It’s been a long quiet winter for my skydiving fun this year.  When I was filling out my waiver at Pepperell the other day I was shocked to have to write a “10” in the “Number of skydives in the past 6 months” space.  Last year that number was closer to 30.  Weather, time and money were against me this winter.  Then again, I taught my girlfriend how to ski this winter.  She’s taken and equally un-moderated liking to skiing that I have for skydiving, and since I have a similar view of that, it wasn’t a bad winter!

We often talk about how our jump buddies are like a family to us.  I think that getting back to the DZ at the beginning of the season that feeling is especially true.  There are the people who you really connect with, that you feel you know, and who know you, even if you do nothing together outside of these “family events.”  It’s kind of like, “Ya, all right, here we are.  Let’s jump.”  There’s no need for formalities like the standardized questions about work, kids or what ever.  We’re just there, ready to jump.  If there are important life details that need sharing, they’ll come up on the way to altitude or in the packing tent.   It’s comfortable and natural.

There are other people you haven’t seen in months that you may not have realized you missed.   Usually there are a couple of new people to the family, or just people whom you’ve heard about but never met.  There those who you know, but you don’t really know, and you don’t really get, but are fun to fly with anyway.  Let’s face it, in our “real” families, most skydivers are the weird uncle or aunt that no one in the family quite understands.  Then there are those family members that you know you didn’t miss, but what the hell, they’re part of the family too, so you have to be polite to them, or cordial at minimum.

Friday night Skydive Pepperell sent an e-mail out that Otter load 1 would take off at 8:00am.  My brother (actual brother, not just brother in skydiving) and I were so amped to get in some air time we were the before 8…  to wait for things to start spinning some time around 9am.  No worries, we were on our way to altitude by 9:30 with a plane load of tandems that we left behind at 10k, then enjoyed the ride to the top on our own after that.

We did a little effort at angle flying after my brother did some sort of blender break dancing move on the exit. We’d decide to pull a bit high to play with our canopies.  We’d tried flying together a bunch last year, but  we just weren’t matching up.  We’d get close, but it was always work to stay together.  The odd thing was, even though he was heavier loaded on his Saber 170, I would always sink away from him.  We thought it was just that my Spectre, being a 7 cell was just too steep and fast to fly with him.

It turns out there was a trim issue, but it was with his canopy.  When he brought his gear in for the bi-annual inspection and repack, he mentioned to the rigger that he thought his steering lines might be a little on the short side.  We’d noticed that it didn’t look like he was getting full flight, even with the toggles all the way up.  So they laid it out on the table and found an alphabet soup of lines that were too short and too long.  The whole thing was way out of whack.  They decided to send the canopy to Performance Designs to get relined and tuned up.

That was the ticket, because when we got in the air together this weekend we matched up like a couple of peas in a pod.  We had no problem moving around one another and staying together. It was a blast!  We’ll hold off actually docking until we get some coaching on CReW, but in the mean time we’re definitely having a good time proximity flying together.

Holey no wind landing!!  I was glad I didn’t lock my ankle in the toe down position for free-fall as I often do, because I was moving across that ground with some speed when I came in.  I suppose the lawyers at Ossur would shit a brick if the saw me running at full speed on their Elation foot/ankle with the ankle wide open.  They’d be quick to point to their “not for high impact activities” note on the literature.  All the same, it beats doing the home plate slide first thing in the morning.

We followed that jump up with an 8 way that I fell out of after the first point and just couldn’t get back up to.  I was nearly there when I felt the air underneath me soften up as I started to drop away again.  Yup, my buddy Jim was even lower than I was, and he passed about 10 feet underneath me.  He’s not a little guy, so he left  pretty big hole in the sky above him.  My attention went from getting back into the formation to swimming out of his burble to avoid being sucked into an unscheduled rodeo.

Clouds kept us from leaving the plane at full altitude on or next jump which was supposed to be a 6 way.  The base was 8,500 so we decided to break into to two groups.  A 3 way horny gorilla seemed in order for a ‘fuck it’ dive.  We spun and rolled like a tilt a whirl on nitrous oxide.  Ya, it was that good!

I finished my jump day off with a nice hop-n-pop from 6k and really cranked my canopy around.  It’s so good to get back into the sky and spend some time with the Pep Peeps again.  Ya, there were 15 minute calls that evaporated into now calls in 3 minutes.  There were as many different landing directions as there were wind directions with little correlation between the two, and a few hyper critical moments.  But there were also good laughs, people watching out for one another, Carolyn’s bad joke of the day and all of the good stuff too.

They say you can’t choose your family, but this one you can, or maybe you did but didn’t know it when you signed up for that first jump course.  Either way it’s good.  Jump with the people you can fly with, pack with the people you like and drink with the people you know.  It’s gonna be another great season of skydiving!

AA