4-way

It's 4-way time again today. This is good, because I love it, and this is bad because as a belly flyer team, you have to sit in the back of the plane, and it is cold today. -15° at 13.000 ft. Minus windchill, brrrr. There are few skydivers. It is almost eleven o'clock before we have enough people to fill the plane.

First jump we go for a Unipod exit, followed by stairstep diamond, murphy flake, yuan and meeker. Anybody seeing a pattern here? Yeah, right, that's just A, B, C, D and E. Not the most imaginative briefing, but it makes for a nice jump. We start off by funnelling the exit. Sus (centerfloat) and I (backfloat) are on our backs immediately, and we are all tumbling happily through the sky for a few seconds. Once we recover, it is indeed a nice jump. For the yuan - meeker transition Door is the only one who moves, but he turns too much on his chest, rather than around his knee, so while I should just have to flash and retake the same grip, it always opens up.

We decide to do the same jump again. We ask a proper 4-way team how to do this unipod exit, we do a quick re-brief of the transitions, and up we go. This time the jump is really good. The exit works, the jump is clean and quick. As soon as we are back on the ground, we discuss the possibility of ending on a high and starting on the beer, but since it is only 12 o'clock, that would be an even more high-risk activity than skydiving itself, so we just manifest for the next load.

Next is Open accordion, cataccord, bow, donut, hook. You guessed it: that's F, G, H, J, K! Nice jump for Jean, our front diver: his biggest move of the dive (actually his only move) is the few inches he has to come forwards from the open accordion to the compressed accordion. Apparently we are having difficulties with our exits today. Even the (very easy) open acc almost goes wrong. It takes two or three seconds before we can start working, but from there on it is OK. Somewhere in the third round, Jean looses track of the jump. He stops moving at all, and just takes up grips when they are thrown at him :-). Good enough!

We decide not to do this one again, since apart from the exit there were no big issues to correct (well, there is Jean's over-20-seconds-brainlock, but he's beyond hope anyway). Next, we don't go for L, M, N, O, P. We want a nice little block in our jump, so we decide on a sidebody exit, phalanx, cat+accordion - cat+accordion, star. On exit we are in the door for way too long, and when we finally jump, I still don't have any grips at all. You gotta ask Door (inside centre) how he manages to find a way to position himself so that I can not reach either his arm or his leg grip. But the exit is good: I just pick up two grips instead of one :-) The jump is not so good. Randoms are OK, but instead of just turning to do the block, we fly circles around each other. Shame on us!

I have too leave earlier than normal, so this is all we have time for. We decide to start of our next session with a repeat of this last jump and we assign Door to remember this, which means chances are slim...