Skydive Sacramento
As the long Thanksgiving weekend loomed, Sean and I talked about enjoying a couple of days of down time and a couple days of jumping. Just before the weekend an email came out through the NorCal Skydiving Yahoo group that said Skydive Sacramento will have a Super Otter this weekend and through the winter.
I’d heard of the new DZ just north of Sacramento, but hadn’t really considered going because I knew it only had a Cessna. Driving farther than every other DZ in the area to jump a small plane wasn’t appealing when both Davis and Byron have PACs, and Lodi has multiple turbine aircraft. But this seemed appealing - a new DZ with a great plane. We decided to head up Saturday morning and spend the weekend there.
I’m really glad we did. By the time we got there, a lot of our friends were already there and just waiting for 15 people to show up (the minimum to make it worth taking the plane up) to get the first load of the day - actually the first load ever with the Otter - up. We were happy to help get to a quorum. We did three jumps on Saturday, which was an absolute blast even though the plane broke mid-day and was down a few hours for repairs. This DZ has so much potential - it’s very exciting to be in on the ground floor.
Saturday night was spent in Sacramento on Fozz’s sofabed, then after taking him out to breakfast Sunday morning, we headed back up to Lincoln for a couple more jumps. We had the bright idea to get on the road mid-afternoon to beat some of the Thanksgiving traffic, but it didn’t really help much. It still took us about 3 1/2 hours to do what should be a 2 hour trip. Besides the distance, that’s going to be the real drawback of going up there - end-of-weekend traffic is going to be bad almost every weekend because it’s on the route back into the Bay Area from Lake Tahoe and Reno. But I think it’ll be worth it anyway.