SkymonkeyONE

Those of you going to Perris for Nationals need to go to the official website www.nationals.com and register. You cannot register onsite according to the website. You must register online before you get there. The online registration is simple and straight-forward and only takes a minute. Once you have completed the basic registration, you must then hit another button and pay your entrance fee and for your jumps. If you are going out to Perris to compete in Canopy Piloting as an individual, you must still hit the button on the registration page where it says "register a team." Once you hit that button it will take you to another screen where you scroll down until you choose which event you are competing in. Hitting any "canopy piloting" button will then take you to another screen where it will ask you to input your USPA number (your login) and come up with a name for your "team". From there, it will automatically default to a screen which tells you how much you need to pay. You are going to be charged for the cost of the preliminary rounds only. You may elect to pay a portion of the fees up front, but I did not see any way to pay for semis or the finals. I guess that they feel it would be a bit presumptuous on a competitors part to pay for anything other than the first six rounds. Anyway, the ability to pay online has been active since this Monday, so get online and get it done. Chuck

Not that this makes any difference to the "no smoking" argument at all in my opinion, but since you asked, I can name quite a few of the best freeflyers in the world who smoke regularly. Here's two: Dave Brown and Colon Berry. Smoking is fucking disgusting.....period. If you regularly smoke, you smell like it no matter how clean you think you are. If you don't believe that, have a non-smoking friend smell the hand you regularly hold your cig with. Kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray. Ugh. Chuck

Actually, Vinny, I have just heard the opposite. I just heard this weekend that all the on-post housing has been renovated, but it's the town outside which is the total shit-hole. Jake is a single E-6, so he will definitely be getting BAQ and living off-post. Chuck

In a total, you have either not found your deployment device, or not been able to pull your deployment device once you did find it. In either case I am going straight for my reserve on my sport rigs. If you have successfully gotten your PC out of it's BOC (or pulled your pud), then it's a partial malfunction and then you would perform your standard cutaway.

I would say in that case it would depend on what the jumper has been doing since his rating lapsed. If he has been doing a lot of sequential RW with vertical moves, swooping to docks on bigways, etc, then I would probably not hesitate to let that very-current skydiver take up some slack (edited to add: only if we were REALLY swamped). Still, it's pretty dumb to let your entry-level coach rating expire. I would not let anyone with an expired rating and no "relevant" current skydiving experience touch a student though, regardless of school overload. Chuck

First off, Travis, your new avatar is fantastic! Second, you techno/trance haters can piss off! Would you prefer some Enya on your videos?

No haircut; it's just pulled back into a (quite long now) ponytail in that pic. I still have the full-on Manson look on call at a moments notice.

That's a good article.

What exactly are you responding to in these three posts?

Tim and Tom, While both of you have compelling arguments for allowing non-rated people to assist with training under certain circumstances, I don't believe either of you would simply allow, without any sort of "check dive", what the original poster proposes in the other thread they started (also called "students"). There is a big difference between allowing a very qualified potential instructor to assist with CATs F,G,and H (under supervision of the CI/S&TA) and letting a person's unrated freeflyer boyfriend train them just to save money. As a former school manager and S&TA, I can tell you that I would not allow some un-tested, never-rated individual to be working with any of my students. Now, if there were some compelling reason why a bonafide "potential instructor" simply had not been able to make it to a course, then I would take him/her up and do the two coach eval dives with them and, if they passed, I would probably waiver them and allow them to work. Chuck

Simple answer: NO. Unless "freefly boy" has at least a Coach rating, and at that point why wouldn't he unless is is skeeeered, he doesn't have any business working with his GF. Now if he were so keen on working with students, he ought to have gotten off his butt and taken the bare-minimum qualification course to do so. Sounds like the guy is trying to get over. Now, my reason for saying that is I personally know more than a couple of people with 600-700 jumps who can not skydive to save their ass. I even know them in more than one category. I know pretty competent freeflyers who cannot launch stable out of a plane on their belly, much less maintain levelidity and proximity on "flat" dives. I also know flat flyers with that many jumps who still zoo solo and basic linked exits and cannot fly to a stable-flying formation to save their ass. The point is, the coach course makes you prove at least rudimentary belly flying skills. One of the skydives proves you can exit stable, get within arms reach of someone and then fall straight down. The other skydive proves you can move around in proximity to someone and give corrective hand and arm signals while maintaining proximity. You would be surprised how many "experienced" skydivers can do neither. Case in point, after exiting late on a milestone skyive for a person on our dropzone, I literally had to fly down and un-fuck the person of honor. He was on his back and spinning uncontrollably on his 1000th skydive. The bottom line here is a STUDENT (anyone with under 25 jumps and without an A-license) has two choices: jump with an instructor or coach and get something checked off on their A-card; or jump solo, assuming they are cleared for self-supervision. (edited for hurried typos) Chuck Blue D-12501 AFF/SL/TM-I, BMCI, PRO

Selwyn Facey did not do this at Rantoul and I am sure he has not done it at CK since then either or we would have heard about it. Selwyn is incredibly funny.

I had no problem getting in touch with RWS on the telephone yesterday.

Eric did not trust that his Competition Cobalt 120 on rears enough to "get around the corner." He felt it was far too mushy at the time, so he would get around the corner on toggles, transition to rears for about three seconds, then go back to toggles to finish out. He did that on every round of Distance in the PST meet at Panama City. Eric has competed professionally since 2000, albeit quite randomly these past two years. You would have to ask him what prompted him to start landing like that, but I hear that he is now doing more traditional rear-riser landings under the same canopy.

That looks more like cordura than mesh...FWIW, the mesh on the base pantz is much different than that on the FF version, so that is maybe what they are now using.

Both of the videos on that site were nice, particularly the second one.

I am competing in the Open division of canopy piloting from the 8th thru the 12th.

Bands Reunited is a fantastic show. I don't much care for some of their choices (New Kids On The Block, which they failed to make happen thank God!), but others are simply brilliant. Berlin was great, as was Romeo Void, A Flock Of Seaguls, The Call, and several other early 80's alternative bands. I really like the show and only wish I could have been in the audience of some of those shows. Chuck

I, as they say, was thrown directly into the fire. My third and fourth paying tandems were INCREDIBLY big guys. It was out of a Cessna, under a Vector II with an EZ 384 and I was a bit concerned. Luckilly, I had more than 1500 skydives at the time and simply did what I thought I had to do to dress for success. I wore my skysurf suit to get more surface on my arms. Oddly (to me at the time), the tandems went perfectly and I have never once since that day been at all scared or intimidated by any passenger. I am ultimately confident in my abilities as a skydiving instructor and the second that I think that I "don't have it" anymore is when I will stop doing the job.

Are you advocating using toggles to plane out and then switching to rears? No, it seems to me that he is simply stating that unless you have a near-perfectly planned and executed turn which results in you needing only minimal rear riser input to "get the rest of the way around the corner", then your subsequent "dig" on your rears will not get you nearly the desired effect. As you your statement about going toggles-rears-back to toggles, that is exactly what Eric Butts used to do last year.

Why? What do yours look like?

Nick, I thought you were talking about linked exits, with grips, like we do off of ramps (CASAs and Skyvans). I regularly run out the back of ramp planes holding hands and throwing perfect gainers with others. It's great fun and pretty hard to screw up. You can easily poise off a Cessna with grips as well. Mono Uno Rodriguez CaCAW! CaCAW!

It would be my guess that the new Strong will look amazingly like a bigger Quasar. That's pure speculation on my part, but if it doesn't then they are really not listening to the consumer......at all. When Strong announced "the revelation that will change the tandem industry" at the last PIA (the rent/lease-per-jump program), I just shook my head.

CaCAW! CaCAWWW!

Heights for PRO/open/ultra entrance gates are five feet. All other gates are five feet as well (at least in PST meets), but once again, they are only there to show your left and right limits. You can pop up over the top of the gates after entrance height-wise, but you have to stay within the left and right limits.