Take me to your litre

What kind of litre? Any kind, as long as as it has a label on it saying what
proof it is.

Now the REAL party has begun. We returned from dinner on Sunday night to
attend the briefing for the 8-way competition and found that everyone on the
drop zone was bombed. Trashed. Toasted. Even the judges. Especially the
chief judge. When she staggered out on stage she had so much trouble
standing up that she finally wound up delivering her briefing sitting down.

She slurred her way through before handing the microphone over to Rook
Nelson. He shared some statistics. The judges scored 452 competition jumps
on Sunday (they earned their beer, no wonder there were some complaints, and
thank you to them for their efforts), there were 112 competition loads flown
by 5 twin otters, 20 fun loads, and 120 Tandems. There was never a time from
7 AM until sunset when there weren't canopies in the air.

Although there were a lot of serious teams entered in 8-way they were
outnumbered by the fun teams and names like "FIG JAM" (F*** I'm Good, Just
Ask Me), and "Rook you Have A Call On Line 1", were common. I went over to
Erin after the team had registered our team name and told her there had been
a mistake, that instead of "Ninjas 8" it should have been "Ninja's Eh?" in
honor of the 2 Canadians on the team. She gave me a suspicious look and said
"Here, you type it in." I guess she didn't want to be blamed for making a
typo. By the time rest of them found out it was official and too late to
change it.

For the Canadian Nationals we had to scrape up everybody on the drop zone to
put together 3 teams, here they had 21.

Once they handed out the dive pool we headed out to the hangar to meet the
rest of the team and start puzzling out and planning the dives. This is
where everything went to shit. It took forever to figure out the flow on the
first dive and to start creeping it. It was one of the most frustrating
experiences I've ever had skydiving. Everybody had their own idea of how it
should be done and they were all trying to talk at once and there wasn't
anybody who was clearly in charge. It was the deaf dumb and blind trying to
lead the lame stupid and halt. Nathalie and I didn't know these people so we
were reluctant to try and take charge. I had started to consider faking an
injury or some desperate emergency forcing me to return home when an 8-way
team from the Ranch descended on us and proceeded to Gang Coach us. They
each grabbed the person who was flying in their slot and started pushing and
tugging us around, stepping into the formation to demonstrate when somebody
was having trouble understanding, giving us a constant stream of
simultaneous instructions. It was overwhelming at first but In minutes we
had everything figured out including the exit. Nonetheless it took an hour
just to plan the first jump. Everybody else had left the hangar long before
we were done, and they had puzzled out most of their jumps. We're so
screwed. We've already paid for all 10 jumps plus the video slot. It's far
too late to back out now. Nathalie lay in the back seat and cried all the
way back to the hotel room.

Nathalie and I plotted our strategy that night. I told her that after the
first jump went to hell if she stepped forward and took charge I would be
the muscle and back her up. The next day when I told Kelly what the plan was
had she said why wait? She'd been watching the Gong Show the night before
and thought we should stage a coup now and seize control before somebody
gets hurt.

The first jump didn't go anywhere near as badly as anybody expected, and we
actually scored 3 points. I had worn all the weight I could find, and found
myself fighting to not go low on the big guy. He was 250 pounds, but it was
spread over a big frame, wore a slow suit, and knew how to fly. But since we
were going to be on quick calls all day long it was obvious somebody was
going to have to force the pace so Nathalie started to issue orders, and to
my great surprise for the most part people shut up and listened. On a good
day organizing skydivers is like herding cats, but I think everybody
realized how much trouble we were in and wanted someone to show them the
way. We roped Kirk Verner into showing us the best way to engineer the dives
for the rest of the day but every time he left us on our own Nathalie took
charge again and made it happen. We did 9 jumps that day, which is a hell of
a pace for a 4-way team that has trained together. For 8 people who have
never jumped together it was spectacular. We scored 3 points on every round
except for the last one where we scored 2. We finished the competition with
our last jump on Tuesday morning. We accomplished the 2 goals Nathalie and I
had set for 8-way: Don't finish in last place, and finish ahead of a team
with matching suits.

Us Nationals has been fun, We're glad we came, but we've had enough. We're
going to go spend a couple of days in Chicago. Phil works for the City of
Chicago and has invited us to come visit him at work on Tuesday and stay for
lunch. He said we could ride along if they get any calls. What sort of
calls? There's no telling. Could be damn near anything. Phil rides around in
a big red truck with sirens covered with lots of lights, ladders, and hoses.
This could be the high point of the trip.