Friday 10 October 2008

A whole lotta skydiving


I've been pretty much jumping every available weekend, weather permitting.
It's been fantastic and I have learned a lot.
Most of my jumps were 2-ways with Debbie Sanderson. We had a good mix of
plain flat flying, improving our skills, and a bit of mucking about.
We did start jumping with others, too, and did some 3-ways and 4-ways.
And I even did a 11-way tracking dive at the end of one evening with the sun setting at the horizon.

The following video has a few jumps: First is Andy Moss and I. We ended up doing our spin a bit early, but it was good fun! I am the one in black with black gloves and blue container with pink writing on it. The next one was a 4-Way wit Debbie, Tracy and Andy. Our exit was a total disaster and I think very well captured ;). Jump 93 was a 3-Way with Debbie and Andy. We did a bet with Richard Head of the Phobia team that we could do the formation and it all went pretty much as planned and we won a beer !!!
Being confident we went on to do another 3-Way. We were all supposed to be linked together in a compressed accordion (the 2 outside ones are facing torwards the feet of the inside one). Then one of the outside people will go up and over the other 2 with a 180 turn and then dock again, then the next person... As you can see, we did not even get to the compressed accordion.



Last weekend was the scrambles. It is a little competition where they make 4 pots with each one having the names of people from different ability levels.
Then teams are drawn with one skydiver from each pot.
The teams then get a set of 4 formations for each round they have to dive.
There are no practice dives, only dirt diving on the ground using creepers in the hanger. The first 35 seconds, once the team is out of the door, count. The team has to get as many points by repeatedly building the formations in the order given.

Our team consisted of Martin ???, Richard Head and Gier ???.
We got 12 points and ranked pretty much top of the list with one other team!



Unfortunately the weather turned bad and the scrambles had to be called off.
Instead of jumping we ended up doing indoor competitions on the creepers, same rules same teams except now you had to push yourself around instead of flying.

In the evening was a party with Oktoberfest theme.
I missed a bit of it because I wanted to be there for Cate's 30th birthday dinner. So I went to London, had a lovely dinner with Cate and friends and then went back to Weston.

Unfortunately the next day was even worse than the Sat. It did not stop raining and it was very windy. So, the 2nd day of the scrambles was called off.

This coming weekend looks a bit more promising, so I am hoping to get a few more jumps in before the season ends.