:-))

I live some 25 km away from the DZ, south-west of it (and that happens to be the predominant wind direction over here). So after a rainy morning, when it clears out at home, I leave for the DZ, and we (the nice weather and me) arrive almost at the same time.

We are 14 belly fliers in load 1, we quickly brief a 3 point dive, and it really is a fun one. We are done before we reach 7000 ft. Big smiles all around! Next is a sit/stand-up, where I try to follow two other people. I can't match their vertical speed:-(

Jump 3 is a level 3. I don't know the guy, it's his third attempt at this level. But he did a few minutes of tunnel after the previous one. And it shows. He is very tense, but the jump is not bad. We take an hour to debrief and than brief his level 4, and up we go again. I really put on a show in the air to relax him, and it works. Up there, everything is so much easier when you smile! The tunneltime shows: he can't exit, he can't fly forward, turning is not completely under control (after the 90°, he was supposed to turn back, not to throw in a 270°), but his movements are very crisp, his general flying is OK. In a tunnel, they don't teach you altitude awareness: he almost never checks his altitude spontaneously. Only when I give the example, he mimicks me. That will be an extra TLO for his next jump. A good jump, I had fun just being there :-)



So just a sunny & lazy afternoon: 1 FS, 1 FF, 2 AFF's, and a few beers to round it all up...

8 and 12

For the last few weeks, we have been using one plane for two dropzones. Since it is slow season, that's normally not a problem since the two fields are only some 40 km apart. So it is an alternating routine: climb, jump and then the plane descends to the other DZ. Normally, we shouldn't loose too much time like this. But. Problem today is that on the other DZ, there is a 16-way training going on. In short, I 've been in all the loads on our DZ (all whole four of them :-( ) and I spent way too much time waiting at the boarding area (cold, wind). But hey, 4 jumps is 4 jumps, right?

First jump (after more than an hour of waiting in the cold) is an 8-way. For the exit, I am the middle diver. The next diver, to my right, gives me a pin check on exit. But that's not why we funnel it: one of the floaters goes belly up, so... Rest of the jump is OK. Under canopy, there is more wind then we expected. A bumpy ride, but a nice one!

While the rest of our group wait for each other and for a few newcomers, I quickly throw in another jump. Exit in sit, backfly, push to sit again, f**k why do I fall over when I look at my alti? Using my arms too much, not flying with my legs... bwaah :-)

We are 12 now for the next jump. For the exit, I am front floater, and silly as it my sound, that's my favourite position for this kind of dive. I love the wind, I love the power you need to make a good exit from that position. It is a good dive, but no thanks to me. On the third point I take a wrong grip, and for the rest of the jump I don't recover. Each transition, I have to wait and look what the others are doing, before I know what I have to do: it is one big brainlock... (and a few people noticed: beers are in order :-))

Nice 8-way to end the day. Our standard exit works this time. I am in the same position, with someone else diving to my right. He is also too early in the exit, but I manage to fly through the pin check. It's a kind of a boogie-jump. After the exit we make a star, that we then break into two lines of 4. Each line curls up and makes a 180°, and back to the same star. Next is open accordion, followed by closed accordion, and back to one. One of the jumpers is a young hotshot: hours of tunnel time, completely focused on 4-way. He has a wrong grip on exit, brainlocks each time we do the star-star thing (he releases his grip), and he doesn't build the closed acc from the inside, but just goes for his grips. But he is much quicker and more accurate then I am, that's for sure :-).

First round is on me. After that... Well, who cares anyway!

4 more jumps

Not much time to blog. 4 jumps today: 1 FS, a 6 or 7 way, I can't remember, 2 tries at sitting and a tracking jump with two former students of mine.

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...

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 :-)

Last jumps of 2007

1FS, a 5-way, and 2 attempts at sitfly today.

Sometimes I wonder if I really want to start freeflying, or if it is just a mid-life crisis thing... The average freeflyer at our DZ must be some 15 or 20 years younger than most belly-flyers. Some of them could be my kids!

No, seriously, it is fun being a novice again, it is fun learning a few new tricks. In FS, there are moves I could do better, quicker, more precise, and all that, but there is very little I can't do at all. The stuff I worry about are mainly details. While in FF, it's the very basics I'm trying to learn, and there's at least 99% I can't do at all. It's the difference between cursing myself because a move was a few inches short, and worrying that I'll backslide so much that I'll come too close to the previous group. And I guess that's what makes it so much fun, but also a tiny little bit frustrating.

Almost 250 jumps this year. 93 AFF's. 0 reserve rides. Lots of fun, not too much shit. I didn't count the beers. All in all, it has been a good year for me :-))

Happy 2008: blue skies, safe jumps!

Brrrrrrrrr...... (very cold weather)

... but a clear blue sky. Too good to resist (I didn't even try :-). Temperature is around 0°, not counting the cold, northern wind. Temperature at 13.000 ft is something like -20°. In conditions like this, I always prefer diving, rather than floating.

Four jumps today, all belly-to-earth, jumping with everybody who wants to join. Only rule is as soon as we are 8 or more, we split the group. So two jumps are 5-ways, the other two 7-ways. At the end of the day, I have earned 8 free beers: 1 per brainlock (and that's only counting the very obvious ones, not the glitches). Over the years, I learned to cover up my own locks :-)

This is one of the 7-ways we did, a real nice one. No need to think, just swing it around! (this jump made us three beers). For exit, we launched the center spider as a linked 5-way, plus a front floater and a back diver.


Split off the 3-ways and turn them 180°, the outfacing jumper has the nice job! The center also does a 180°.


Next is a very short move to an open accordeon, center does a 180° again.

Direction of the turn is to give the jumpers who must pick up the grip the best visual. And for the center, how about another 180°?


The two switchers cancel each other out, so we can go back to 1.
The faster you can go, the nicer the jump!

16-way

At 9.30 am, everybody is ready for briefing, only the organiser was 30 sec late:-). First jump of the day is an easy one, everybody's facing in all the time, "hardest" slots are a few cats in the second point. It's been a long time since we have flown together and it shows. The jump as a whole is not bad, but could have been much better. I am rather disgusted with my own performance. Exit is slow, my dive is terrible, I deserve to get axed for the dock I make, and I react slow on the key to the second point.

In the meantime, it became very busy on the DZ. We have a two hour wait, before we can make our second jump. The jump is more challenging. Base is an 8 way, a round with 4 people facing in and the other four in doughnut in between them (like the base for a ruby, with two extra people sideways), and then the base becomes an 8 way doughnut. I am front floater this time, my favourite exit position for this kind of jump. Base makes a 45° turn while building, so we (outer people) have to work a bit. Second point is not complete: there is a collision, and we end up with a 7 way doughnut, and a nice 14 way. I am still not too pleased with my own flying. On the first point, I didn't notice that the base wasn't finished yet, one grip was still missing, so I grip too soon. On the second point, base (well, what's left of it) is finished when I grip, but it is not a well-flying formation yet, so again a bit too early.

We decide to do the same jump again, but we have a three hour wait, before we can go again. And that proves too long to stay focused. We start of well, all the floaters have a good exit, the first point builds OK, cleaner than the first time, but there already are a few minor fall rate wobbles. While building the second point, this grows into a level problem and the centre doughnut collapses. Over and out. It was my best flying of the day, but I choose our poorest jump for it. Pity. There is little wind, and somebody pointed the arrow that indicates the landing direction downwind, I like it!

And that's it for the day. Although it's only 4.00 pm, all the loads for the rest of the day are complete. :-(( It feels too early for beer, but what can you do?

AFF, backflying, zoo, FS, AFF

When I arrive at the DZ on Sunday morning, it is already buzzing with the mild chaos I like so much. My gear is back in from annual inspection, so I take a bit of time to check it, and I have to pack to start the day (bwaaah). In the 10 minutes or so this takes me, 5 different people ask me if I can do this today, or that, or ...: I say "yes, sure, go ahead, you can put me in the next load" to all of them :-)

First up is a level 1. He is not too nervous, and really looking forward to it. He's good in the air. Smooth exit, very composed in free-fall, and follows instructions perfectly under canopy. He immediately signs up for a full course. Congrats to him!

By the time we are ready to board for our second jump of the day (a level 3), some low clouds have come in, and the wind starts to pick up, so all student activity is put on standby. OK, that gives me some funjump time. There's one place left in the next plane, so I go up immediately to do some backflying. I am going to exit last. The guy before me is a rookie, he has something like 15 jumps since AFF. When we are on jumprun, I see that his Vigil is not turned on (even when I am not instructing, I check such things, it's a habit). I have to forbid him to jump, and he has to come down with the plane. Not happy.

OK, so I saw it, and that means I can not let it go. Just imagine I decide to let it pass, and something happens. Would I be comfortable then with my decision? Would I be able to explain my decision to his next of kin? Would my decision stand up in a court of law? Triple no. (I could lie about it of course, but only to others, not to myself, and I don't like lying anyway).

The backflying went fine.

Next is a 5-way bellydive. I am frontfloat, and I leave a tiny tidbit early, which makes it a sporty exit, but we manage to hold it. I have a few nice moves in this dive: a back-in-while-backsliding-more-than-a-meter, and than a backwards hop over somebody, completely blind. I didn't engineer the dive :-) I notice at least five brainlocks around me, my first blind hop is way too far, all kinds of stuff happening. We are all laughing through the dive, and manage to do 15 points in the meantime. Nice!

Then a 2-way FS drill: a sequence of turns: 90°, back in, 360°, etc. Ooh, I am very rusty on these things...

By now, the weather has cleared out, and we can restart AFF. I am going to do a level 4 with the older man with the incredible smile from last week. He has tried a level 4 with another instructor yesterday, but he ended up spinning on his back, and under canopy at 9000 ft (5 sec rule). I don't know what to expect, so I ask a cameraman up with us. There is a hesitation in the exit count, but we manage to leave the plane together. He is arched, I signal legs out, and he pushes them out, his body position looks good, but there is quiet a lot of tension. Even when I let go of only one grip, he immediately starts turning. I don't let him fly solo, I don't see what's wrong. Back on the ground, it takes 4 views of the video, with two instructors, to figure out the asymmetry in his arms and upper body... We'll have to do level 4 again, but we survived, we had fun, and he regained some confidence.

Last jump of the day is a level 1, but when I want to start ground practice, I can not find the guy. Simply disappeared (ran off?), so I can start on the beer almost an hour earlier than expected :-)

2910: Door, Sus, Jean & me

We had to wait for the fog to clear, so we all had too much coffee and gossip, but at last, sun 's coming out, so lets go. We are exiting a ritz, but we are diving it out, instead of our usual version of this exit.
Shake, OK, off we go, not a good idea, trying it this way, we lost jean. While we wait for him to take back his position, Sus relaeses grips, what's he doing now, oh yeah, it's his first jump in this new jumpsuit, so he is using this pauze to try it out. Jean 's back and off we go. Move towards icepick is good. We (the sidebody piece) are done early, we can meet them earlier next time around. Some randoms, OK, here 's that move again, good, timing was much better now, but the front piece didn't expect us this early in there move, so they just quack into us. Then some confusion over a sidebody-donut. Sus continuing, me waiting for the sidebody, third ritz-icepick move, beatiful, I love it when a plan comes together.
We start our fourth block move at 4.1 kft, no way we will finish this, so I just start the turn, and throw away my piece partner halfway through it, and track off. He goes almost 360 before he can stop himself. But where the fuck am I?
My first jump here, was 18 years ago, I saw the DZ at exit, but I can't find it now ??? I check the other canpies, waaw, that **** of a pilot must have taken a reverse axis with rather high upper winds to leave us here. I check my mental picture of climbing out, we were third group, and indeed he was flying north instead of south, should have realised it then instead of now. The car ride back to the DZ is exactely 7.4 km! All 17 jumpers landed out.

2908: 8-way

The same seven people from the previous jump, plus Walter, who arrived late. Briefing is more ambitious now (we are not a team, we are just a bunch of jumpers who happened to be there): standard exit, start off with a compass, easy transition to a frisbee, then snowflake/in-out and a big star to cool down.
As we launch, I am coming from the inside again, I feel that the guy behind me is late: I pull him out instead of him coming with us. I can hold it, but next to me, it opens up. We also go off heading more then 45°, so it takes us almost 1000 ft to make the first compass, but shit, we 're only seven, where is eight? Koen sees me looking, and points down, ooh Walter is deep, too deep to wait, so 7-way it is.
We 're lucky, he was on the outside (wing on the frisbee, cat on the snowflake), so there needn't be too much improvisation. But our fallrate is now ridicilously slow: I am 1.85 m for only 64 kilos, so no problem here, but there 's people struggling all around me, not a good dive.
Back on the ground, I go to the other skinny guy of our group, we high-five, "I can go slower then this" "Yeeah".