lurch

Oh you got THAT right amigo... Puffies....MMMMmmmm..... Ain't nothing like scoping your exit and having a puffy farm as far as the eye can see with half a dozen 10,000 foot tall bright white towers within range to choose from. All those canyons slopes caves and valleys to surf. Given a choice between a fine wine and a nicely defined crispy white surfable puffy, I'll take the puffy any day. You can get wine whenever. Perfect puffies however, are a delicacy, and no two are the same, and you never know whats going to come drifting over the horizon. Difference is, thats a sweet -Spot-, which tends to encourage soloists to find the Sweet spot. And when you got it, theres only one thing to do. Surf. The. Puffies. ...and bring a phone. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I've mostly given up trying to teach the sweet spot since everyone just goes for the big wings, but... Easiest way to find it is do a bunch of solos. Get as wide as you can, as flat as you can. Stick your neck out and hunch your shoulders a bit. Point your toes. Start thinking "long" thoughts. Literally. This is not a joke. If you kind of stretch your neck and think like you're trying to pull yourself further with your forehead, your body tends to get a bit narrower and your shoulders go back a bit. Pull the tail tight between your legs, keep the same pressure with your toes and your knees. Pull hard with knees and easy with toes or hard with toes and not with knees is no good...distorts the tail fabric. Keep your face down. Wanna see where you're going, use your eyes, you turn your head you change direction. What you do with your head and neck has a huge effect on cruise and burst fallrates. Dropping your chin to your chest, throwing your elbows out and shoulders forward can give a -radical- burst of lift that will slow down your forward speed and can cut your fallrate in half and half again in a few seconds. Do not do this anytime there is the slightest possibility of people above you or you will kill them. If you go to max and stay there you lose forward speed, so go there and then back off a bit until you don't feel like you're slowing down any further. From there its all about the feel. Tiny movements matter a LOT. You'll eventually know your fallrate by the wind noise alone and be able to guess what your neptune will say after you land before you even look at it. You'll wind up making smaller and smaller movements. The nature of the sweet spot is a bodyshape thats as efficient as possible, so anything you do from there only makes your fallrate worse-speeds you up. You might try dearching a bit more, and the air gets a bit quieter. So you try even MORE, and even though you feel like you're flying harder and should get slower, the air noise speeds up. You just went too far and overdid it. So you back off a bit then try something else, a bit more or less tight toes, more or less rolled shoulders, more or less pushing down with your arms, you get the idea. This is what people are talking about when they say it can take hundreds of flights to master. It does. You can find a "rough" workable sweet spot fairly easily, but there are several hundred slight small movements and combos that work together in different ways and work or don't work at different speeds and different angles. Some of those hard to find combos are what allow fallrates that look absolutely impossible with medium to small suits. Its not just the 105 lb birds who can do this- properly used, a lowly little Birdman GTI suit can get over 3 minutes of freefall from 14.5 with a 160 lb total exit weight. Both the cruise and burst sweet spots aren't one move. They're a couple dozen little moves all done at the same time. I've only just scratched the surface with this... you could spend a hundred dives just experimenting with toes and knees. And this is just a sample of the detail to master for just one single subdiscipline, the art of hangtime. Haven't even mentioned speed, distance, cloud surfing/surface targeting or acro yet... This is why I don't find solos boring. Every time I fly alone and experiment with this I learn another small ninja move. And then of course you can get into flocking, technical formations... and people at my home DZ wonder why I never take my suit off. -B -Disclaimer: This is not a suit by suit breakdown. People will quibble about some of this saying Not-With-This-Suit or that. Some of this detail will work on whatever suit you are flying. Some of it will not. This is just a guide, a few places to start looking for that sweet spot. Good hunting! Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Sabre 135. A 150'd do but a 170 would probably f'k up my piloting by now and have me floating all over the place. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Well I ain't gonna worry about that until and unless Fran comes up out of the blue and tells me I'm forbidden to teach anymore till I get one. My tolerance for that kind of arbitrary expensive pushiness is very thin. Been meaning to get one for awhile now, but the 1300$ for what amounts to an electronic insurance policy that is not required gear puts it fairly low in my priority scale. Replacing my weak-ass reserve is a much higher priority. Whats in your second rig anyway? I'm 90% inclined to stay put anyway just cause I have so much weighted against this trip... adventure fatigue, long drive, depleted travel/time off budget etc, but if what you got is close enough to what I fly I might still show. The only way I can make this trip and still make rent and jeep payments is if I can keep total cost of trip to under 1K. Last month and a half of my life has been very expensive. Lemme know whats up ok? I checked out the Cypres offer on the other page and his price is good, but it'd mean spending almost 2 grand on very short notice for a 2 day weekend road trip and counting the Philippines trip and the FnD 4.0 its way too much to be spending before the seasons even open. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Are you shitting me? That just took me off the list, man. I haven't jumped an AAD in about a year. Getting one is on my to-do list anyway, I just can't budget it on such short notice. Next event, then. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Ok so its time to start planning for 5.0, people. Got to get Mr. Bland to pay the weather bill in advance this time. Is there going to be high altitude? I LIKE high altitude.... -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Nope... If it was one of my guys he'd have already presented himself for a smacking, been smacked and moved on. Wasn't us. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

(sigh) I cannot afford this. I do not want to deal with a 10 hour drive both ways. Might as well show up anyway, one of you guys is going to need duct tape at some point. 1. Scott Gray 2. Chris Gray 3. Jeff Neblekopf (Heffro1) 4. Justin Shorb (PhoenixRising) 5. Andreea (Supergirl) 6. Rick Hough (dzjnky) 7. Scotty Burns (scottygofast) 8. Ray Stone (Stoney)

Ok my ride arrangements are failing dismally here. I have no pickup yet. If there are any birds arriving at, around or just after 11:40 am-ish Thursday in Tampa and don't mind a stray bird hitching a ride, drop me a PM with a phone#. I'll happily throw down for gas and then some just for your trouble. Worst case I'll just call Phantom but I hate to drag somebody all the way out there just to go back. Waste of gas and time. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Damn, Scott, you're gonna outfloat me in that thing. Can see it on cnn now...Lurch goes low, details at 11. Since its gonna be all mid to bigways its a pity I'll never get a chance to see what you can do with that thing if you punch it at breakoff. Thats a LOT of wing there, wide stance, usual portuguese whore references not included, void where prohibited. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Ok flights are booked and I'm registered, gonna get a tent and got no idea how I'm getting from or back to Tampa but I'm in. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Ok, but to do this in the proper spirit of northeastern backwoods industrial redneck technique you'll need a strip of electrical tape, a pair of scissors, the assistance of a curious 5-year-old child, and it'll probably void the warranty. Are you sure you want to do this? [Ok/Cancel/Apply] -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Figures... 10 years of troubleshooting everything from cars to robotics to the fuel truck at home. I'm a Rofin-Baasel trained industrial laser tech... given about $400,000 for the exotic hardware necessary I could build you an honest-to-god real, functioning 3 kilowatt q-switched diode-pumped solid state Nd:YAG pulse laser built as a semiportable shoulder fired laser cannon that'd punch an .005" hole through damn near anything if you hold it still long enough, and start the evening's bonfire from 200 yards away. Sci-fi shit like that can actually be built with creative mix-n-match of off the shelf industrial hardware and old computer parts now via incredibly unauthorized assembly of highly evolved technologies originally developed for the mass production manufacturing of consumer products. I think up shit like this for a living. I know a trick that'd allow me to resurrect the engine in a jeep that just threw a rod through the side of the block 200 miles from anywhere with a carefully shaped hunk of wood sledgehammered in where the cylinder used to be. It'd take about 20 hours to pull it off and it'd run like shit, but it'd run. I managed to get a vehicle home once after breaking a leaf spring and collapsing the suspension... with a piece of clothesline. It wasn't legal. Or safe. But it moved. I've put together my own camera helmet. My own transmission and suspension hacks. I had an in-car mp3 player made out of pc parts and an old Sega Game Gear 4 years before you could buy one at Circuit City. And nobody's ever gonna remember any of that shit. No.... What they'll remember is me, wielding a chunk of concrete due to a misunderstanding involving my suggestion about how to feel better and vent some frustration about that bite switch. (sigh) I'm going to go live in Greenland as far away from manufactured things as I can get for the next 40 years till theres nobody left alive who remembers this... -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Anybody got one of those cylindrical concrete packing weights handy? I think Scotty B took mine and hid it somewhere, I can't imagine why... -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Yuri, I hate to tell you this but I think you lost most of us at "Yo." Could you start over from the beginning?

...And a nice way to end mine. The videos awesome, Matt. We didn't have much to work with weatherwise, those conditions took my camera out on every jump I made. Not once did I make it to the ground without hearing that "plunk, plunk, plunk" condensation shutdown alarm my camera makes when it notifies me that we will have no landing video on this jump. I was lucky to get it to work for every jump although once or twice it required me to hold the thing in the windblast from the door with the tape door open to blast-dry it and reassemble it on the way up. Nothing quite like trying to troubleshoot a stubborn camera before a bigway with only 4000 feet left to go before exit. Must be a lot more heartbreaking when it happens to you megahelmet camera guys. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Yah. That was my first chance to really air out the godzilla mod 6, and J, you forgot one crucial bit that thickened the plot: I was packing GPS in my wing so we could back it up if we actually made it. I checked-Marco gave us the green early. 6.2 miles exit to pitch. Proof that lo-speed junkies like myself CAN go far if we really want to. Rick woulda made the distance but the haze deceived him into giving up and deploying seconds before he spotted the driveway in the distance. Sobe pulled like 206 seconds by flying a bit more for fallrate than for drive, which is exactly the kind of thing I'd have done myself if I wasn't flying with your anvil ass which made it visible every time I eased off the gas in the slightest. That flight was EPIC. We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread hijack. -tweet -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Thanks, Bill. This is exactly the kind of anecdotal evidence I wanted. This "I watched two people break legs/ankles trying to land them (a 120 and a 135)" by itself is enough to convince me that by the standards by which I judge my main, this reserve belongs in a dumpster or a museum. Or the rig of an amputee midget with an eating disorder. Pick one. I'd take your advice about jumping it as a main but would be scared shitless to attempt to land it again under any circumstances on anything but water. The last 100 feet of that descent had that sickeningly wings-clipped sensation you normally only get right after turbulence turns your canopy to a crumpled ball. That alone wouldn't do it- its the memory of feeding it a carefully modulated flare, ramping up the toggle stroke as the remaining altitude vanished and getting no response whatsoever that does it. I knew to expect an easier stall than a main, I'd already read the threads in here about that. I also knew to expect typical sludgy 7-cell handling. I've stalled every ride I've flown up high, just to get the feel. I still don't even know if a stall was involved with this- prior to a stall I'd expect to feel it coming, it'd be on the far side of SOME sort of change in direction or feel. I was prepared to back off the flare if it decelerated and then felt wobbly. I never did because it never even began to decelerate or level off. I've watched the resulting video about 30 times and still can't believe I took a hit like that without a mark to show for it. I don't know if you've ever experienced total brake failure in an old poverty-level car but it was the same sensation you get when the pedal suddenly goes to the floor so slack it has no effect on the vehicle at all. The canopy flew into the ground at a speed and angle I'd only ever experienced in a maxed-out double-front dive on my Sabre. So. I'm changing the question now. Question is, of anyone who finds this thread that has landed more than one type of reserve, what reserve landed the most like a main? I know not to expect Sabre handling out of anything 7-f111, but of the models out there, which ones subjectively felt most familiar? Widest, strongest flare, lowest descent rate for the loading, quick response, easiest to land well even when you knew you screwed it up? I'd settle for one that flies like a worn-out Triathlon with the ZP washed off. My old starter rig's raven II 218 was almost comically oversized but it could also nearly hover on the thermal off a cigarette and hang at 5 feet altitude and a dead standstill for 30 seconds with half a flare. Crosswind. Around dust devils. In a blizzard. I only used it once and landed it on rubble near the parking lot. The brochure would call it "magenta" which translates out to a gigantic slow violently hot pink security blanket. Felt quite safe jumping it even if it did have a small risk of retinal trauma due to overexposure to its fluorescent majesty. You could grow crops under it during the off season. Simply showing it to people is considered aggravated assault in 11 states. Clothing in colors half this obnoxious was banned in most european countries 22 years ago as a threat to public safety along with Bart Simpson t-shirts and those rubber sandals all the kids have been getting their feet caught in escalators with lately. I had to buy my rigger a pair of sunglasses, some SPF 50 and one of those mesh panama hats people always bring back from Aruba just to get him to pack it. Coolest. Reserve. Ever. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Hey I wasn't responding to Rob there. That was directed at Mr2mk1g mostly for answering like a lawyer rather than a jumper. Everyone else who has stopped by including Rob and yourself were far more helpful. I've taken the trouble to try to educate myself in the sport and play extremely conservative in canopy choice, but theres a big enough information gap about reserves that I got my ass bit the second I stepped outside my 5-year hypercaution canopy policy. Given the same available info and experience I'd have made the same choice again. If I can collect enough anecdotes and general info about why I was able to misjudge it this badly given the caution I used getting to this point, maybe I'll spot the next similar trap before I stick my foot in it. I made it 6 years in this sport without breaking anything, I'd like another 36 more and this is the closest I've come to ruining that. I figured understanding this was worth looking like a dumbass in public if necessary. Theres people running around providing vast amounts of easily accessible info about mains, loadings and appropriate uses. Everyone knows a lot about Sabres, Stilettos, Spectres and VX's. It would take an effort of willful ignorance to be a dumbass in your choice of main. The same isn't true of reserves. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Rob, I AM white, I may be stupid but I'm certainly not fat. I'm a 135-140 lb acrobatic light-athlete kind of critter. I climb structures for fun, think nothing of leaping off a 10-foot high object and consider walls to be just floors with really poor traction. If that is considered fat now, no wonder America thinks it has an obesity problem. I guess "gaunt" is the new "healthy look"? Guess I didn't get the memo. My bad. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Hmmm. You haven't been paying attention, your sarcasm is less than useful and nowhere in your post do you actually offer any information that contributes noticeably to the discussion or the issue being addressed. I am attempting to resolve the conflict between what the manufacturer has said and the fact that these things are overloaded commonly enough to get 2 answers in under 24 hours. Most functional adults with gear would overload this considerably. This rating is so extremely weak that to stay safely "well within and under" its max rating I'd have to be 85-95 lbs to leave room for gear and 10 lbs of headroom. This is absurd. Since a Microraven is not exactly a rare canopy but a skydiver under 123 lbs exit weight IS, it implies that a great many, possibly the majority, of these things are being used in such a fashion and the owners do not expect to get pounded. This conflicts directly with the manufacturer's statement. I'm big on personal responsibility. To be responsible requires me to exercise judgement. Judgement requires information, and all the information I have conflicts with itself. Whether or not the earlier responders to this thread have no problem flying one isn't really a decision factor for me. It is useful "state of things" data that backs up my impression of a rather large disconnect in the sport between load ratings and actual use. I've already returned my older 170/218 rig to service because I don't like having something on my back I'm not all that sure I could land successfully if I have to again, even though to all appearances I should be able to. I'd rather be unstylish and fly a sluggish rig than pound again. I flew that rig with a brand new Sabre2 170 loaded at .9 and a ridiculously oversized 218 reserve for my first 5 years of jumping, bought specifically to ensure my ego didn't write a check my ass couldn't cash and guarantee a huge margin for error. I'm told this kind of caution with canopy progression is extraordinarily rare. The purpose of this thread was to attempt to resolve the conflict between the perceived common use status of these Micro reserves and the manufacturer's rating matching the experience I had when I used it myself. The action necessary to prevent a repeat is obvious... the reason the majority of these reserves would appear to be overloaded and expected to work fine is not. There seem to be two sets of standards in play simultaneously here. One says I'm a dumbass-and by extension so is everyone else over 123 lbs exit weight who has jumped with one of these things on their back. Thats calling an awful lot of highly experienced jumpers dumbasses. The other standard says its easy to find people who jump these things all the way up to around 1.8, 1.9-ish and they do not consider this unsafe enough to regard it as anything like unacceptable. The cognitive dissonance on this is something of an issue for me since I seem to have got off light, yet I'm being MORE conservative than others more experienced than I who would not regard this as anything like an unacceptable risk. Since this 120 is not as safe for me to jump at this loading as the state of things led me to believe I will find another that is. But that doesn't address the nature of or resolution to the trap I fell into in the first place. Now, if you'd like to actually contribute to this discussion, what is YOUR reserve, what is its rating and what are you loading it at? -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Somewhere between 30 and 45, none in the last year, most of em on either a 218 as a fresh A license or a Tri 160 when I borrow a friend's wingsuit rig. If I ever heard of a 9-cell reserve I'd buy it- I appreciate a 7-cell has its advantages but I do not like to fly them. Spoiled by years on Sabres that can rear-riser 2 miles home from 2200 feet in a pinch, to me a 7 flies mushy, has very poor long-spot range and comes down way too steep. That said, everything I know says I should have been able to land this thing no problem. This is the first time I've ever failed to land a 7 cell or even had any issues with suddenly flying one, a Triathlon is an awesome canopy, as 7's go and I don't hesitate to borrow one if its offered. I -should- be alright if I can avoid that terrain feature/wind thing again, but if I'm wrong I won't know until after I try and fail to land it in an open field far from buildings and major terrain irregularities. This fact has me scared to jump the rig again. I'm still not sure if I should be or not. Its driving me bugshit. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Interesting... Thanks, guys. Getting two responses this fast pretty much verifies my impression of the state of real reality with these things, that they're customarily run loaded that high or higher. I'd asked my rigger to check if the brake lines were too long when I had it repacked, he called the manufacturer whose response was along the lines of " You're overloading it and will pound in every time." I thought "WTF?" I'm 140 lbs soaking wet and have never been accused of overloading anything. Who the fuck designs a canopy that can't be effectively flared by the vast majority of the skydiving population? This struck me as a self evidently half-untrue corporate CYA answer since the placarded max weight on it is only 123 lbs. How many skydivers are THAT skinny? It implies it was designed to only be used by anorexics under around 105 lbs bodyweight. I'd bet a week's pay that the vast majority of microraven owners are way over that, and don't expect to get nearly beaten to death if they need to use it. I'd heard it stalled easy but this didn't feel like a stall...it didn't slow down then drop, it didn't slow down at ALL and flew into the ground at full speed in a steep, level descent. Its not like I was out of my depth with this size canopy, my daily driver is a Sabre 135. I still can't decide if I flared it too little, flared too hard and went through its entire flare band from zero to way beyond stall in a split second, or flared just fine and was totally screwed by the location and would have been pounded under any reserve. Am trying to find a reserve that "flares like a main". This thing came in so steep I'd have been scared to death to use any front riser, it was already coming down the way my Sabre would if I was hanging off double fronts, I'd expect adding fronts to that would have turned it into a straight-down plummet. Anybody know if a pd Opti 143 reserve will fit in a Jav NJ? Edit to remove pointless trash talk: Canopy may not be the best but my judgement with this obviously wasn't either. I'm still stuck between "I'd be stupid to keep jumping this" or "Nobody would consider this a particularly unsafe thing to do." One judgement would ground the rig permanently till the reserve is replaced, the other would say its relatively safe to keep jumping it because most people make out fine with these most of the time and so should I if I have to use it again. I'm leaning toward "i'm being stupid" but a 120 just doesn't seem like its even close to an unreasonably stupid decision given that bigger people jump smaller microravens commonly enough to get more than one to answer this thread in less than 24 hours. I'm still gonna upgrade it, just can't decide if it'd be terminally stupid to jump it till then. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Question for Micro Raven 120 owners: What do you load it at and how are your landings? I'm looking for anything... anecdotal stories, flaring advice, anything. I landed one of these things last season loaded at about 1.3, the flare was nonexistent and the landing extremely, almost unsurvivably violent. No bones broken but the worst beating of my life. I was landing it in a fairly bad place in the windshadow of a clifflike terrain feature, crosswind. Perfect place for a nasty downrotor. What I'm trying to figure out is whether that landing was a result of the loading, the conditions, bad technique on my part or all of the above, and if I land this thing again in the middle of an open field under ideal conditions with a more aggressive flare would it be just as bad? I've come across an awful lot of mixed signals and contradictory info about reserves, customary loading of. I know people who routinely jump mains over 2.0. Even with a reserve significantly larger I have a hard time picturing a rig put together at 2.0 main and under 1.3 reserve. Do most other similarly sized reserves simply have far higher loading tolerance? What am I missing here? -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Glad you guys posted this, I think I just got an opportunity to get high altitude in the Philippines out of a Skymaster and had my doubts about exiting with an engine behind the door. I was hoping I'd find somebody with stories about jumping these things. I'll probably ask the pilot to shut down that rear engine if I want to launch a wingsuit though- that rear engine just scares me. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.