On Staying North
by Kim Emerson, S&TA at The Ranch
[snta@ranchskydive.com]
The end of the warm weather means a layoff from jumping for some. It could be another six months before some of us get back in the air. If you don't have the luxury of jumping throughout the winter, staying safe by staying current will be a challenge. It isn't always simply a matter of being away causing enough rust and dust to cause trouble, it's more that we're so hot to get back that we forget we've ever been away and so behave as though the last jump was just the day before. If you put several months between jumps, remember that the first jump you do when getting back won't be the same as any other two in a row on a summer weekend when you've been jumping with some regularity.
The return of the jumping season is traditionally the time of increased injuries as those of us who are hungry and horny for a jump come out of the cobwebs of winter to toss ourselves out of the plane with all the vigor and vision of a beginner - pumped up all the way to blindness. This is one of the very important reasons for Safety Day - to reacquaint ourselves with our sport and with the safety state of mind we need to have in order to love our sport from inside the active loop rather than the sidelines.
It is doubtful that over the long, dark winter we won't be home drooling over skydiving videos, Parachutist and Skydiving magazines, teasing and taunting us with promises and dreams of greater seasons coming. And if a trip to skydiver friendly climes is not in the cards and jumping at your home dropzone with yards of snow piled up above your eyeballs isn't your idea of unbridled fun, dreaming and reliving may be all you have. What's important then is that you do absorb yourself in those videos and magazines. The safest skydiver is the most knowledgeable skydiver and one way to assure that is to live, eat, sleep, breathe skydiving.
You should see skydiving in your dreams at night.
You should think of and be able to discuss nothing else.
You should be able to bore the family and friends to no end over the holidays with incessant talk about skydiving.
Regardless of your personal faith and practice, ask for skydiving related gifts.
Get videos and books you don't already have. Play and replay and read and re-read the ones you do have.
Subscribe to magazines from other countries to get another perspective. Pictures are great. Who needs to understand the language?
Call or email all your skydiving friends and share your misery with someone who loves the company.
Make skydiving plans for the spring and summer and work to see them to fruition, maybe considering a newer dimension for yourself in the sport.
Plan on attending your dropzone's "Safety Day" in the spring.
The bottom line is that we plan to come to the drop zone prepared to skydive if skydiving is the plan.
Have a safe and warm winter and please, come back in one piece! |
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