bluewaterstream

Cool, I like where this is headed... A guy named Hook pimpin' out a chick named Tequila... No doubt, this sounds like a sweet night in the making...

Those pictures show why I love jumping in Colorado. Plus, it sounds like the Mile Hi Purple Otter is going to be flying as of this weekend! So, it looks like I'll be buying that new Vector after all... Say what?!?! No beer? Sushi? No steak? No ribs? Just when I thought I knew you two. That's it... I'm takin' you two pansies out boozin'... John

Come winter I probably won't be skydiving anymore. My rig is up for sale and I'm not sure if I'm buying a new one. Although after a SWEET sunset jump last weekend, I'm starting to reconsider. Peep this...

No worries... it's your story bro, you can tell it all you want. I was just glad I caught it when I did. Dude, keep the accent - lose the jackass friends. Simple as that. Joe, we're from the east coast - we're all that way! If they don't like it - screw em'... John

PMed...

Not too long ago, I saw someone get bag lock on a sport rig from double stowing using stow lengths of about 3 inches. The pc appeared to be functioning properly because a few of the stows did release, but one locked up tight. Between seeing that and hearing about what happen to Derek on that tandem rig, I'd say that it can happen. Maybe not often, but it can happen. John

So can women.

Come on man, I'm no Pookie-Bear. Since I refuse to ever call him that, I totally forgot about that nickname. Here, I'll update it: "Maybe you know him - his name's Derek (aka: "ol Hook n' pile" / Hooknswoop / Pookie-Bear). Ohh... the irony." Funny shit.

Thanks for the compliment. I'm really not so young in the sport though, I have over 100 jumps. Want an autograph? I'm actually training to become a rigger, so I do quite a bit of research and I tend to question everything and everyone in this sport (i.e. - riggers, instructors, people with more "experience", etc.). I also have an extremely knowledgeable rigger that I train with. Much of that "wisdom and understanding" that you complimented me on, I can thank him for. I've learned quite a bit from him. Maybe you know him - his name's Derek (aka: "ol Hook n' pile" / Hooknswoop). Ohh... the irony. John

For you maybe, but it seems very relevant to me. I don’t see the line management on a reserve as a “side issue” at all. By applying similar line management logic and methods that are used on my reserve, on my main I’ve been able to achieve line stretch faster (not line dump) and prevent the d-bag from spinning up by rocking back & forth while unstowing unnecessarily tight stows during deployment, which has relieved me from experiencing line twists and off-heading openings. Achieving line stretch faster in an organized and controlled manner gives the d-bag less time to dance around and create problems. “Take a look at the line management of your reserve - a few locking stows and the rest of the lines are free stowed in an organized manner” Note “organized manner”. As in lines are placed in an organized manner in the line stow pocket on a free bag for a reserve & lines are placed in an organized manner using somewhat loose single line stows for the main. In my mind, an organized (in sequence) deployment should prevent line dump. Achieving full line stretch quickly is not line dump. An out of sequence deployment that causes slack in the lines during deployment is how I would define line dump. Line hesitation caused by tight stows can cause deployment problems – achieving full line stretch quickly in an organized manner will not cause deployment problems. If you believe it will, please explain and give examples.

Double stowing has never caused a mal that I had to cut away from, but double stowing did seem to cause my deployments to take longer to achieve line stretch, caused off heading openings, and occasional line twists. Changing to single stows using smaller bands on the non-lockers has solved all of these deployment issues for me. This change has improved my openings dramatically and I have had faster, on-heading openings ever since. Now I single stow everything: large bands (always tight) on my locking stows and small bands (not so tight) on everything else. I view my small band single stows as an organized alternative method to free stowing; these stows, IMO, do not need to be as tight as the locking stows do, but the lines still should be organized and held in place tight enough to prevent an out of sequence deployment. Take a look at the line management of your reserve - a few locking stows and the rest of the lines are free stowed in an organized manner, they are not and do not need to be tightly secured with single or double stows. John

360+ jumps

I'm planning on selling my rig and wanted to see how some of you riggers out there would view this situation. The main (Tri 190) has an extremely small hole on the top skin (center cell) of the canopy (the hole is less than half a square). My rigger advised me that it was still OK to jump and suggested that I keep an eye on it. I've kept a very close eye on it for my last 20 jumps and its condition has stayed the same, just as he predicted. We talked about this before I decided to sell my rig. Because I'm OK with jumping it like this, does that make it OK to sell it like this? What do you think? When selling a canopy, should all holes be patched no matter what size and/or location? (note: I plan on mentioning the hole to anyone that's interested in buying my rig, no matter what the results of this poll are. Seems unethical to withhold information like this.) My understanding is that only holes that are larger than one square require a patch. The theory being that the multiple needle holes required to attach a patch would actually be more damaging to the canopy than a small 1/2 square hole. Is this true for both the top and bottom skin? I'm assuming that the bottom skin would get hit harder during deployment, which would probably cause a similar sized hole on the bottom skin to increase in size within a jump or two. Anyway, my rigger knows his shit and I feel confident that I am not selling a dangerous canopy (obviously, I'm still jumping it). As far as selling used gear is concerned, I would like to see how a large group of riggers view selling a main with a small hole. Thanks, John

Yup, I'm pretty sure that I broke my wrist during a boxing match about 1 year ago. I didn't realize that I even hurt it until 2 hours after the fight, but even then it didn't feel like what I expected a broken bone would feel like. It really didn't hurt that bad. I tried to treat it myself for about 3 - 4 weeks but then finally caved and got it checked out. Because I waited so long to have it x-rayed and due to the fact that it had several weeks to heal, they couldn't even tell me for sure whether or not I full on broke it. Not cool. Find out for sure and go get your ankle checked. John

Choose one answer for each situation: 1 broken suspension line = ? 2 broken suspension lines = ? 3 broken suspension lines = ? 4 broken suspension lines = ? 5 broken suspension lines = ?

What about two BigBros connected with a chain? "Nunchakus? Nah man, this is just climbing gear..." I've traveled with my rack twice as a carry-on and didn't have any problems, but that was before 9/11. I'm thinking that the combination of the two (rack and rig) is probably not the best idea. Oh well...

I'm heading out to the east coast for the weekend to check out the Ranch, but I would also like to get in a few routes at the Gunks while I'm in the area. Has anyone else here ever taken both a full trad rack & skydiving rig as a carry-on? I've taken them both individually on separate occasions, but never at the same time. Would this be a carry-on security nightmare? I'm thinking that it most likely would be and that I'll probably just end up bringing my rig - let me know what you think... Thanks, John

I consider having a misrouted chest strap pointed out, responding with "whoops", getting on the plane and still jumping as being nonchalant & complacent. We'll have to agree to disagree on that one. We all screw up sometimes, but if someone does something that could have killed themselves or others - well then they may want to consider taking the rest of the day off. If someone forgets to route their chest strap for whatever reason, maybe they also forgot to cock their pilot chute, stow their brakes properly, etc. If I, or someone else, discovered that I missed something major on my rig, one of my first thoughts would be 'did I miss anything else?' and I would not jump until I could answer that question with 100% confidence. I would answer that question as if my life depended on it, because guess what - it does. If you make a potentially fatal mistake and are obviously having an off day, well then you may want to consider taking the rest of the day off before unintentionally fucking up again and possibly killing yourself.

So I'm not the only one getting these types of nonchalant responces. Do any dropzones ground people for at least a day or so when mistakes like these are made?

Have any of you ever caught something wrong on someone's rig, pointing it out to them, and then they act like it's no big deal? Kinda frustrating, isn't it? It's happened to me three times already. The first time was that I noticed about 1/4 of someone's pc hanging out of their BOC spandex pouch (noticed & pointed it out to them on the ground), another jacked up the bottom & right flaps when closing the main so that the corner of their d-bag was exposed (noticed, pointed out, and fixed it for them on the plane), and the third had about 3 inches of bridle exposed in the form of a loop that seemed to be just waiting to snag on something (noticed, pointed out, and fixed it for them on the ground). The third one with the exposed bridle bothered me the most because I was doing a 2-way with them, plus that shit has the potential of taking the entire plane down. Feeling comfortable and confident jumping out of a plane is one thing; but complacency is another. If you don't perform basic gear checks on your own gear before you jump it, you have grown complacent. I've seen this in rock climbing in regards to gear, but I never imagined that I would see this in skydiving too. Considering the risk factor involved in these types of sports, you would think that we all would analyze, research, and check the hell out of our gear before we put our lives on the line with it - guess not.

Sweet, now I'll definitely have to try and make it to SGC. I'm guessing that I'll probably be rolling into Ohio on March 20th(Sun), 21st(Mon), or the 22nd(Tues). Does SGC jump during the week?

I'll probably be making my 100th jump out there, so maybe the three of us can make that jump together... Plus, that will be my first time jumping in Ohio... Plus, I recently cutaway my old boring girlfirend, got a new cool one, and the new cool girlfriend is probably going to make her first tandem skydive on my 100th jump... BEER, BEER, BEER...

I plan on taking a road trip out to the east coast next month, are there any drop zones that are right off of I-70? I'm coming from Colorado and going to New York. Ideally, I'm looking for dz's that are less than 30 minutes from I-70. What are the top 3 dz's that I should check out and do any of them have a helicopter? Thanks guys... John

I completely agree with both of these statements: So, my biggest mistake was that I didn't see the first person land. I totally accept that. Sometimes though, we're not always in a situation where we can see the first person land and we have to determine the landing direction from those that land after the first person. From my point of view, everyone that I saw landing underneath me was landing into the wind, in the same direction, and in an orderly fashion, so the landing area appeared to be safe and organized. Everything seemed cool until I saw someone spiraling down to swoop toward me. Here are a few other concerns of mine: My landing pattern is as basic as you can get, in other words, it's pretty easy to determine where I'm heading when I'm coming in for a landing. On this particular landing I was heading strait the entire time while on final, no s-turns to bleed off altitude or anything like that. So, my question is why didn't the swooper see me until he was already in his swoop? With thousands and thousands of jumps, why was he so unaware of the 7 jumpers all heading in the same direction that were all at a lower altitudes then him? Why did he not see me before spiraling down? Why did he swoop to the peas when we have a designated swooping course that is away from the main landing area? I was willing to accept and learn from my mistake and I would think that even people with thousands of jumps could accept, admit, and learn from theirs too. It seems obvious that several people made mistakes in this situation. I was willing to discuss and accept my mistake(s) but was it inconceivable for them to even consider that perhaps the swooper also made a mistake or two that was worth discussing.

About 40 jumps ago, I ran into a situation pretty similar to what stratostar is describing above. I've already talked to a few other extremely experience canopy pilots regarding this issue, but I'm curious to hear what ya'll think. So, after this situation took place I heard that the 1st man down on this particular load landed facing East. I did not see this with my own two eyes, I may have been deploying at that point, watching traffic around me, etc. With that said, the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th all landed facing West. The 6th and 7th guys were the only ones that landed pretty close to the peas(about 10 - 20 ft short of the peas). Since the 6 jumpers below me all landed facing West, that's also where I was heading and I was going to be the 8th guy down and was going to overshoot the peas by about 10 feet. When I was at about 80ft AGL I notice this dude at about 150 ft(I'm guessing here) begin spiraling down hard to set up for a swoop toward the peas. So, he was setting up for a swoop heading East and I was coming in for a landing heading West. Just as he was about to level out toward the peas, I decided to make a flat turn out to the North to avoid a collision. Well, his swoop was right on point and he basically landed his swoop right on the peas. So, if I didn't flat turn away from him we most likely would have collided in the peas. So, as I was daisy-chaining my lines I overheard him and a few of his buddies complaining about how I cut him off. So, rather than let this become a pissing contest I walked up to them both to try and calmly discuss what happened so that we could learn from it and so that it never happened again. Without going into details it got all heated, they kept insisting that because they had thousands and thousands of jumps and more experience that I should just listen to them without trying to explain my side of the story. That type of logic doesn't work with me I refuse to kiss someone's ass and/or blindly accept their opinion just because they have more jumps than me. After about 20 minutes of arguing we accomplished and learned nothing from the situation. You know, if I fuck up, prove it, and I'll apologize and admit that I was wrong, but they couldn't prove shit so I refused to back down. These guys are bad ass skydivers, bad ass canopy pilots, knowledgeable, well respected at my DZ, employed their, and most people with less jumps than them kiss their ass because of who they are and for their jump numbers. I think that they got pissed that some dude with 40 jumps was questioning their opinion on what happened. These cats sometimes post on dz.com, so maybe they will read this and maybe we finally can learn something from that situation. edited to add: The winds were coming out of the West, so I, as well as the 6 jumpers below me, were all landing into the wind and he was landing downwind. We do have the follow the first man down rule at my DZ, so in that regard he was right. My guess is that if the first guy down also landing downwind, that they were most likely swooping too. So if the 1st guy down swoops downwind, but the 2nd through 8th are all landing into the wind, and the 9th guy swoops downwind in order to follow the direction of the fist man down - who's right? Honestly, I can see several points of view here. I think we both made a few mistakes, but once again, I'd like to hear what you guys think.