Jan's Adventures
A whole lotta skydiving
Friday 10th October 2008
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.