December [1996] Jump report

Holy moly I made it through another Winter solstice(?) party season. This year, the season has conjured up strange weather as well. We had snow in Oct. and sub-zero weather in November and December. On New Years Day it was 68 and calm.

I got in a total of 10 jumps from December 7 through January 4, and, they were high quality dives. I did a night jump over KC with all the Christmas lights in full bloom. The night air was crisp and clean and all the cities up and down the lower Kaw River were clearly visible. When facing towards the west, lux streched in front of me for a 100 miles and when looking east you only saw the darkness. I flew the dive in the head-down position doing piroettes and giants until it looked like strob lights..

The next day I made a dive with my freefly team and M and I did a no-contact Spock with about 1 meter gap from point of grip. I flew head-down. I haved dreamed of getting to this point. I did it in less than 500 jumps but it took tremendous concentration in visualizing, studying film, and streching. I virtually never stopped thinking about it since Eloy freefly competition in '94. Some say this is no kind of life....I say different.

I visited another DZ a couple of times in early Jan.(called Skydive Kansas) as my regular DZ shut down for the seasons 2 big holidays. I got another case call at still another Kansas DZ. Since the filming of the Gypsy Moths at Cottonwood Falls, I've been to all the Kansas DZ's except 2. This is like 3 dozen or something. They are all small Cesna Dz's that pop up and fade away. Somehow out of all this a kind of roots thing has happened. Everyone I jump with can tell you who trained them and it is always from a former DZ in the area. As the DZ's shut down, the Instructs and JM's just move over and suddenly become the hard-core of the next DZ.

At Skydive Kansas a couple of people mentioned freeflying to me and I gave them some pointers. I did 2 training dives with one. I fell a nice base while he worked on fall rate and direction controll in a stand-up. He had a bad back slide and I had fun trying to stay with him. The other fellow had come from western Kansas to jump because the small DZ located out there had their only aircraft in on overhaul. I'm encouraged to find people working alone at freeflying trying to figure things out from pictures they had saw. I try encourage them to keep it up.... I said hello to a flyer from the K-State club I knew. He said he had won in 4-way at the National collegiates(sp) at Deland just a week before and I mentioned how I had gone their in 71, 2 years before he was born, and, competed for K-State in the colligiates. It was before RW. He remembered me because I was in his 1st three way about 4 years ago....

I managed a first ever Santa Claus jump with Santa in the head down position. I showed up late at the DZ on a cold Sunday a week before christmas. I packed up any way and then asked Jerry, who was on the manifest and dressed in a Santa costume, what he was doing, " .. -a demo or something".

"Nope, just jumping in a Santa costume for the hell of it".

So, I said, "Let me get my camera on". Jerry flew a nice head-down exit then did some chair piroettes in front of my wide angle from 6 K because it was to cold to go higher. I got a nice christmas video to send to some friends out of this. We sang Jingle Bells on exit.

blue sky jhs/dzp