Off and Crawlin' like a Herd of Turtles.....

By the time most of you read this we'll already be across the border, headed southwest at a dangerous and unsafe rate of speed, headed for Skydive Chicago and the US National Skydive Championships. (I'm serious about the dangerous and unsafe part, 2 out of the 3 people in the vehicle are from Quebec, one of them is Nathalie, and her idea of a reasonable cruising speed is going fast enough to catch the Starship Enterprise. I can't for the life of me figure out why I'm the one who gets all the speeding tickets. I'm planning on spending most of the drive with my eyes closed, even when it's my turn to do the driving) The Major Leagues. Probably the largest skydiving competition in the world. The participants aren't limited to just US citizens, teams from all over the world will be coming to measure themselves against the best skydivers in the biggest league in the world.

And then there's us. I already feel like the hick who fell off the turnip truck and found himself in the Big City. Although we are more than welcome to attend, if this were any other sport in the world we'd never be allowed to waltz right in and enter ourselves into some other countries national championships. Skydiving is very democratic that way. The more the merrier!

Actually, the truth is, they just want our money. But we don't care. We came to play. We'll be scored by the judges just like all the American teams, but as a Guest Team we don't qualify for medals. Not that Arizona Airspeed or Deland Majic are looking over their shoulder to see how close we are. We're loaded with the usual assortment of gear and luggage, and since neither Nathalie nor Stephane have mentioned anything about bringing booze I have decided that I will claim their duty-free allowance and bring 3 assorted cases of Canadian beer. I'm certain my American friends will welcome us with open arms.

Our team name is 4D, it consists of Nathalie Gaudreault, Josee Leblanc, Philippe Morin, and myself. It's the same group who competed successfully at last summers Canadian Nationals. Well, mostly the same. There was one change. It seems that every single time we go and compete somewhere, we have to break in a new cameraman. I don't mean take an experienced camera flyer and let him get used to flying with us, I mean take somebody who has never flown 4-way video and teach him everything from how Not to take us out on exit to not circling the formation so much it makes us dizzy watching the debriefs. In 2005 we trained Ross, - actually it would probably be more accurate to say he trained himself, using us as targets - literally. I still have a chip on the back of my helmet where he broke his camera on my head - who went on to so many bigger and better things that he eventually got bored of skydiving and moved to Whistler to sell condos. In 2007 we trained Garth, which taught me that just because somebody has jumped with a camera bolted to his head for many years I shouldn't assume he can actually knows how to fly the video slot. Or how to not take us out on exit. In 2009 I thought we scored a real coup when Paul accepted our invite to fly for us, he had lots
of jumps, lots of experience in competition at the national and international level, had been flying Tandem video for a while, showed up with lots of shiny looking camera crap in nice, well organized bags, and
promptly took us out on our first 2 exits. In the end they all got the job done, and I'm still grateful to each and every one of them for being willing to put up with us for a summer. Which brings us to our present cameraman.

Stephane Lemay.

When the guy who had originally agreed to do video for us had to cancel because of commitments in the real world, and Paul had to cancel because somebody offered him buckets of money travelling to exotic places to do whatever computer thing it is that he does, we decided to hold auditions.

The first guy showed up late, which we had been warned he might do when we were checking him out. The next day we jumped with Stephane. A split second after we left the plane he followed the example set by his predecessors and dropped onto the formation. Now, this is a big guy. Real big. He is more than capable of completely trashing a formation, especially if he's attacking it from above. But he didn't do that. When he realized he was caught in our burble and couldn't possibly avoid landing on us, he aimed for a hole in the middle of the formation, did a front somersault through it, flipped back over onto his belly, reinflated his wings, flew out from underneath us to where he was supposed to be, and only missed a couple of seconds of our jump. We hired him. I just wanted to see what he would do for an encore. Stephane said he was quite pleased to be the latest student enrolled at Cameraman University.

The plan is to drive through the night, arriving sometime on Thursday, get registered and waivered, then crash early at our hotel. We'll do a few practice jumps on Friday to let the team members who haven't been there
before get used to the place, and crash early again Friday to be ready for the start of competition early Saturday. If past years are any indication we may be doing all 10 rounds of 4-way in a single day. That's a lot of jumps for one day, and once you add on the stress of of competition it will be interesting to see how we all hold up. It's been an extremely busy summer for all of us and I think it's safe to say we're all wound up pretty tight as we head into this. We've all thought about attending this event before and this should be a lot of fun.

As long as nobody does anything stupid. In which case I will gleefully tell the world via email. I heard it said somewhere that a little nonsense is relished by the wisest men.

Wish us luck.
Crazy Larry