Well the sun finally decided to come back from it’s extended vacation and start doing it’s job again. Despite professional forecasts to the contrary, don’t get me started, we had beautiful weather this weekend allowing the gang at Skydive Twin Cities to once again take to the skies. With our grass runway still covered with snow on Saturday we spent the day doing re-currency training for those skydivers that took the entire winter off and I started training the next batch of tandem instructors. For those of you that don’t know what a tandem skydive it’s when an instructor straps a student to the front of him and takes the rookie jumper for a skydive, remaining attached the whole way to the ground, hopefully. To get a license to be an instructor you have to take an intensive training course which consists of one day of ground school followed by training jumps with an evaluator who tests their skills at overcoming challenging scenarios. In other words I get to go up with instructor candidates and acting as a new student try and kill us both. If the candidate manages to overcome the emergency I put us in he passes the jump, if not………well that’s what I get the big bucks for I guess.
On Sunday our runway was still too soggy to use so we packed up the entire operation and moved to the municipal airport in the town I live in. It has a paved runway and great facilities that are under used so we invaded the new terminal building and took over.
I did four successful evaluation jumps with two separate candidates and only feared for my life a few times.
After a hard days jumping it was time to call it a day and head on home. Seeing that The plane had to make one more flight to get back to the drop zone in Baldwin and seeing that it would be flying right over my house it only made sense to have the pilot “drop me off” on his way back. Hey, I’m as green as the next guy and ride sharing is important. So as the plane passed over my neighborhood I bailed out and somehow managed to find room to land in the cemetery next to my house. As a bonus my neighbor met me with a beer when I landed, so I had that going for me.
