Thursday started off like every other day in the California desert, hot and dry. By 8 a.m. it was 25 degrees and climbing fast. Despite her best efforts at protecting herself with sunscreen and a hat Diane had been getting fried by the sun during the dirt dives. She showed up for the first dirt dive that morning wearing a home made burka fashioned out of a halter top that left only her eyes showing. It also did the double duty of filtering out the dust. Written on the shirt was "Porn Star Academy".
There's going to be an airshow at nearby March Air Force Base on the weekend so we may have altitude restrictions They're going to try and squeeze as many jumps in today as they can.
Dan B.C. was playing tour guide all day for an older couple who finally joined us for one of the debriefs. It turned out to be his mother, and I can't imagine that any mother ever looked as proud of her son as she did while he ran the debrief for all 150 people.
Towards the end of Thursday the winds started picking up but were going opposite directions in the north and south landing areas. They lay out a large arrow on the ground to designate landing direction so that meant half the people came screaming in downwind. No wind I can deal with, but downwind was about 10 miles an hour faster than I could run. I watched Rob from the UK spend 5 minutes furiously attacking his jumpsuit with a scrub brush after a particularly bad landing. He generated a choking cloud of dust but when he stood back to survey his progress there had been no discernible change in color. It was still Perris brown. I haven't even botheedr to pull out a scrub brush, counting on wind and opening shock to clean most of it off. Fair warning Trevor, the rig is going to need a full wash when I get home. It's actually a lot worse than it looks in the picture.
The Quatari military did some training here a couple of years ago and renovated one of the bathrooms as they didn't like the plumbing facilities that were available to them. I'm sure it wasn't what they intended, but they left behind a bunch of booby traps, and skydivers are well known for being boobies. Twice while we've been getting our video debrief there's been a sudden bloodcurdling screech from next door as another curious skydiver discovers how not to use a bidet.
By the end of Friday we were within seconds of building the formation when we hit our hard deck, which was 500 feet lower than the designated breakoff altitude. Hard deck is the absolute lowest that we will continue to hold the formation, and we only hold it for that couple of extra seconds if the Dan thinks it will make the difference and let it build.
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