Safety Day 2012

Me and Christy, picture by Linny

I know some of my blogging buddies wonder how I can jump out of perfectly good airplanes on a regular basis. Well, I don't do it nearly as often as I once did, so now it's kind of important for me to attend Safety Day at my local Drop Zone. In the old days, I made more than 200 jumps every year, sometimes as many as 400. These days, I'm lucky to get fifty in, so Safety Day is made for jumpers like me: getting ready to get back into the swing of things, but feeling pretty rusty after not having made a skydive since October.

I am not alone in my desire to get current and ready for the upcoming season. Today was USPA (United States Parachute Association) Safety Day at Drop Zones around the country. Skydive Snohomish provides seminars and free food for the entire day to encourage people to attend. Here you can see that the attendance was pretty darn good: around 120 people showed up on a rainy, dreary Pacific Northwest kind of day to attend seminars and get refreshers about how to be safe.

If a person attended all six sessions and got signed off by the instructor, you were then eligible to enter a raffle that gave over $9,000 in prizes. If your name was called. I've attended this before, and although I didn't win anything, I enjoyed myself tremendously and if your name was drawn (mine wasn't), you got to choose your prize. I learned way more than I expected. My favorite session was with Dieter, who is a rocket scientist five days a week and flies the Cessna 182 for the Drop Zone on weekends. I was fascinated by him when he told us what he does during the week:

Here is Dieter explaining about a Mars lander that he helped to design, describing how the Phoenix lander used a parachute to slow its descent, much the same as skydivers do, except with the thin atmosphere of Mars, it was going a LOT faster than we are going when we deploy our parachutes. It was very interesting to see the parallels. (If you enlarge the picture you can read the text.)

Now I am safe at home, but I'll be losing an hour of sleep tonight as we change our clocks over to Daylight Saving Time here in the Pacific, but tomorrow, I am pleased to note that the sun will set after 7:00pm. More time for skydives once the rain disappears. Isn't it funny what a simple change of clock time can do for a person's disposition?
:-)