Ha ha ha!

[d-dog]

First solo jump. Midnight, with a clear (though not quite full) moon and the little dipper hovering right over top of the antenna. A long and quiet climb, but what's the rush? Plenty of time to savor the experience. Lightstick thrown to mark landing area, watching it float down all 900 feet to a soft, standup landing.

Not my best exit, a little tracking to a sorta early pull at 4 to an on heading and that wonderful <phwap> noise of an open canopy. Nice canopy ride to a smooth landing. Frogs croaking in the woods, crickets in the grass. Just enough tailwind to make things easy.

Nobody knows my secrets, just my GSD Bruno and me. Wouldn't have it any other way.

The BASE Mafia is on my tail, so sssssssh don't tell. Just between you and I, life ROCKS!

Peace,

D-d0g
ddog@wrinko.com

[guest]

just out of curiosity, why would you THROW or DROP a lightstick down to mark the landing area? If it was to get clear of obstacles, wouldn't it make more sense to PLACE it there before your climb? Perhaps you would even attract less attention that way. Besides, with an "almost" full moon, shouldn't you have been able to see your landing area pretty well? If not, you might want to think about another way to mark your landing area next time...perhaps try walking the landing area and gaining an inherent knowledge of where is good/bad to land, make mental notes of obstacles, etc.
or am I missing some good reason to be dropping a lightstick? Or is this a subtle troll?
curious.
PS: on a four sec. delay, shouldn't your canopy made a slightly different noise than THWAP? like fthu fthu fthu fthu thwap?

[guest]

That object is pretty remote, so attention is less of an issue so long as one is quiet and reasonably discrete. Given the noise some folks make out there, two small lightsticks floating down at 1am don't seem likely to cause undue attention. Just my opinion.

As to the lightsticks, I dropped two actually and my theory was to use the perceived linear displacement between them as an aid in judging distance/height during final landing setup (ankle is still sore). Moonlight is cool, but not always so good for depth perception - particularly so on a flat, recently-tilled field with few other depth markers. My worry was that I would not gauge setup correctly over the dark and uniform surface of the tilled field, even with good moonlight.

I didn't leave them at the base before climbing as I was not sure what relative winds would be at exit altitude and more importantly deployment altitude. On this object, I often feel different winds on the ground than I do at 250-350 feet. Maybe I just climb slowly and the wind shifts, or ??? In any case, throwing the sticks off after ascent eliminated this concern.

Regardless, the two lightsticks thing didn't really help my landing setup. Under canopy, I felt I was too low to really use them as an aid in judging setup and flare height - maybe if they were closer together? Oh well, never hurts to experiment. They are little sticks I bought at a toy store, and I doubt you could see them from more than 500 yards away as they were falling - though they did trace pretty arcs in descent from my vantage at exit point.

Well, I hear a "thwap" on opening after 4 secs with no nose rolls and no banding of the slider (mesh). A "ftu ftu ftu" would scare the crap out of me, frankly. Snivel?

Peace,

D-d0g
ddog@wrinko.com

[guest]

We jump objects over here with no moon and just leave the brakes on, curl into a ball and wait for the ground to hit us - seems to work fine.

[guest]

It may not have been very smart but one of the neatest jumps I"ve done was a dawn solo from an antenna through about 500' of ground fog. It was so thick I had trouble finding the tower, even with the lights. I figured it would burn off. It was so thick that it was condensing on the tower and the climb up was like a rainstorm. But when I got above the fog, man - what a view! Just the tower I was on, another a few miles away sticking up above the clouds. It sounds corny, but I sat their for a while and that was the closest I ever felt to God. I stood on a light and tossed the pc to the end of the bridle and started folding it up into my hand.... as it reached my feet the strobe went off, shining right through it - I almost thought it caught fire, it flashed so bright. I"d been expecting to jump off the other side so I hadn't really checked out the landing area on that side - I could see straight down and that there were widely spaced trees, but I couldn't tell how high they (only 8-10' it turned out). I opened just into the fogand faced toward the tower. The wind was just strong enough that I could s-turn between the wires without overshooting into the antenna, and I sank straight down into the pasture. My girlfriend started to freak out a bit on the ground because she heard the canopy but couldn't see me. Anyway, I know it wasn't the smartest jump to do at the time, but at that time I felt so at peace that now, some 17 years later, I can still look back at that as a great experience. Sometimes we do things that others don't approve of, and we have to live with it. Your midnight jump sounded great too,d-dog.