On one jump the girls who were docking on me beat me to the formation and took grips on the girl I was supposed to dock on. She was wearing a similar suit and helmet so it was easy for them to make the mistake. I stopped beside them, and reached up to tap one of them on the shoulder to motion them out of my way. The look on her face when she turned her head and saw my face was was priceless! Then when she backed up and the other girl could see me was just as shocked. It was the most fun I has all day.
Most of the people have been displaying the skill and discipline that earned them an invitation to the event, but once in a while, somebody gets a little excited, and that's when the the real fun starts. One guy only had 5 or 6 feet to cover to get to his slot but went into a full out track to get get there (A track is the body shape you use to "cover tracks"). he took off like a bullet and immediately had to work just as hard to stop himself, coming to a halt 10 feet past his slot, so he promptly turned around and repeated the process, winding up even further away. Another guy was working so hard to stop after he dove in that he wound up standing upright on his booties like a begging dog. It didn't work, he still went crashing through the formation like a bowling ball. We watched both mistakes over and over in the debriefs, the wise cracks, insults, and digs increasing in volume and quantity every time.
On our last jump of the second day I landed out in the desert with half a dozen other people and as soon as they were down the rest of them began shouting and pointing to the south. i turned to see an enormous dust devil a hundred feet across reaching a couple thousand feet into the air. the huge column of swirling air was clearly visible because of all the dust it had sucked up, but I had flown right past it without noticing. If I had even come close it would have sucked me in, collapsed my canopy, and the day would not have ended well. It's already been a bad weekend for skydivers, the King Air crashed in Gananoque, there were no serious injuries, a guy died after a low cutaway in Deland, one died in a CRW wrap in Elsinore, and another guy was left paralyzed after he was rendered unconscious by a hard opening and then crashed into the windshield of a car when he got to Earth.
On jump number 3 today I moved quickly during the dirt dive to secure myself a prime spot for the exit, one of the last divers coming out of the Skyvan. That would have given me a straight shot at my slot with the added bonus of an quick easy exit. But then Josh put me as second last diver coming out of the chase plane which meant I had to wait for the rest of the plane to empty before I could even start moving. by the time I went through the door the formation was just a bunch of tiny little dots far below me. I managed to get to my slot just as we got to break off, but my tardiness will probably go unnoticed during the debrief because the rest of the formation was a god-awful mess, sliding and spinning all over the sky. We're planning on 2 more today, and then we'll be starting the 88-ways Skydive From Hell tomorrow morning. At the bottom of this page there's a pic of the plan courtesy of Celine. If you find it confusing looking at the picture on a computer screen, imagine how it's going to look to me tomorrow morning while I'm diving down on it like a meat missile.
All the jumps can be viewed within a couple of minutes of our landing at http://www.skydivingphotography.com/
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