November [1997] Jump Report

Merry Christmas Everyone..Happy New Year

I have spent the last month and a half riding an unbelieveable wave in Parachute history. Now I have an awareness I'm actually doing a new species of art style. The art of VRW has never before been practiced in the history of man and finally I'm up and on the face of the wave of my life long desire to meld Skydiving to the arts. It's totally New Age.

I spent most of my time last month not jumping but drawing alot of pictures illustrating basic vertical postions and exits as part of a project with other World Skydance members. Hopefully, I'll see some results soon. I've also gone back to dancing every evening. I've suddenly discovered a rythmn I could not get going when I danced semi- professionally 10 years ago. I think it is because I discovered the wiggle in head-down. Good freeflyers are always leaning and this is what decreases their fallrate more than anything.

I am scheduled now at the GKC DZ to do VRW jumpmastering and videography every third weekend. My first went off Nov. 8, but then the next go round lost out to El Nino. I went out one other time to work on my personal skills.

On the first go round, I made 4 jumps with four different people, all sit flyers with 25-100 attempts. I knew everyone and where they were with their skills. I listened to their complaints and made just simple suggestions. During each jump I paid attention to my video and gear and suggested they just try simple manuvers. Mostly, no one could get stable until the very end of their dives. Despite all this chaos Everyone seemed to have a good time and enjoyed the videos I shot of them. I found the whole experience a great workout for my own skills. I had solid video on everyone as they skitered about, with no lost frames, and this made critiques easy and worthwhile. The last student of the day did well, making three points with me. She had about 50 skill dives.

Unbelieveably, I attended a party last weekend with 5 members of the original 13 Kansas Homegrown -(before Jerry Byrd). While at the party, 2 other original members called. As expected everyone in the 40 or 50 something crowd partied hard and regailed each other with real stories that would have sounded made up and exagerated to most everyone else.

For me, the highlight came when Jim Captain came up to me and said I showed some real skill in my video production. He was a former first jump student of mine who went on to be on the NFFET and the Olympic Rings jump and the 300 way. He works with N. Kent now. This made me believe in the art in my work.

At the Homegrown reunion Christmas party I found out the Smitty rig was for sale. Since the party, I have founded a consortium to get the funds together to buy the damn thing. It's a museum piece. It's the possiblity, the KSU club 1964-97 may be gettin together a permanent museum, and that may end up the resting place since the Kansas Air Museum has fallen on hard times. This is a 26 foot silk job with a ford tractor steering wheel for riserlinks. Two 3/8 inch thick leather straps loop around each other to form a saddle connected to the steering wheel. To steer the canopy you grabbed the wheel and pulled down in the direction you wanted to go. The canopy launched out of a peach basket hand-held to the chest during exit from the wing of a bi-plane. The rough grain of the wooden basket acted as a pilot chute because it clung to sides of the canopy and streched it out before breaking loose like some prehistoric freebag. There is no reserve for this system. Smitty jumped this rig 31 times mostly at demos at Friday night races in small Oklahoma and Texas cow towns. He always landed in sight of the crowd because he exited from less than 800 feet.

Happy Holidaze JHS