On the 14th August I moved onto San Francisco from LA. I was heading for Bay Area Skydiving which is at a place called Byron which is 60 miles East of San Francisco. Fortunately this time my journey was uneventful and I got my luggage back without delay which was a great relief. The manager at the DZ had kindly asked one of the club jumpers Carrol Shaw if I could stay in his trailer for a few days and Carrol kindly agreed. Carrol is quite a guy, not only is he a good skydiver and coach he also is quite a cook and more or less fed the DZ over the last weekend.
The first thing that hits you when you get here is the heat, over Friday and Saturday is was over 100 degrees F. at times. Compared to Perris its quite small in a physical sense but they do have rather a nice array of aeroplanes, A PAC XL, a King Air and a Cessna 206. While I have been here I have been jumping out of the PAC. The centre is open everyday except Monday and Tuesday. It was fairly quiet on the Friday I was here but the place comes alive at the weekend. There are the usual tandems but there is a large core of fun jumpers and everyone seems to know everyone else. I did not have a problem with being here on my own and was soon mixing with pretty well everyone. The geography of the DZ means that at certain times of the day it can get quite windy, but the Byron Boys as they are know have learnt to cope with the wind, they can actually jump in winds up to 30 mph here (not students). Its a very open area, mainly scrub land where the landing area is but it is very large. I have attached some still pictures which I took as I was going up in the aircraft to give you some idea of the general area. My stay here has been quite short so the number of jumps I have made here was only 6. However I have achieved one of my objectives for the trip. I did my 100th Jump of the trip on Sat. 16th August. I have done over 1,000,000 feet in descents and about 850,000 in freefall - I hope to get that to over a 1,000,000 before I end my journey. As usual I have attached some photographs, there are a couple of the sunset at the end of last week which I hope you like. Finally I have once again been shown great friendship and kindness by all at the DZ and met some really nice people. I am moving on to-day to a hostel on the coast south of San Francisco so that I can do some sightseeing before I move off again on Thursday, next stop Dallas. john 18/8
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