Crazy Larry's Excellent Adventures

Mission 100, Day 4.

The ringers are due to start arriving today. They're the high caliber skydivers with lots of big way experience who will fill out our numbers to the goal of 100. It's 6 o'clock in the morning, there's a light overcast, less cloud than we had at anytime yesterday, and it's already warmer today than it was in the middle of the afternoon yesterday. It's not perfect but it's promising.

Okay maybe not so promising. It's now almost 11, the clouds have thickened up, and we're standing by to stand by.

I was sitting with a group out on the patio, when somebody said "I'll be pissed if I took a week off work to just sit around another airport." Someone else said"I only had 1 week of vacation left and I'm spending it here." Brian looked around to say "I can't believe I took 2 weeks off from retirement to just sit around and do nothing all day, and then drink beer until the middle of the night." We all turned to look at him. After a long pause he admitted that was exactly what he would have been doing if he had been at home, but the rest of us were bitching and moaning and he just wanted to get in on it.

I've had so much free time I finally finished and posted a story on my trip to bridge day that I had started years ago.

A little after 6 with the cloud cover finally starting to break up, we were called to the dirt dive, did our run outs, the Sherpa load was ferried over to their airport, and we all headed up. But the hole we were aiming for wasn't there, and after circling around for several passes over the airport at 20,000 feet, we sat back down and did up our seat belts for the ride back down. At least most of us did. The passengers on one Otter and the Sherpa elected to make a hop and pop through the clouds. They made several passes with only a few people getting out each time, and it resulted in people being scattered across a couple of townships.

That's 2 days in a row without jumping. We're running out of practice time. Our window is closing. It must have been tough getting 4 aircraft together for this, getting qualified people signed up, doing all the logistics. The weather has to turn around soon, or it may have all been for naught.