FrogNog

This is freaky - I saw THAT bike on Hwy 520 between Seattle and Bellevue on Saturday. The rider was wearing an orange mesh safety vest with a piece of paper stuck on the back saying "new rider" or something like that. I remember looking at it and picking it out as a Ninja 250 instantly (I had a 1990 ZX600C3). So, anybody know if this is a Puget Sound area bike? -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Nice.

We had to vivisect chicken eggs at various stages of development in Advanced Biology in High School. Yeah, it was a little while before I went back to eating eggs. The trick is not to look too close. And throw out anything that you can tell looks funny even if you're not wearing your glasses. Edited to add: so when I see a bumper sticker or billboard noting abortion stops a beating heart or said heart beats after x days, I am reminded that I've cracked the shell off the top of precisely that, and looked down with a dissection microscope and seen the blood being pumped. And, most distressingly, all these embryonic animals died because we opened their shells. (They were probably going to die anyway, because they were totally-inbred factory chicken eggs, but still.) So, I probably wouldn't have yacked. That was a tame show and not the least bit your fault. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

I don't think conservatism can be applied to a single act with any value. (Or even a single act repeated, if that's what the poll question was asking.) Conservatism is also misused a lot. Expanding one's abilities while taking precautions to keep the best safety margins possible is way better than keeping the same abilities but pushing some of the less obvious safety margins (like panic turn problems and malfunction frequency and descent speed). But I couldn't call one more conservative than the other just by watching. BTW, those two plans are how I consider the comparison of learning to fly harder on a larger canopy before downsizing vs. downsizing first and staying alive long enough to figure out how to fly it hard. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Slide it in a few times until the spot goes away. I would try and think how you'll feel about this whole spot business in 50 jumps. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

This brings a tear to my eye. And 25-foot white "X"s in the middle of big grass fields, right? -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Cool. If I'm ever a one-armed jumper, I'll look into that.

Pretty much everything I had thought about. On the SOS systems I used as a student, we had pretty long reserve cables. I reckoned I could wrap it around my finger and give it a yank, worst-case. I can't guarantee it would come out - hard reserve pulls happen, and you'd be at a disadvantage - but I'd be willing to give it a try and a broken finger in the air if I thought my life probably depended on it. (And I wear gloves specifically to enhance my effective hand strength and protection, even in summer.) I'll see about trying it on one of the student rigs at repack time. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

A friend of mine once said, just after his 50th birthday: "Having reached 50 years old is great. As opposed to the alternative." -=-=-=-=- Pull.

I have to agree with a lot of stuff I'm reading here, but I just wish "everyone else" could stay 2500 feet horizontally from our "X". They're not bad people, it's just a communication issue. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

People at my DZ will back up that I try lots of different packing methods. Some say I'm trying to use my reserve. On my canopy (Hornet 190) I have found psycho-bagging consistently produces about the same openings as s-folding, if you don't do anything stupid. But I found if I roll it really tight, I can get a tiny delay between extraction from the bag and the start of inflation. I once did a wolmari pack (s-folding the tail onto the back of the canopy cocoon on the ground instead of folding the tail under the cocoon in front of the nose, like a propack) then psycho-bagged it backward (nose on the outside of the roll instead of the inside; the wolmari folding made that look like what I wanted) and got a very exciting opening! It came out of the bag (I know because I felt the PC collapse - tension came off my shoulders / I went back into total freefall) and waited about 2 whole seconds before it started inflating. I was almost done waiting and was reaching for my handles at that point. But that super-exciting one was my fault, I think. Try it like other people show you and it should be fine. Goes in the bag really clean. (But I think we're supposed to have PC bridle extensions to reduce topskin wear when doing this.) -=-=-=-=- Pull.

It might get better with a few more jumps. My Hornet scared was brand new when I got it and it scared me with "lazy slider / super-soft openings" for a few jumps, then it became "like normal canopies". -=-=-=-=- Pull.

It was sort of a rite of passage at my DZ. The excitement! -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Re that pic: slide it in! -=-=-=-=- Pull.

I've got one of those ... I can't remember what jump # it was, but somewhere around 60-70 jumps, I jumped my Thriathlon 220 in 25+ mph winds, and got blown all over the ground once I landed and my ass was dragged through a cactus field and I picked up a couple of hundred of those prickly things along the way all over myself. This is one thing I did smart: I got out when we thought the winds were fine. I saw ugly clouds coming generally our way but they were many miles away. (OK, maybe that part wasn't the smartest.) Turns out gust fronts don't have clouds; I was at 1,100 feet for over a minute because of the weird winds. I managed to sashay it out of the monster updraft and into a steady level wind just faster than my normal forward glide. I double-front-risered it so I would land barely inside the huge student field, disconnected my RSL at 50 feet, flared slightly and chopped the instant my feet hit the ground (which was also the instant I started leaning over backward). I saw the wind in the grass from 750 feet and knew I was going to be dragged hard and fast. Just being a few seconds ahead and thinking about what I was going to do made it a lot easier on me. I refused to go back up the rest of the day, even when they said the winds had passed.

Tell them it's like a seatbelt. By itself, it doesn't do magic, but it's part of a system. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Bonus questions for cvfd1399: * What are some things you could do to help reduce the likelihood of finding yourself below 1,000 feet without a landable parachute? How often would you do each of these things? * In the event you found yourself below 1,000 feet without a landable parachute, and you had an SOS system, what would you do? -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Sweet. My favorite plane just became favoriter! -=-=-=-=- Pull.

...was not the smartest move in the book. On that canopy - Stuck toggle, 2 or 3 rotations and u r history. Cheers for posting Not pulling that out to give u a hard time - just think it is worth highlighting in case people don't pick up on it fully. Yeah, sometimes when I'm gliding back I want to leave it in brakes to make it easy on me, but I force myself to have brakes popped and controllability check done before 2k (if at all possible). If I see something just bad enough I don't want to land it, I don't want to think "Do I really have enough altitude for my reserve to open?" I want to think "Screw that! 2k - check; look, reach..." Once I flew back with both toggles in one hand for glide while I undid my booties... I think that's how it's done. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Early on (~100 jumps?) when working on accuracy, I tried too hard to hit the "X" and was not in control when I touched down. The late Winter ground was very soft and I PLFed the heck out of this but I was sore for a week all over. Probably 50 jumps later, on a double-front-riser approach I kept trying to "get down to glide" all the way down to about 10 feet. I gouged the ground right through the target. Luckily all the stains were green and the limp went away in about a week. My failure here was not admitting the approach had problems and going to "safe landing mode" by an appropriate altitude. I may have avoided contact with the ground by yanking my toggles harder, but that wasn't the core screwup here. We were hotloading a 182 on the taxiway once - me (normal jumper) and 3 wingsuits. - when a plane showed up behind us. I got nervous about being in their way and when I got in last, I was in a hurry. One of the other guys pointed out that loading in a hurry is very bad. (Pulled handles or worse.) I confused the pilot with the fuel truck operator once. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

I have a similar, milder diagnosis. 13mm overjet. (About 8 teeth that don't touch.) I don't have any pathological symptoms yet, and I may never get any, but I have considered the braces and surgery. Right now I have good insurance. It would probably cover 60 to 75% of the cost. The braces seem doable. It's the general anesthetic, short hospital stay, and surgery recovery that concerns me. I was under once for wisdom teeth so I know I'll probably survive. But I remember the aching of the stitches for a couple weeks afterward, and being completely dependent on someone (my mom, at that point) to keep me fed, watered, wound-dressed, and drugged for the better part of the first week. This is about the only flaw in my looks, too. The orthodontists, their assistants, and some professionals who do not stand to make any money from this all claim I'll need a stick to beat the women back if I get this done. They also mentioned I would temporarily lose feeling in my chin, and I might permanently lose feeling in my chin and even nose or cheeks. I first put it off because I was scared. Then later because I realized I don't need perfect looks to get women. (And it wouldn't make a difference with the women I want most [vs. the "temps"].) Now I'm still scared, and I'd have to quit jumping for some time! -=-=-=-=- Pull.

We grow up, we grow old, we die. The luckiest of us do this, anyway, with some jumps thrown in. If you're bummin', maybe you should make some jumps and see if that helps. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Most of our intentional cutaway canopies are worth less than the $550 for the device that would have to be attached to the cutaway canopy, I reckon. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

I thought Poynter's book said an estimated 33 deaths per year, not decade. I haven't checked the book recently enough to be sure, anyway. -=-=- Our gear is complex when you get to describing all the details of it. I dislike the shortened, screwed-up version reporters describe, but it's a compromise. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Me? Never.....ahhahaha. I wish I had the same chute two weekends in a row. Yeah, that played hell with my early accuracy attempts. If you can get it 3 jumps in a row on the same day, that helps. Other than that, the variety is... invigorating. -=-=-=-=- Pull.