Jumping Journal: April 1, 2006

No not an April Fool's joke. Conditions seemed like a joke when you first look at them but other than the wetness it wasn't bad at all.

I knew to keep the weekly streak alive that today was going to be the day to jump this week. With the lack of snow on the inrun and the pipes still being frozen we was going to have to either run garden hoses up the jump or wait for it to rain so we could get the plastic wet. Dry plastic just doesn't work. Last year for mud season jumping we just raked some snow up and down the inrun from the pile that remained in the transition on the inrun. This year the entire inrun was melted down to practically nothing back Monday afternoon. Last year we also had snow spotted all the way down the landing hill until you got to around the K point where it was solid snow coverage until you got to the normal end of the plastic. This year as you can tell from the photos the landing hill was completely bare down to around 20 meters. This meant either manually wetting the plastic or jumping while its raining. I chose to take the easy route and wait for the rain.

I got to the hill probably about 30 minutes after the rain had stopped. I found standing water around the end of the sawdust. This was all mostly due to the melting snow. The rain added a little extra to the standing water, but darn little. I knew this would be a definite problem to be dealt with before trying to even ride the landing hill. I changed into the jump suit and then headed up to the maintainence building to look for something to use to make a trench to try to get the water off the outrun. While walking up the stairs Esky points out that when I get to the snow on the landing hill the snow isn't in the best of conditions, quite bumpy to say the least. I figured that I would be able to handle it. I knew I would find out by doing an outrun or two before even trying to jump.

Finding a hoe I head back down and dig a trench and the water starts getting out of the way. After the water drops to a safe enough level, for me, I head up for the first outrun.

The next problem I notice is that it has been 45-60 minutes since the rain stopped. The plastic was already starting to dry out quite a bit. I had a harder time than normal trying to get moving at the top of the landing hill. Finally I did get moving and got into a decent inrun position. I get down to the snow line and it mentally catches me off guard. I end up falling over. I knew it wasn't much of a problem. I head up and go for another outrun and it goes much better. I remembered to dig my hands when I got to the sawdust and ended up quite surprised how quickly I stopped. I figured that I should have went further than what I did before coming to a stop. More on this down below.

After a minute or two of debating with myself I decide to go up and give it a try. I knew that it was going to be slow to put it modestly. I get up top the tressel and put on the skis. At first it seemed like the inrun may be a little wetter than the landing hill. Once I had both skis on I realized that that wasn't the case. After getting the flag I start down the inrun. It was somewhat sticky at top until I started to build some speed then the rest of the inrun was smooth. I jumped weakishly at the takeoff. I definitely wasn't trying for a hill record by any means. I land and start riding the landing hill. I get into the snow on the landing hill and, from what Esky said afterwards, everything seemed fine. From my recollection it seemed like everything was fine at first but my mind was once again trying to play games with me. I did end up going down somewhere right above the sawdust while still on the plastic. Esky said it wasn't until I was on the sawdust that I had any problems but I do disagree with that. I ended up being covered almost head to toe with wet sawdust. At least it wasn't mud this year like it was last year.

I decided to play it safe given the conditions and I called it quits with that one jump. Last year with several differences in the conditions I ended up taking 10-12 jumps. The one big difference between last year and this was in the sawdust. Last year we found a bit of standing water and used hay that was sitting right next to the outrun to help soak up the water and more than likely help add a little extra 'strength' to the wet sawdust to make it more 'solid'. Totally soaked sawdust doesn't seem to 'compact'. When you ride over dry, even damp sawdust, you just ride over it, you don't really make any marks in the sawdust. When you ride over soaked sawdust you tend to want to sink in, at least it kinda seemed like that today. You need extra support, hence the hay we used last year, to keep you from digging down in which could end up creating a real bad situation.

Unfortunately I didn't get to really perform the dig in with the hands this year. During mud season last year the easiest way to stop was to really dig your hands into the sawdust when you got there. If you didn't, you ended up having too much speed and the only other option for stopping was to laying down on your side and slide to a stop when you got to the end of the outrun. If I remember correctly I have heard the rumor of even being able to do a hockey stop on wet/frosty grass. I didn't get the chance to try that idea out either. A very short day of jumping, but a safe day nonetheless. That's the most important part.

It was definitely a much different way to start the 104 consectutive month of jumping the 25 at Storrs Hill, and the 68 consectutive week of jumping nothing smaller than a K25 at Storrs Hill. Granted in both cases I sit 40 behind, 64 months and 28 weeks. If I just wouldn't have missed those two weeks back in Septmeber last year, DRATS!

Crash