has been more or less “wait and see” skydiving where we all hang around hoping that everyone makes it in to the base before carrying on.   I think that this weekend Shawn and I turned a total number of points that was great than the sum of all of the points put together since we started jumping!  Oh, and we did it in 8 jumps.  So the jumping was awesome awesomeness and the chill factor beat the heat.  We’re definitely headed back to SNE again this summer hopefully sooner than later!