faulknerwn

If you come up to Temple where we are, we're jumping Cessnas, so its pretty easy to find people willing to do a 2-way..

Yep 1.3ish works very well for CRW. Spectres are very compatible with most everything as are Triathlons so either should work well for you.. W

Actually unless someone else there has a storm as well I would recommend not getting a storm. The trim on the storm is so steep that they are imcompatible with anything but other storms. Triathlons and lightnings and specters are very compatible with each other as well as other canopies.

Then that's your solution - sell the Vengeance and use that money to buy A Triathlon or Spectre. Heck, if you sold both canopies, you could buy a new one. You've got a perfectly good canopy there that you can't jump for hundreds of jumps - why not sell it and buy an appropriate canopy for what you're doing now?

I think the linesets are the same for the hybrid and CRW version. I put the full dacron lineset on a Tri 99 I owned with no issues.

Start with center cell rotations - each of you docking on each other and work from there. You can't really retrofit retract pilot chutes on canopies very well. For the cost of a new line set (probably $300 or so) you can easily sell your canopy and pick up a used Triathlon or Spectre which would be more appropriate for CRW. Once you get on a 7-cell you can practice learning offset docks but you don't want to do end cell docks on 9 cells. Triathlons are always for sale on dz.com for a good price.

Bev makes awesome suits and can be a bit cheaper than Tony. Flite Suits also are really good..

I've bought their warrenties before but never had to use one. They seem like a good deal.

Had a young jumper show up at my dropzone today. 35 jumps still renting gear. (Had his own helmet). Learned at Spaceland but has been at my dz once before I think. Spaceland is his home dz. Seems really nice, not arrogant, or know-it-all or anything like that. He was in the plane with me and an AFF student today, and on jumprun noticed my Contour camera and commented that he had one of those but it had gotten ripped off his helmet. I was shocked. He was allowed to jump a camera renting gear at crazy few jumps? Wasn't an issue for us because he had already lost the camera but that scared me. Unfortunately he was in a hurry and had to leave before I could talk to him about it. Just from his general attitude, I think that if someone sat him down and explained to him why he shouldn't be jumping a camera at his number of jumps he would listen. Apparently no one ever had though because apparently he had already bought, installed, and lost a camera at 35 jumps. And he's still jumping dz rental gear so I can't imagine locals wouldn't recognize that. Why would no one say anything? At least having lost it, he's probably not in a hurry to spend $300 on a replacement that he may again lose..

Those numbers seem way off for Texas. I would guess closer to 275 days of sun for the Austin area. (Big white puffys all summer long are still very jumpable days.) Every time I've gone out to Perris for an event it seems like we have to sit down for winds at least at some point. Weather varies...

Taught a couple of deaf students here. I've lived in Italy so communicating with my hands and face comes easily to me (I don't know sign language.) We have a good handout which I let them read ahead of time, and a good presentation with visuals and all of that. A lot of the teaching body position and the skydive and such is just visual and placing their body in the right position and showing them what to imitate. We just spent a lot of time on canopy control making sure they understood it, and used flags to point landing directions as need be. Neither had any problems with canopy control as a student. We found that often using a laptop with a Notepad style of application was usually faster for communicating on the ground because typing for all of us was faster than handwriting..

Sounds good! See ya then :) I'll be there.

We were just happy you eventually let go of the plane! Don't sweat it - read my student logbook - I was not exactly a brilliant student :-) You'll get it... http://crwdog.servebeer.com/CRWdog/HowCRW.html

Don't have any suggestions beyond what other folks offered, but read my student logbook to feel not so alone :-) I eventually got it and now have ~6800 jumps now.. http://crwdog.servebeer.com/CRWdog/HowCRW.html Wendy

And just FYI, the Storm is probably the steepest flying 7-cell I know of. It will descend a LOT faster than a Spectre or Triathlon of similar size. If you don't like the steep descent rate of the Storm, you might like the other 7-cells better... Wendy

Please post this in the Classifieds. Thanks

This thread is weird to me - the Sony battery which came with my CX100 would lose an hour on one jump. After the jump which said I had 45 minutes left on the ground but died on the way to altitude, I went in search of newer ones. Got 2 cheap knockoffs and they work way better than my original Sony's. Had knockoffs with my previous PC330 and they worked great too. Luck of the draw maybe...

They will if desperate but our beer fridge almost always has good beer in it - and that always goes first! No one voluntarily drinks crap beer if the good stuff is available...

Same here. Anytime you do/say or acknowledge a first, you owe beer.. We rarely pie people. Happens occasionally but not too often.. We do recommend good beer - if you buy crap beer you have to drink it because otherwise it takes up space in the beer fridge for months :-)

I sometimes see students who are in such a hurry to get belly-to-earth they jump and immediately try to go horizontal, forgetting that the relative wind is coming from the propeller and it will take a few seconds to get horizontal. If you jump out and immediately try to go belly to earth, you could definitely hit your face on the step.

I'm fairly small and have jumped regularly as small as a 75 in my career. These days I only jump my 99's in high wind days, and much prefer my 120's and 135s. And I like nothing more than on the last load of the day jumping my old PD 150 - that canopy is awesome - opens beautifully and all I have to do is pull the pilot chute and it will auto-pilot itself home :-) The older I get, the more I like going slow!

Its easy for my dz to watch out for folks and such because we just have a couple of Cessnas. What about the guys jumping at Eloy or Perris or Chicago? It seems that it would be extremely easy for them to get onto a plane where no one knows who they are or their skill level with a camera with no one ever saying a word. The good things about those dropzones is that there are tons of really good and experienced flyers to learn from. The downside is that it is easier to do stupid shit and not have anyone notice or care as long as you don't endanger them.

Its extremely painful for me to be outside without sunglasses. I can't imagine jumping in clear goggles. Its funny though - my students always tell me how I made them laugh and such in freefall because I'm so expressive with my facial expressions. So it is possible to communicate even with sunglasses on :-) I always wear an open faced helmet and not a full-faced one so that definitely helps communication as well.

Not injured or killed but I've had stuff mucked up. If you jump non-common gear its easy. Once had a pullout handle loose in the airplane. I asked a friend to stick it back in. He did, but unfortunately shoved it down the BOC pouch that was also on the rig. I noticed that one on jump run! Multiple times now I have had people tuck the walrus teeth on Racers underneath the bottom flap instead of the top flap (one was even a rigger!) That can possibly cause a container lock if the rig is tight enough. Luckily I always discovered those when reaching back for my own personal gear check in the plane and fixed it myself. If you jump "non-typical" gear people can screw it up. That's why I'm paranoid.. THey haven't hurt me but they have screwed it up. (Oh and I have had people try and pull my pilot chute cap off to check the reserve pin too :-)

What about people who cannot necessarily see their handles? Some women can't. Heck - Rick Horn (?) a few years back was saved by an RSL because he couldn't see or find his reserve handle because it had tucked under and his rig rotated on him during a spinning mal. Saying its always easy to see your reserve handle is not true... Every year there are people who cutaway and never pull their reserve or don't pull it in time. I do wonder what method they were trying to use. (Obviously I have no idea - only their friends/instructors would know. But it would be an interesting thing to try and find out.)