NickDG

>>Another factor is all the talk about currency. I worry that unless I can jump almost every week, I should probably reconsider. Am I giving that too much weight?

>>You've experienced jumping, move on.

Doing the test with the tailpocket closed produces the same result. Except now the tailpocket Velcro can get blown open or the lines tangle even worse trying to get through the hole. "So my keelpocket locked up and my tarp failed me." Gee, in a few years I'm not going to be able to understand you guys . . . You know, building on what's come before is fine and is the way of BASE, but re-inventing a problem is not. NickD

Don't think only about this week - think 30-years into the future. If we stickered everyone it may start to be kind of grim out there. When Perris put in that monstrosity of a memorial up after the Otter crash I had to walk past it with my students ten times a day and it was always a question they asked about. They finally took it out in favor of the small memorial park up by the ultralights. A better thing for Shannon would be this. Off to the side of the LZ go ahead and plant Shannon's tree. It's probably illegal, so just go and do it at night like a real BASE jumper . . . NickD

Boy - that old "relax" thing is never going away as long as Instructors don't learn how to teach skydiving . . . First of all no student is going to be relaxed on any student dive. A student like that would scare me. But think about what happens when you tell them over and over to relax. First off they think its good advice because you are an authority figure and every other student must be doing do it, so there must be something wrong with them. The biggest problem is they'll tend to "lock" into an arch position and they don't fly. Stable freefall means constantly altering your position to stay where you want in the air. Even experienced jumpers do this but they do it with smaller control inputs and most probably forget, or don’t realize, they are even doing it. So now because so many Instructors use the relax answer as a crutch the problem students get sent to the wind tunnel (the new bowling alley where the DZO still gets a cut). Tell your students that can't hold a heading to "Fly Wide" Get them to spread their wings and fly like an eagle. They need these exaggerated motions to counter the forces that are trying to turn them and as they get more experienced they can close up and these motions will become smaller. Take a dummy fashioned into the perfect arch position and drop it from a plane. It's going to spin like a top because you need a brain to hold a heading and that brain is working moving your limbs and center of gravity around. Relaxing is what you do with a beer in your hand . . . NickD

>>Why the hell would anyone want to continue in this sport when they are treated like that.

Try this test: Lay the canopy down and anchor the bridle attachment point. Flake and fold per normal. Place the lines in the tailpocket without using the rubber bands – just figure eight or lay the stows side by side and close the flap like most people do. Now grab the container and run away. Note how smoothly the lines deploy and the lack of movement of the tailpocket. Now do it again – but this time use the stow bands. Leave the tailpocket flap open this time so you can see what's going on. On each stow point the stow band comes in contact with only the lines on the outside of the line bundle. The lines in the center of the bundle will deploy first (this is called the race track effect) and this is just asking for tension knots, especially slider up. Also note how the tension of the stow bands releasing will rock the tailpocket (sometimes violently) from side to side. This is why we removed the stow bands in the first place in BASE jumping and the reason skydivers went to the free-stow reserve bag for the same reason. Jumpers rarely see this phenomenon, but riggers saw it all the time when un-packing reserves in the old days when stows were used. We can also look at this latest tandem fatality as (maybe) an example. Tandem reserves are too heavy for free stow reserve bags. During a terminal deployment there it a high risk of bag strip so the more traditional stowed bag is used. Believe me if you could guarantee never to have a high speed tandem reserve deployment there would be no stows on tandem reserve bags either. NickD

>>But the PRO rating is noe of the things I think the USPA did right.

Or buy a ten dollar keyboad and plug it in to the USB port on the laptop - like I did after I spilled a Coke on it the first week I owned it . . . Beer would have been better! NickD

Yes, that's Jimmy Tyler, BASE 13 (now deceased) jumping a round piglet off the bridge in San Diego. That's Jean Boenish in the passenger seat of the truck. Carl is filming from the vehicle behind - his ancient Dodge Dart. BTW that car is still sitting in the driveway of his house to this day. The footage was picked up by the TV show, "That's Incredible" and Jimmy was featured on the show and did an in-studio interview. He was on way to doing other stunts like this and selling them to TV, but the market wasn't like today, as there weren't many "Video Reality" shows at the time. Jimmy was killed in 1983 and is number 4 on the BASE Fatality List . . . Trading BASE jumps for money, in the minds of some at the time became bad karma and is the reason I'll write about BASE for money, I'll do interviews about BASE for money, but I never have and never will BASE jump for money. There's just something dirty about it . . . NickD

I want to give a nod to Young Sun, whose helping with the Jay' rigging, she's a former student of mine, and she wouldn't mind me telling you she was the student from hell. I only mention it as she's went on to be such a success story. She's become an AFF Instructor herself, she's been on all of the recent big way records, and she's a rigger. She started at Cal City about ten years ago and several Instructors already gave her the bowling speech when I met her. She was stuck on her release dives always spinning and kicking. And she was very fearful. I can't remember how many times we landed with the airplane with her in tears. However, the girl had no quit in her, but I already tried every trick I knew to get her to click on. Her husband and the DZO were asking me to get her to quit, but I refused and as long as she kept strapping on a rig I was going to keep taking her. I saw a bit of myself in her as I was very fearful student too. I really can't remember how many student AFF jumps she made, probably approaching fours times the normal number. It was all coming to a head one Saturday morning and by this time she could dress herself, pretty much pack herself, and she'd always stand around when I was with other students sometimes helping me demonstrate a position or procedure. The DZO gave her cheap jumps and we just kept on going. She made two jumps that Saturday morning. The first began with her normal excruciating ride to altitude and by 8-grand she's a quivering bowl of jelly but she was getting good at other things. She could check her own gear, and she even checked mine and I trusted her with that. She could spot pretty well now and she handled all that with the pilot. The jump was like all the rest. She flailed and kicked her way down the hill and after release it was spin/redock – spin/redock – spin/redock always ending with a gripped deployment. She thought a few times she pulled stable on her own but I always had to say no I had a grip and she'd cry. It was getting to the point that while her canopy control and landing were all spot on, were she to get hurt, or worse, I'd be the Instructor out there flapping in the breeze. And the fear was also starting to get to me. Instructors, after a while realize they inadvertently soak up the fear their students give off. Up jumpers spend their time with happy fun jumpers. Instructors spend their time like a guy who stayed too long working for the bomb squad – after a while your nerves are shot. Students are like time bombs and they can, and do, go off right in your face. The next jump started like the rest. At about 8000-feet she started squirming and I expected her to ask me to bring her down again (this would happen on every third jump or so). But she didn't and out we went. And she clicked on – finally!!! It was like someone threw a switch! She held a heading, she turned and stopped, she pulled stable, on time, and on her own !!! I watched her open and deployed myself. I then had to remove my frap hat and goggles because now I was crying too . . . NickD

Not the first - the pogo stick came later and after it some accused Carl of turning El Cap into a granite circus. But he had a child like sense of fun. What you saw is probably one of the compilations. The film (none of these were videos at all) that "started it all" is shot by Carl Boenish in the summer of 1978 and shows four jumpers, a local four way team from Lake Elsinore, launching from El Cap. Carl didn't jump on that load but it was his idea, and he organized, and filmed it. Carl showed the El Cap footage a month or so after the jumps were done. I saw it the night it screened at the DZ in Lake Elsinore and he showed it again a week later at Perris. That may have been the last time it was seen without being edited in with his other stuff. Carl made more than a few trips to Yosemite before the cat was completely out of the bag. And he made the jump himself a number of times. He also erected and rope mounted an aluminum scaffolding, he called the poor man's helicopter, to the brow of El Cap to get more angles. It was up there for weeks. Of course Mike P. and Bryan S. were the first two people to parachute from El Cap in 1966, but the world wasn't ready for fixed object jumping yet and they got murdered in the press and even other skydivers were calling them knuckleheads. We now know them as the visionaries they were. They just didn't have the right gear available to them. Some of us skydiving in the 70's may have vaguely remembered Mike and Bryan's jump, or at least heard about it, but it didn't register on us like Carl's film did and I know why. Carl wasn't filming a stunt. These were four guys everyone knew, or if you didn't know them, you could relate to them. These were four guys, with the same gear and generally the same skills as the rest of us. These four guys were us! Carl didn't set out to popularize fixed object jumping, and it might have been just another film project had he not fell so in love with it. But what we took away from that first film was a stunning revelation. That night we learned any reasonably experienced skydiver could parachute from a tall cliff. And we knew it because we'd just seen it with our own eyes . . . NickD

The faster you go - The higher it is . . . NickD

I went and found the caption . . . "Xxxxx Xxxxxx, BASE XX, and an unidentified companion exit from the top of a moving truck traveling across the Xxxx Xxxx Bridge. The pair landed in the Xxxxx ship channel. Photo by Xxxx Xxxxx, BASE XX. First published in BASEline, Fall, 1988. NickD

198? NickD

I think it's kind of okay - if you leave without blowing the caper. If you don't - it makes you a dirty first jump course burner . . . Besides, the ones who couldn't pull it off would get tripped up long before they reached the door. The not very experienced would give themselves away either over or under playing it. Watch a person with 700 to a 1000 jumps play student in an AFF cert course for the first time and they pale compared to real students . . . A good Instructor would spot you before lunch . . . NickD

USPA once put forth a spy program. They even started recruiting experienced jumpers who were otherwise not well known. People who weren't faces. There are still a lot of DZs still jumping rounds so we got a hold of ourselves and said forget it. It would have been fun though, secret agent-man in the first jump course. When you got bored with that you could see how far you could push them and they still let you jump . . . Sooner, or later, you'd get a punch in the nose for adding more pressure to an over-worked AFF Instructor who doesn't need anymore pressure. As for taking all the available First BASE Jump Courses right now – you'd probably get killed if you made a job of it . . . NickD

It's better to call it the, "harness ring." That way everything else means on a riser . . . NickD

Being a good BASE Jumpmaster means knowing you can't sling, especially PCA, a light load on a big canopy because everything is set for the middle. When the load goes down or the canopy goes up the reefing must slide to compensate . . . Whose bright idea was that anyway? NickD

>>A van left Alberta Skydivers in Beiseker Alberta (elevation 3026') carrying nine rigs with armed Vigils

Assuming this is a cityscape (with buildings and all) and it's a demo where timing is important - the chances of the conditions being good are nil. The original reason BASE jumpers began jumping from buildings at night was not for security, it was for the calm wind conditions. Just a ten MPH wind blowing around downtown creates all manner or rotors and turbulence as it rushes around everything it hits. In the day time it's 100% worse. But hey – that's why they call you guys PROs . . . NickD

>>Do you know of any girls who started skydiving really young?

I didn't get the link, but yesterday there was a report both pilots initially boarded the wrong CJ. They were then directed to the correct A/C by a ramp worker. I can see how that can happen, but in light of what happened later . . . Somebody left their thinking cap at home. NickD

I'll see if we have them tomorrow . . . NickD

Why doesn't he become a shoe salesman. Then he could do it - and get paid too . . . NickD