Saturday night my girlfriend and I went to see Warren Miller Entertainment’s movie “Flow State”.  If you’ve never been to a WME movie, you’re missing some good fun.  It’s like a pep rally and ski-porn all wrapped into one.  No, I don’t mean a ski themed sex movie!  It’s lot’s of really great, really crazy, beautiful, kick ass ski video from around the world.  It’s loosely held together by a theme, which really is just a way to edit together some bad ass skiing.

They show the movies in playhouses and theaters rather than a regular movie theater, so they can have an MC to get everyone fired up.  Everyone is encouraged to clap, cheer, scream and whistle at scene’s they like.  It would be like Rocky Horror, but the movie is different every year, so you don’t know what’s coming.  Anyway, it’s a fun way to get pumped up for ski season, even if you’re never going to come close to any of the amazing locations, or chuck any of the bas ass moves you see in the movie.

Skydiving needs that kind of thing don’t you think?  Sunday morning came with lots of sunshine and mild temps for November.  No skiing to be had.  No worries, I had already planned a day in the sky.  CPI is open all year, but this weekend was the last weekend with the Twin Otter.  I’d planned to meet some friends from the Ranch, along with some Pep Peeps and my brother for some fun.

It seems that there was some sort of soiree with the Pep Peeps, that I didn’t hear about until the drunken phone calls around 11:30 Saturday night.  As E and I sat for a late late post show dinner, I hear from the party bus somewhere in NH.  “I don’t think I’m going to see too many from Pepperell at the DZ tomorrow.” I said to Elizabeth.  Indeed, it seems everyone but Jim W. traded a day of skydiving for a night of drinking.  I’m not being judgmental, here.  I love to bend an elbow too, and I’m not sure I wouldn’t have ended in the same condition.  Fortunately I had some ranchers and a couple of survivors from Pepperell to hang with.

Despite the sunshine I woke to in Cheshire, there were low clouds in Ellington.  One load had been up and only made it to 5k when I got there.  But I turned on my magic AAD, and the plane was flying again with in a half hour.  My AAD is special.  I’ve shown up on cloudy, un-jumpable days and not bothered to turn it on, and the day would stay that way.  Then one day, feeling optimistic, I turned it on even as low clouds hung heavy over the DZ.  Another jumper even gave me shit for bother to turn it on.  But half an hour later, load one was on a 10 minute call.  Since then, if I show up and the weather isn’t right, I just turn that baby on, and poof!

The first jump was a kind of hastily thrown together 11-way of mostly CPI jumpers.  I took the camera step for the exit, one of my favorite positions.  I love seeing the mayhem of bodies dumping from the plane!  The 4-way base lost a person on the exit somehow, and I waited in my slot next to Ryan.  Nothing was happening, and since I was supposed to pod off of the MIA 4^th person in the base, I didn’t have much to do, so I drove in and filled the slot.  What the hell, someone had to get the thing going right?  Eventually we put 8 or 9 together in a random configuration that eventually morphed into a round.

Once under canopy, finding the dropzone at CPI can be like finding an albino in a blizzard.  Sure, it’s the place with the airplanes and the runway, I know, but until you jump there for a while, everything on the ground looks pretty much like everything else.  There are tons of fields, and clusters of developments, and quite a few roads… but nothing really draws your eye to the DZ.  The DZ itself is remarkably unremarkable.  So, I get under canopy, and kinda follow everyone else for a while until I can get a line on where they are trying to go.  Fortunately, everyone else I talk to says the same thing.  So I don’t feel that inept.

Jump two was a 6 way rugby match that didn’t really settle down into anything I wanted to play with until about 6,500 feet.  Then everyone stopped moving, and I thought “Great! Now we can put at least a round together!”  As I moved in, everyone kinda held still and looked at each other, then broke.  WTF?

My third jump was with a new friend Don, and we were just out to have fun.  I barrel rolled out, and he dove after me.  We were a little rough, but we got through a bunch of points we’d planned, maybe 8 or so.  Of course, while we had talked about the dive quite a bit, as we made it to the end of our first round of points it occurred to me that we’d never discussed a break off altitude.  We were hanging in around 55, and looked at each other like “Ah… so when did you want to break?”  I guess that was about as good a time as any.  I spun and found myself looking strait up jump run and thought better of tracking that way, being that we had been first to leave.  So I turned another 90 and checked for Don who I found still hanging in there waiting for me to make up my mind.  I quick wave and we blasted off in opposite directions.  So fun!

Thinking I could get one more in I was quick back to the packing tent.  My pilot chute bridle was spun up like a Chihuahua on amphetamines.  When I followed it up to the pc, I found my d-bag wrapped around my pretty new pilot chute.  Huh, I guess the guys at the shop didn’t do such a great job with that install after all.  The old pc bridle had been sewn into the bag, so they’d cut it off.  Fair enough.  To install the new pc they put a grommet in the d-bag to accommodate it.  This would have been fine had they done any kind reinforcing where the grommet was placed.  So it ripped completely out of the bag.  I guess I was lucky that:

1. It didn’t rip out leaving the bag in place on my main giving me a nice bag lock
2. I didn’t loose the bag

Anyway, nothing worse happened than ending my day one jump early.  You can bet I’ll have a few words when I bring the mess back in for repair!

The day ended with two 10-way speed stars at sunset.  While I would have loved to be on that load, it was great to watch from the ground.  The first one didn’t come all the way together, but the second one did, and flew nice for quite a while.  Watching and listening to everyone coming in on pattern together at sunset was such a perfect end.  Ski season comes soon, but jumping continues until that happens!

A final  fly-by  from the Otter.