Patkat

Reminds me of a joke - A fellow walks into a bar, and requests a pint of Guiness. The bartender, as he pulls the pint, mentions that it reminds him of his youth in Dublin. A second fellow walks in, and requests a twenty year old Islay single malt Scotch. The bartender mentions that this reminds him of when he was chief steward to Lord McSo-and-So in Scotland. A third fellow walks into the bar and orders a Coors Light. The bartender smiles and says, "Ah, now that takes me back." The first patron looks at the bartender as if he's insane, and the second fellow asks the bartender, "What in the world does Coors Light take you back to?" The bartender replies, "Why, it takes me back to those days in Scotland. I'd take my sweetheart out in a rowboat on the loch." The first fellow asks, "Coors Light takes you back to nights in a rowboat with your sweetheart?" And the bartender replies, "Sure. It's fucking close to water." Patkat

Worst beer bong I ever did... at a Jimmy Buffett concert - we happened on a group of Canadians who invited us to use their "Volcano Bong" - a papier-mache volcano on top of their van, with the tube hanging down the side. I was nominated to represent our group. I chugged two whole Yuengling Lagers , provided by myself, and as I was about to finish, the bong operator added a warm can of Miller High Life. I kept it all down. Epiglottis of iron, baby!!!! P.S. the raw clam still wins. -Patkat

Well, kids, I thought this might be an interesting thread to start... you know, see what other people do/wear/etc before and after jumps, maybe see whether we are as superstitious as other athletes can be. And it took nine (actually less, but I'll spot you all a couple) to get back to "nakie stuff." And anyway, Froggie, were those undies just bottoms, or tops and bottoms matched up? Patkat

I just finished dyeing a new pair of Chuck Taylors - red and blue, with a little bit of white left in between. One is blue white red and the other is red white blue from heel to toe. I just realized that the last pair of shoes I got specifically for skydiving were red white and blue also... Could be the start of a little tradition. Anyone else have any talismans or rituals/traditions that cropped up in your skydiving career? -patkat

"You know you're a skydiver when..." - you see the mini-O2 bottle in the REI catalogue and think "hmmmm buddy bottle. I could get some altitude." "You are *definitely* a skydiver if..." you see that same bottle of O2 and think, "man, the cure for all my hangovers!" "You know you're a skydiver when..." - you watch the Weather Channel for more than two hours at a time, while listening to radio forecasts and checkingat least 2 weather sites online. -Patkat

I gotta agree with Mattb on this one: we as participants in a rather pricey sport need more ratings like we need more clouds. I'm all for more canopy training, and the dissemination of standard (to some extent) canopy control principles, and if there is an association willing to help provide this training, great. I'd even pay for a course. But, I've already paid for a license to skydive, and yearly dues to an organization to represent me to our government. Why should I pay another group for another license/rating to do what others can do for free? The big problem with a "hook turn license" for me is that, like the PRO rating, it can't ascertain one vital factor of your ability to safely execute a potentially risky act: whether you are a jerk prone to hot-dogging in front of an audience or not. Oh. Did I go off there? I don't mean to offend any ECPA people or PRO rating holders. What irks me about this is that we as skydivers are being asked to pay for ratings which I think are unnecessary and not all that vital. With the PRO thing I referred to - why is there a rating instead of a requirement to have the necessary jumps logged? so the USPA can collect another license fee from potential demo jumpers. And guess what? Beer servers are still being tackled from above. Note: I don't know whether the jumper in that incident was PRO-rated or not, or whether it would have made a difference or not in his case. OK, I'm done now.

Well, I'm glad to hear that most people here feel spotting is important... since we only jump C-182s, no GPS, at my dz, spotting is *vital* We even have a Braille Playboy Award for the worst spot of the year. (It's an actual copy of Playboy - in Braille) My $.02 - spotting is not too hard - to do, or to screw up. And if you're trusting that guy at the front of the airplane to take care of it for you, try talking to him about the spot sometime. I do it anytime I'm spotting the first load I'm on for the day,(one good thing about the Cessnas - you sit right next to the pilot) and I've gotten every resonse from "Spot? where ever you say, I guess" to a very helpful discussion of the winds aloft and ground winds, etc. Bottom line - if spotting for you is spotting the green light when it comes on, and you don't look when you leap, don't get worked up about your participation in the exciting sport of parahiking. A wise man once told me that anyone can spot - a spotter is someone who can take the heat when the spot's not good.

Hey, all - just wanted to let you know I'm gonna take the Basic Instructional Course at Delmarva Mar 30 and 31 - just requested the course materials from USPA today. Gonna get me a rating, maybe throw some folks out of an airplane! Well,gotta get the JM course after this, and expand on those freefall skills, but I'm on my way. -patkat

I can't believe anyone hasn't done this one yet - 1) I 2) am 3) me Hee hee. Ok, I'll play for real this time 1)Up 2)Down 3)Caring That's it. Three, count 'em three, words. I chose them for their ease of multiple interpretations - well the first two anyway. The last is there because, ultimately, I do give a damn about most everything. As for the first two - whatever you're thinking is most likely right at some point in my day/week/month/life. -patkat

It is a sad note on the dilution of the "No Fear" logo that the coolest reference to it that I know of is my friend's license plate - PA "FEAR-WHT" He got it in response to all the stickers plastered on kids' pieces of junk and over-chromed , big-tired, manhood-substitute pickup trucks. Me, I always figured that if I had no fear, it'd show - no need to advertise. Well, I guess I do grin in the airplane a lot, if that counts as advertising. -patkat

BEEEEEEEER!!!! Gotta watch that F-word, 'Sis. And ain't it cool? Welcome to the world of sitflying/chute-assis/freak flying, whatever you call it in Texas. Let us know when you owe for your first sit dock, first cartwheel, first head down.... as long as you can afford the beer

Never mind how they did the jumps - who's the girl? Man, if she'd do that jump, I could talk her into.... nevermind.

Absolutely right, Laz - which explains Skyhawk's high opinion of his homeland. When ya start at the bottom every direction you go is up! And as for this whole Texas/restoftheUS/England(or is that Great Britain?)/France thing - you're all part of the conspiracy to hide the encroaching evil bent on taking over the world - Canada! Ever since they realized what a raw deal they got upon emigration to the new world (fur?!??!!! we got fur? and the other colonies get the good weather, fertile lands, and all the rest?) Canadians have been plotting - establishing themselves as a member of the Commonwealth so as to suck up to Mother England, and the Quebecois adding a sop to France, becoming the ever present, ever second tier ally, inviting us north without passports so we get to like their socialized medicine and parliamentary procedure. They send us their quarters, carefully sized to not quite work in our vending machines, they put The Kids In The Hall on cable tv, they open strip clubs in Niagara Falls to tempt our youth. They will make their move soon, and the next thing you know, we will all be calling sofas chesterfields, buying Barenaked Ladies albums in ever greater quantities, and ending every statement with "eh?" And they will not stop with the U.S. No, all ye Britons, Francais, Aussies, yea, even ye Texans will fall before their cultural juggernaut!! Be warned! Oh, wait. I actually rather like Canada. Never mind. -patkat

Froggie - bustin' out with the five letter f-word - FIRST! This the first time you owe beer? Anyway, when you stop grinning enough to see over your cheeks, this is about all there is to say:

Hey, Frank, I have had the same problem as yourself, once and only once, thank god. Our Cessnas have door handles which are roughly six-inch metal disks with a raised handle - sort of like a big cookie-cutter. You turn it counter-clockwise about 180 degrees and voila - the door opens. I was climbing out for a sit jump and slid one of my reserve flaps under the metal disk as I was in the poised exit position. I was going to turn around and face the rear of the plane, but I realized I was stuck. My jump partner caught on and pulled me back into the plane without incident (thanks, Anne!!!) and the jump went normally. I'd have been pretty screwed if it had been just me and the pilot, I bet. Glad I didn't find out. Anyway, I'm inclined to believe that just about any handle one could devise for a C-182 door suitable for skydiving is potentially prone to this hazard - if your can get a hold of it with your hand, you can probably get something caught on it. And those doors are small - no doubt. All you CASA/Skyvan/Otter jumpers, thank your lucky stars the next chance you get. And hey, Frank - congratulations on being alive to tell the tale.

It began, as so many of these stories do, in a bar. I has made friends with a couple of older guys who frequented the bar across the street from the store I managed at the time. One Wednesday, one of these guys, Bill, told me that his son who is my age was going to jump out of an airplane. Apparently, he had done a static line jump the summer before, and since his rappelling class had fallen through that weekend, he was going to go make a jump again. So, having tossed my share of GI Joes and stuffed animals out of windows with home made parachutes, I was a bit intrigued. I got the info on where to go and when the class started and such (just up the road!! I had no idea!!) and got myself psyched up. Hell, who am I kidding - I hardly had time to get excited. And the truth is, it didn't really hit home that I was going to jump until I was fastening my seatbelt in the front of the Cessna six hours later. Amazing. Then I came back to Maytown the weekend afterward, and I was a skydiver. Hooked. Addict-ted. Adrenaline Junkie. NEED A JUMP. It's hard to imagine the air not feeling like my natural element now. -Patkat P.S. Bill's son didn't make it to the class.

Ahhh, another blind person. I bet my eyes are almost as bad as yours, 'Sis - I'm not quite at the "needs hard lenses" state, but I must be close. Plus, I had retinal surgery last summer, which made my right eye even worse!! I've tried both glasses and contacts for skydiving, and I gotta say, contacts have it all over glasses as far as I'm concerned. The reasons? 1. I don't look like a dork. 2. I have much better peripheral vision, which can be key to survival in the sky. 3. I'm lucky enough that I have very few problems with my lenses popping out. I'd say that even if your lenses do fall out, that leaves two out of three, which is not bad, as they say. -Patkat

Subject: Re: Skydiver's Cars...... Sounds familiar, froggie - that bit about the DIE-nasty anyway. I'm still driving the '94 Topaz my parents gave me in college, and it's reaching that special age, when cars begin to assert their individuality. The neutral safety switch is going, so sometimes I have to jiggle the shifter to start it, some of the dash lights work once in a while, and go out if you hit the dash too hard, or if you don't hit it at all. I killed the fuel pump from driving around on empty too much (never ran out, just ran so low all the time that the pump never got cooled off - but that's not because I spent all my $$$ on jumps ) and let's see - it's a Ford/Mercury, so it eats various engine sensors about every 10,000 miles. But it gets me to the dz on time, and provides a handy place for all them stickers...

Yeah, Froggie, you're right on both counts - it's a small town, and it was a slow day for EMS. Still, I gotta imagine no one reported that they were responding, or at least no one paid attention. ("Hey, Maytown said they're responding, 2 minutes out..." "Awww, lets go look at the airplanes anyway - I wanna go see the pretty airplanes...") Anyway, Maytown, the municipality nearest my dz is so small that all the residences surrounding it have a Marietta address, (Marietta being the slightly larger town just to the south) because - get this - the post office is too small to handle the extra mail. That's right, they ran out of P.O. boxes and had to start making new addresses Marietta instead of Maytown.

Whoops, forgot to log in before I posted that last - 'twas I, Patkat. And P.S. to 'Sis and anyone else hitting the books - I feel for ya.... but from my present position I can't quite reach ya. It's awful hard to deal with a professor lecturing on stuff like "the transmutation of paradigms in the semiotics of social/sexual politics in Weimar Germany" and such after a hard day's work - especially when work is so in-your-face gritty real as your job, 'Sis. All I can say is way to go so far... and good luck, blue skies, and fair winds!

I think that, going (way)back to froggie's original question, there are two connections between drugs/addictions and skydiving. The first is our propensity for risk-taking behavior. By which I mean, our ability to investigate and evaluate risk, and accept a certain amount of risk for a certain amount of reward. In skydivng, it seems to me, most folks get a huge rush and sense of accomplishment from jumping, and do their best to minimize the risk while accepting that s**t can (unavoidably) happen sometimes. I'm guessing a lot of folks do the same sort of calculus with drugs (I know I did - risk vs. reward - bodily damage vs. pleasure) The second is that when people are in the grip of an addiction, they often realize the harm they are doing to themselves, in terms of toxins in the body, relationships harmed, sheer time lost, etc., but they wind up telling themselves over and over that they'll stop after the next drink/cigarette/hit/toke/line/shot etc. You just keep putting off quitting over and over. Well, when you are skydiving, there is no putting off pulling - the choice is before you and is crystal-clear: pull or die. So you pull. Skydiving concentrates one wonderfully on what needs to be done, and permits no procrastination. Which may well explain its appeal to the recovering addict. By way of a disclaimer, I've never been really really deep into an addiction - done a small variety of drugs in college, including a good bit of weed smoking which delayed and nearly prevented my graduation (hey, it was me and not the weed, I know) quit cigarettes the other year, etc. I am assuming that this has given me a bit of an insight - but if I am talking B.S., please let me know.

Rule #7 at Maytown - "All jumpers MUST deploy before impact." I'm not sure of the penalty, but I'll bet you'd owe a hell of a lot of beer....

Speaking of news crews showing up... last summer at my dz we had a first jump student land on a parked plane. I guess he fixated on it and went feet first right into the tail section. Broke his ankle, it turns out. Well, dz policy is, a student gets hurt, we call 911. So the call goes out to local EMS services (ya gettin' this, froggie?) that "a parachute jumper hit a plane." About 5-7 minutes later, the local fire crew shows up and begins first aid procedures. Followed by the ambulance from the next town. Followed by the local ambulance. Followed by the ambulance from the other nearby town. Followed by that town's other EMS unit. I'm guessing they were thinking it was a mid-air collision and they'd be looking for pieces over half the county. And then the news crew shows up - we didn't even let them on the airport, since there was pretty much nothing newsworthy to report, and they would likely have done a story on the "local club of crazies" who caused this poor fellow to smash his ankle. Five EMS units responding to a cracked ankle - who says skydiving isn't a big draw?

"He who makes a beast of himself does so to forget the pain of being a man" - Dr. Johnson. As quoted by Hunter Thompson in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" - if you must debauch yourself, this is your guide....

Mmmmmm..... new. Looks great, boss! Super job. And hey, check out all the newbies!