"If you can't convince them, confuse them" Harry S. Truman

Jump number 5 was awesome! We burned right through it. They're starting to
back up on posting the scores, there's so many teams they just can't keep
up.

Just as the plane was lifting off on number six I looked out the window to
see 3 wild eyed deer tearing along beside the runway as fast as they could,
looking absolutely terrified as they were being overtaken by something
nothing in their lives could ever have prepared them to deal with. It would
have been pretty funny if not for the fact that if one of them had panicked
and turned left onto the runway instead of right into the corn it could have
easily taken out an engine at a critical moment. When a skydiver screws up
he gets hurt, if he screws up seriously he dies, but when something goes
wrong with a plane, they can lose everybody on board. The day would really
suck for the deer as well.

We had a couple more busts throughout the day including some where we
thought the points were clearly presented. I wound up talking about it with
Craig Gerard in the loading area and he said the judging was very uneven for
all the teams. There were a number of completed formations busted that there
were no problems with. But it didn't always work against us.

A number of years ago I was on a skills camp where Andy Honigbaum of
Airspeed gave us a 10 minute presentation on "Acting Skills, and Showing It
to the Judges". One of the points he made was that no matter what happened,
act as if everything is going exactly according to plan. He said that in a
fast paced competition, if what the judges see on video looks smooth and
controlled with no hesitation or hint of confusion, they won't always pick
up on mistakes. "It's too late to save it, just move on to the next one
without drawing attention to it." We got down from one jump and Josee was
upset because she took a wrong grip on a formation she's done so many times
she can do it without thinking. It was only one point, in the grand scheme
of things it wouldn't make the slightest difference one way or the other but
she was upset she made such a simple mistake. But when they posted the
scores for that round they didn't bust us. We watched the tape again,
several times, the mistake was definitely there, we definitely should not
have scored a point, but she looked so confident and 100% certain about what
she was doing that if she hadn't told us she made the mistake we probably
could have watched the tape a dozen times and not noticed. "If you can't
convince them, confuse them."

Nathalie and I were approached about joining a team to compete in the 8-way
event that would start right after 4-way was done. The guy was a friend of
Nathalie's and because it was the only invitation we'd been able to get
into that event we took it. A few hours later when we were in the loading
area Nathalie pointed across to one of the mockups used for practicing exits
and said "Those guys will be on our team" . When I looked over one of the
guys was one of the biggest skydivers I have ever seen. This guy was more
than six and a half feet tall and looked like he could snap a telephone pole
in half. I'm not kidding, no exaggeration, not a word of a lie. He was huge.
Enormous. He looked like he could be a 4 person base all on his own. My jaw
dropped, all the color drained from my face, my heart stopped, and I damn
near crapped my pants. All I could picture was this guy clutching me in a
death grip as we fell at the speed of sound with me flapping like a flag
above him while we plummeted to our deaths. Everybody around me thought it
was pretty funny, but I was not amused. I also needed fresh underwear. I saw
him from a lot closer in the hanger later that day and he looked even bigger
up close than he did from a distance. I didn't bring enough weight belts to
be able to make myself fall fast enough to stay with this guy. We're
screwed.

The event was over by 4 in the afternoon, we had an average score of 8.3.
Not what we had hoped, but given our problems it was pretty good. We
competed in The Big Leagues.

Now that the seriuos crap is out of the way we can go and have some fun. 8
Way starts tomorrow morning.

But everytime I think about jumping with the big guy I feel like I'm one of
those deer being chased down the runway by something I can never hope to
outrun.