Playtime

A lazy day. It's almost noon when I arrive at the DZ. The weather is still unbelievably beautiful, sunny and warm. Yesterday was the hottest Feb 9 since they (whoever they are) started measuring those things.

I join a group of bellyfliers for a 6-way. I am front float and i totally f**k up my exit. The rest of the jump is also not good (in Luk's words: "this was definitely a sub-optimal performance"), but that's no more because of me: we all seem to have an off day (or an off jump at least). There's absolutely no wind, so landing is fun!

Next I make a complete-fun-jump: I exit tracking on my back, wobble a bit, make speed, salto-ing to normal track, going steeper and steeper to an almost vertical dive, even steeper, falling over and coming out of this in a back-track once again, and so on. Drop was much too far: I exited last, 1.6 mile past the DZ centre point, and I did my tracking perpendicular on the jumprun. I open a bit higher, I am under canopy at 4kft. I love floating around up there.

Third jump today is a sit. I can't help feeling a bit ridiculous. Everytime I check altitude, I turn at least 180° :-))

There's time for one more jump. Two guys who are training to become AFF instructors, ask me to film their practice jump. So that's my first "real" camera jump: I mean where I am filming other people, rather than just filming the jump I am doing. My exit works out fine: my timing and position are OK (well of course it could be better, but I have seen far worse than this my first attempt). And for the jump, well, what can I say... They handle the exit very well. The guy in black who comes from inside, I have more than a few jumps with. I know he's good, much better at FS4 than I am, and still... The fake student is not doing very much, but a bit of stress, an unusual situation, and in a few seconds the jump goes from OK to complete mess. That's what training jumps are for, and they sure learned a lot from this. They both gave permission to show the video, so here it is:



We all deserve beer after this :-)