crwper

Hey all, I heard that someone claiming to be a Calgary BASE jumper gave an interview on CBC last night. I know this message will go out to a lot of people who have no idea what I'm talking about, but if anyone saw the interview, please PM me. I'm curious who that was. Michael

I know of at least one acro paraglider pilot who seems to have an exceptional understanding of how a BASE canopy flies. I would say, yes, their skills probably translate very well. The flight characteristics are, of course, different. But I think any canopy pilot (paraglider or skydiver) worth his salt isn't flying the canopy based on a pre-set sequence of actions, but is actually feeling the canopy through the harness and through his finger tips. Michael

Sam, You're quite right. I've been thinking about that particular aspect (skydivers dealing with packed parachutes opening) quite a lot recently, but I have absolutely overlooked the hands-on-the-risers reaction that hundreds of CRW jumps, in particular, have given me. It has also been my experience that, although skydiving does not imply sound rigging knowledge, a heads-up skydiver with hundreds of BASE jumps likely has more experience with all the equipment that comes along with a packed parachute. That having been said, there are certainly a lot of skydivers who have not developed such a quick reaction on opening, or who are not really all that familiar with their own gear. On the flip-side, there are a handful of paraglider pilots who I would say are particularly well-prepared for BASE jumping. Neither skydiving nor paragliding experience should be taken alone as suitable preparation for BASE. Thanks again. You make an excellent point. Michael

Hey! Sorry, I think I probably came across wrong. This whole thing's kind of got my back up, so perhaps I'm more defensive than I need to be. To be honest, if I was going to sit in a stairwell for a few hours hoping for a jump, I probably would not have chosen that night because I wouldn't say the odds were good. Conditions were certainly unstable. I suppose I just want to head off any assumption about conditions at the exit point, as long as the only person who really knows what those conditions were remains in hospital. Again, sorry if I bit your head off there. Michael

The winds were about 20 km/h at the airport that night, but they were 9 km/h at Canada Olympic Park. As the locals know, downtown sits in kind of a depression which means winds here can sometimes be radically different from what they are at the airport, which is basically on bald-ass prairie. Michael

Rest assured the local skydiver/BASE jumper population is doing plenty of BASE jumps in spite of the ongoing inquiry. I can't believe skydivers are seriously suggesting that BASE jumpers should put their sport on hold because of an issue which has been carrying on for years. If the inquiry had taken place in the middle of the skydiving season, am I to assume that the local dropzones would shut down for the duration? No disrespect intended to the families of those who have died at Jim's dropzone, and I understand this is not necessarily the personal view of the poster. It just kills me that skydivers are seriously suggesting this has anything to do with them. Michael

I think there is a misunderstanding here. Scott had two ground crew. He was the only jumper at the exit point, but he did have backup on the ground. Also, this wasn't his first B. As I count them, it was at least his third. Not to say he's super-experienced, but let's not kid ourselves by thinking the causes of this accident were simple. Perhaps Scott would have benefited from having a more experienced jumper at the exit point, but maybe not. A this point it's unkown whether the cause of the accident was body position, winds, or just something that came out of nowhere--we've all had off-headings we couldn't explain, and it would be foolish, I think, to assume this doesn't also happen to jumpers taught by Miles. Does anyone here seriously believe they are immune to building strike because they were trained by the "right" people? In my limited time knowing him, it has struck me that Scott is the kind of person who has to learn something for himself. Is this the safest/easiest way to get into BASE jumping? That's a whole other discussion. Will debating that question make any difference at all in Scott's learning style? I think we'd have to be fairly self-important to believe Scott would adopt our learning style any faster than we would adopt his. As for the different routes one can take to BASE jumping... I think it's obvious that a well-prepared paraglider is on equal footing with a well-prepared skydiver in this sport. If I was going to give advice to a beginning skydiver who wanted to get into BASE as soon as possible, I'd tell them to focus on canopy skills and rigging. I certainly wouldn't tell them how handy it will be if they can do a style set in under 15 seconds, or nail a diving exit. We all know that the exit in BASE is mainly gymnastic, and has little in common with a skydiving exit. The causes for this accident are probably quite simple, but it will be a little while yet before Scott can share those causes with us. In the mean time, I think casting about at the usual supsects is probably going to get us nowhere we haven't already been. Michael

Hey, Tom's described it perfectly. You want to release the brakes from the set as quickly as possible with a fast downward motion. Then let them up in a very controlled manner. You'll need to feel that out a bit, but the idea is that if you let the toggles up too quickly, you'll actually put energy into the canopy's natural forward surge. If you let them up too slowly, well, you won't get forward speed as quickly as you could. Somewhere in between is the optimum. What comes to mind for me is "critical damping" in suspension systems, for example. If your shocks weren't stiff enough, every time you hit a bump you'd bounce down the road for a while afterward. If they are too stiff, the springs never really get a chance to do their job, since all the force is translated straight into the car. Somewhere in there is "critical damping". Basically the idea is that when you compress the spring, the shock will let the spring unload at the fastest possible rate without "overshooting". Let me know if this is helpful, or possibly I have just bungled the explanation. :) Michael

In that altitude range, your time to full flight also depends very strongly on a) your launch technique and b) how you unstow the toggles. In my humble opinion, it's one of these cases where, "If you have to ask, it's too low." By the time you're jumping something like that, you should already have significant experience from an object, say, 10 feet higher which will answer your questions. Michael

Paraphrasing from one of the many news reports, there was a cop being interviewed: "I've been on the force for 17 years, and I know someone else who's been on the force 20+ years, and we've never heard of anything like this. If they have been doing it before now, they've been doing a really good job of keeping it from us." Looks like, in spite of all the times a jump came back to us the long way, we were keeping the right people out of the loop. Michael

Hey Jaap, I think I know what you're talking about with the back-surge... I had a couple of jumps off a cliff where I noticed myself sinking back toward the face a bit on opening. Not a good feeling when there's a ledge below you. Anyway, I've never fine-tuned my brake settings, so the solution in this case was for me to go to the shallower setting (Fox 245 vtec). This seems to work well, but I'm guessing my brake setting is not as deep as it could be for longer delays. It may well be that the reason I haven't had to use a different setting on the short stuff is because I'm compromising on the higher stuff. Have fun! Michael

Hey Jaap! I've done s/l jumps as low as 111 feet and freefalls as low as 210 feet. I'm sure "ultra-low" is a fairly subjective thing, but for me it starts at about 130 feet for s/l and maybe 180 feet for freefall (just guessing on that one). In my experience, that's where very good technique becomes not just really helpful, but absolutely necessary. Not that I'd recommend doing jumps higher than this without good technique. But you already knew that. On all my slider-down jumps, I've used pretty well the same brake settings, so I'd be kind of surprised if it was very helpful to change them for the "ultra-low" environment. In fact, I think it might be more helpful to stick with settings you have the most experience with, as this will help you judge your toggle release more accurately. I think it's really critical on lower jumps that you release your toggles just right. In my opinion, what you want to aim for is to pull your toggles down quickly just to the point where the line is pulled free from the white loop. Then you want to let them up in a very controlled way. Too slow, and you won't reach full-flight as fast as you can. Too fast, and you give your canopy extra speed at exactly the same time as it surges forward from opening. I've seen one jumper cover 165 feet in a surprisingly short time because of this kind of oscillation. If you let the toggles up at just the right speed, you'll be able to control the canopy's opening surge. When you say that the brake setting was "less than ideal" for the 180-foot PCA, what exactly do you mean? Michael p.s. Dave knows what I'm talking about with the toggles, and maybe can give you a bit more info tomorrow.

Hey Nick! At this point I can only really confirm what Jaap said. There was a building strike here last night. The guy involved is in the hospital with a broken pelvis, but otherwise seems to be doing fine. Michael

I think he'd be right at home on the bottom list. There are a couple of BASE jumpers there who slipped on the way to an exit point. Anyone who makes a serious attempt to land on the arch (with the intention of jumping from it) is already a BASE jumper in my mind. If he had stuck the landing but decided not to jump, that would be different. I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt on whether or not he "would have" done it. Michael

Michael, One of the best pieces of advice I've heard, given from one friend of mine to another when he started jumping (off of stuff), was to be ready for a lot of ups and downs. I'm not sure he really knew what this meant at the time, but I know he's got it now. I haven't yet been injured, or watched any of my friends die in this sport. I've heard these things are inevitable, if you stick around long enough. I've been caught once, but walked away with a stern warning that, "This is danger." I'd love to hear a bit more about your journey, if you're into telling the story. Michael

I think sometimes that takes a conscious effort. You can become so used to seeing the jump as a scary thing, that even when it shouldn't be so scary any more you continue to see it that way, habitually. I once did a series of jumps from a 480 foot bridge (could it be the same one?) in which I'd climb over the rail, and then take a good long time to look under my feet at the structure. I looked side to side at where it attached to the canyon walls, and down at the river below. What I wanted to do was to take a moment to be in the environment. Then I'd look up, take a breath, and jump into that environment. I didn't bother counting the delay--I just took another breath and then pulled. The whole point was to get out of my head. So, as I said, this adventure has not been without ups and downs. I think if you can't do much better than to keep in mind what you want out of it, and design your jumps to work toward that. Michael

I started jumping BASE jumping in the spring of 2000. My jumping history has been full of ups and downs, like many I think. Being a fairly philosophical person, I tend to look at these ups and downs and try to extract some kind of "meaning" from them--something that will help me grow as a human being. This isn't always possible, but sometimes I stumble across a lesson in BASE which gets its fingers pretty well into my whole life. This is a story about one of those lessons. To some extent, I think we all make a calculation of risk versus reward for any jump we do (or walk away from). The measure of these two factors seems to be a very individual thing, and even for one person it can change over time. When I started jumping, I think the bulk of the reward came from overcoming fear. I still remember how deep I had to dig to get my feet off that first span. It's hard to say exactly where that fear came from, and it's probably best just to leave it at a "deep fear" with which many of you are probably familiar. I remember this fear continuing for a very long time. I suppose that when I started skydiving, I felt a similar fear. But in skydiving, it didn't take long before that fear melted into the excitement of learning new skills. Probably within my first 30 skydives, stepping off the plane was no longer an issue. But even after 100 BASE jumps, the exit point was still a scary place for me. In the summer of 2002, with 135 jumps, I took a six-month sabbatical from BASE jumping. I had started to look at everything in terms of whether or not it was jumpable. I felt somehow guilty if I wasn't out jumping when the winds were calm. I decided to take a break, until I could look at a cliff and see something other than landing possibilities, appropriate delays, etc. I returned to jumping one weekend in the following winter, when I felt inspired to join some friends on a trip to the local static-line span. Sometime around 150 jumps, three years after I started, I began to feel a bit ambivalent about jumping. This ambivalence has continued more or less to the present day. I've gone on trips where I could have done maybe 10 or 15 jumps, but I did 2 or 3 instead. My heart just wasn't in it, but this fact was masked by my reasoning that 1) I'm not really a big numbers person and 2) I wanted to enjoy each jump, not just pound off a whole lot of them. About six months ago, I made a trip to a local free-stander with a couple of friends. I've done this jump many times, and nothing felt different about this time. In fact, it felt decidedly boring. Why? Something occured to me very recently. Suppose I had become accustomed to measuring the reward of a jump in terms of the fear overcome. I think this is the sort of thing we might do habitually, long after it has outlived its usefulness. Over time, it seems natural that fear will subside. We can always take our jumping to a new level, but even that level will eventually appear less risky. There are two scenarios I see unfolding from this. In one, I could continually search for new fears to be overcome. After a while I think this path becomes dangerous, particularly if I am raising the bar on every jump. In the second scenario, I would continue to do jumps in which I am not overcoming any particular fear, but these jumps would seem less and less fulfilling, until eventually the risk outweighed the reward. I think this is exactly the path I've been walking. I've done fewer and fewer jumps because of a general feeling of apathy, while the jumps that I have done seem often to have involved a heightened component of risk (which, I suppose, brings with it enough fear to balance things out). A solution has also occured to me. "Solution" seems like the wrong word, actually, since I don't quite believe that these kinds of things have a solution. Perhaps I should call it an "experiment" whose outcome is not yet known. It seems to me that often we might become so accustomed to pursuing a particular goal (say, overcoming fear) that when we finally achieve the goal, we forget what has habitually been driving us. Without a new direction, we wind up bound by our pursuit of the original goal. What's got me excited about jumping again is the idea of jumping "for fun". While this may sound obvious to some, it really isn't obvious to me. I've been jumping so long to overcome fear, that relinquishing fear is not at all a trivial thing. I think it's necessary, here, to separate the ideas of "fear" and "caution". Certainly I think it's possible to let go of fear while retaining a healthy sense of what can go wrong. Somehow, it seems to me there is more to fear than just the awareness of risk. I had my first opportunity today to test this theory. To be honest, I wasn't sure it would hold up in the real world. It's one thing to sit at home and philosophize, "What I'm going to do, is I'm going to let go of my fear and just have fun." It's a whole other thing to feel it at the exit point. But I did feel it. I'm not saying I've ascended to a new level or anything. It never really works like that. But standing at the exit point, I told myself, "I'm doing this for fun," and it actually rang true. Michael

I believe you can also be dinged for flying over a built-up area without the necessary paperwork. Michael

Every time I stand at the edge of something these days, I have to remind myself if I don't have a rig on my back. It's tough. I'm not sure I'd really want to train myself to rap off the end of the rope. I might get the wrong idea on a real rappel someday. Michael

I have also been interested in the WS Extreme... At this point the only thing that makes me wary of having this as my only rig is that the bottom of the container goes significantly past the harness attachment. I would think that on aerial jumps in particular, this would provide a convenient place for the bridle to get hung up. Not sure if this is a major factor, since I haven't done aerials yet, but I'd like to hear from anyone who has. Also, I talked to Robert and he mentioned that he could move the laterals down so that they met at the corner of the container. However, it looks like this would cause the rig to fit my Crossbow poorly. Alas, I'm having a hard time finding a pin rig that I'd really like to buy. The Gargoyle is close, but I'm not too keen on how they've contoured the fabric in the top corners (the rounded end of the side panels give it a bit of a box shape, whereas other manufacturers have tapered the side panels down to smooth the corner). Michael

Well then what was the point doing the jump? Michael

I appologize if this is a duplicate post. The previous reply didn't seem to make it through. My brother and I both jump with Dainese Shuttle Pro suits. A couple of months ago, he had a tailgate hang-up on a 165' span. He covered the distance to the ice in 5 seconds, roughly equivalent to jumping backward off a 15-foot platform. His tailbone and head took most of the force of impact. It looked bad, but he got up and did two more jumps that day. Without the armour, I'm sure he would have broken his back. Dainese armour isn't cheap, but I think the quality is far superior to the cheaper Bohn armour. The Shuttle Pro doesn't restrict your movement at all, and is very comfortable. In fact, I've done several jumps in a day without removing the armour just because it's that comfortable. With my old Bauer elbow/knee pads, I'd take them off right after I landed, because they weren't so comfortable. If you're not looking for a full suit, I think the Safety Jacket mentioned by another poster is basically the top half of the Shuttle Pro. The Shuttle Pro also has a sort of "cumberbund" that holds the lower part of the back plate in place. It also provides some abdominal pressure which I suspect stabilizes the low back. Michael

For "classics"... I recently enjoyed "Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens. Slightly less classic, "The Satanic Verses" by Salman Rushdie. I think it's unfortunate this book was drowned in so much media attention surrounding the author, when it should have received more attention as just a very good book. Anything by Jose Saramgo is great, but if I had to pick one, I'd probably pick "Baltasar and Blimunda". Michael

First, thanks for posting the detailed instructions. I've been curious about this packjob for some time. I have also experimented (indoors) with Gardner's modification, which I found a little easier but seemed to give the same result. I have one question, but first I'll describe how I do the regular mushroom packjob so I know we're on the same page. When I pack my pc, I give it kind of an overhand toss so the pc is lying on its side with the fabric away from me and the mesh close. I s-fold the bridle about half the length of the mesh, then wrap it like a hot dog with the near half of the mesh. Then I fold the bottom half of the mesh (with enclosed bridle) away from me so that the pc attachment point sits at the fabric-mesh boundary. With the remainder of the mesh, I wrap the "hot dog" once more, then I pick up the pc by this roll and pull the fabric around the whole thing. With my method, the deployment of the pc is very well staged. The bridle can't really come out until the pc has completely extended itself, and I feel like this avoids "bridle dump", which I would think increases the chance of bad things like tension knots in the bridle. With the super-mushroom, it seems like the bridle has a clear point of exit at the "bottom" of the mushroom. That might be a good thing, or a bad thing. I don't know. An overly-staged deployment might be slightly slower than one where the bridle can come out more freely. Also, if the bridle is free to come out, it might slow the rest of the pc less, and result in better extension of the bridle. On the other hand, this might result in an increased tendency toward bridle dump (particularly with a lazy grip on the cap). Who knows. I'm wondering if you have any comments on this. Michael