980

I've actually read your other posts on base, SO... I'm calling April Fool!

What's the point in posting it if you do it exactly like Jimmy does? Wouldn't someone wanting to learn that be better served to approach Jimmy themselves? Your enthusiasm for base is inspiring. You seem very dedicated too and that is cool. Your post-whoring does get tiresome, though. Aren't you supposed to be studying at the moment for that big test anyway? cya

Is being comfortable ever a good thing when basejumping? Or are you just that one blissfully ignorant step away from complacency? There seems to be a lot of people being very comfortable with just about any approach they take to base these days, regardless of how little experience they might have and how fast they are rushing their progression. But it's OK, the goddamn fairies will keep them from being busted up because they are comfortable. and because they know their skills and abilities better than people with a lot of experience and they are happy to make that known being comfortable is IMHO a BAD thing in base you need respect for what you do you need even just the tiniest nagging fear to keep yourself in check you need to have that little voice asking you if you have really considered all the possibilities and the best course of action for each one why? because like Al Pacino said in Heat: 'it keep's me sharp, on the edge, where I gotta be...' ...

yeah buddy please do just what we need - packing lessons from someone with 36 basejumps

You’re going to lose the cool battle on this one. Maggot has the coolest digitals stills ever: taken by himself while hanging around 300ft up, from his Raven snagged on a flake of sandstone by a minor amount of canopy fabric, some reinforcement tape and a few suspension lines…. Do you have various self-portraits and other pictures documenting an epic tree-landing? Maggot even made DUDE stop hauling him up so he could take a good picture of him… But, having seen video of a very predictable tree landing by a certain purple-panted-person, I can assure all the environmentally conscious people reading this that this purple-panted-person is indeed a TREE-HUGGER! One of my favourite sayings: ‘Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing’ I wish I knew who coined that phrase; I believe it was a pilot of sorts.

OK I've looked at all the other Excel logbooks posted and I can say that I have a more advanced version that tracks many different parameters and keeps running totals of all of them. The problem is that it is totally BASE specific, as I like to track a lot more data on my basejumps than on skydives. Graphing is easy to add too. If it sounds like more your cup of tea, let me know and I'll rework it to be skydive friendly. Should only take me a few days to get around to it.

yeah, like a surprise suppsitry...

14500 is high altitude? at my home DZ it’s pretty damn standard…

OK buddy, I have no idea who you are, but what did you do with Maggot? That just doesn’t read like a Maggot post…

Yeah, just like that canopy of YOURS that you let Nick jump in that pic he posted (Don’t lie, we all know it’s yours) I guess your excuse is that if you jump girly-sized gear you only get girly colours. Just because I let you lick the deer-poop off my Jeep doesn’t mean I’m your buddy…

Firstly snapperhead, you got the name wrong, it’s not a magot drop, it’s a TomAiello-Drop™ . I understand it’s called the TomAiello-Drop™ because Tom Aiello invented it and was the first person to do one. As for your heading problems, I think it’s because every time I’ve seen you jump you ‘give the signal’ during deployment… At least you’re not all dressed in maroon, pink and purple, like that SUUUUUUUPER pic of NickNitro. Remember the priorties on any jump: 1. Style 2. Style 3. cool factor 4. lowest effort possible 5. safety hope that helped

The question all the wingsuit-fashionistas are pondering this spring is: who will be wearing GPS at Z-Flock and what model will they be wearing? Also: how will they accessorize to facilitate data download, processing and display? ?

Agreed. But the probability of you having gotten to 998 heads in a row is 1 in 3.7331 x 10 ^ 301 , which if I were to write it in this format: p = x in y, it would look like this: 1 in 37331000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 So does it really matter that the probability to get to 2 heads in a row would be 0.25 if you would never get to 998 in a row in the first place due to the ridiculously low probability?

If the probability of throwing heads is 0.5 (50% or 1 in 2), then that is the probability of throwing heads on any one coin toss. The probability of throwing heads two times in row is: 0.5 x 0.5 = 0.25 (1 in 4). The probability of throwing heads 1000 times in a row is: 0.5^1000 = 9.33263618503219 x 10-302 The probability of throwing heads 99 999 times in a row is: 0.5^99999 = so small that both an Engineering Calculator and Excel rounded it to zero

Jamie, that's seriously funny, because it reminds of something... just over a week after my FJC, I was still in Twin Falls and on around my 40th jump, as I had climbed out and got ready to go, Johnny Utah is pointing his camcorder at me and recording: Johnny - 'So, do you think this jump could be the one?' me - 'which one?' Johnny - 'the one that kills you' My goal is to do 5000 or die trying. I think desensitization, boredom and complacency are the biggest obstacles in the way. we all have the certainty of death already whether we basejump or not

Herminio I am going to take a different approach to Steve here and say that I know some people who are quite willing to help you. It’s this simple: A number of Greater Toronto Area jumpers are going to Twin Falls in April for 10 days to jump and some to do FJCs. You are very welcome to join us on this trip for the purpose of documentary making. You would get tons of opportunity to get loads of daytime footage from an object where it’s perfectly OK to do that. That’s going to be as good as it gets, though. Anyone that knows what they are doing won’t be willing to take you to any local sites for the purposes of making a documentary, so be very wary of people that might contact you and offer that. PM me about this and I’ll tell you to who talk to. Cya sam

No you cannot. What makes you think that you can evaluate your skill level, experience, aptitude and judgment better than someone who has experience doing the very thing that you are deciding your readiness for? You are the only one who decides when you start. That is not the same as knowing when you are ready. Here’s your 4 step program to becoming a likeable base student and getting nicer treatment in the DZ.com basezone: 1. check your attitude 2. learn to spell or use a spellchecker 3. get a sig-line that makes some sense 4. get more asses, since you will be jumping one off and no doubt tracking another off, you may want a spare ass for landing on occasionally like a pretty fuckin’ extreme drugfiend I’ve met says: ‘have fun, don’t die’, although maybe in your case it should be ‘don’t die, have fun, don’t die’…

The only way to guarantee that you will not strike the object is not to jump. dude! check out this quote: from this post by some guy named Tom something or other you may want to argue this with him, but then again, maybe not...

WHO ARE THE CRACKHEADS WHO HAVE VOTED OPTION 8??? I can't believe there's 7 (at the moment) people out there who do not think that they could have avoided their object strike. It's always avoidable, in the simplest form by only jumping in favourable conditions with properly set up gear and a suitable skillset, in the most extreme form by avoiding any jump where there is a chance that you could strike the object even if you do everything else right.

Now for the really important question: Who are the locals that would be willing to show me around for some après-skydive activities? I don’t mean bars or drinking either, but I will happily buy you a few beers or whatever for the courtesy. Please PM me if you are one of the above, thanks! edited to add: maybe I should be a little less obtuse - check out my signline for clues as to what i consider apres-skydive...

- good question 1-Voodew1 (TX) 2-Professor (TX) 3-FlyinBob (TX) 4-Buried (IL) 5-The111 (LOCAL!) 6-Skyflyingbecca (FL) 7-Moonglo (TX) 8-Luminous (TX) 9-unclecharlie95 (ITALIA) 10-Base733 (UT) 11-nathaniel(IL) 12-HELMUT (Tatooween) 13-OmarPR (LOCAL) 14-RobertPecnik(CROATIA) 15-Purple Mike(Earth) 16-Costyn (NL) (very likely) 17-Matt (GA) 18-Joni (NE) 19-Yuri (Russia-USA) 20-Lifewithoutanet (CA/CO, USA) 21-badenhop (Lodi) 22-Mike Steen (UT) 23-EmLo (Local) 24-DaMan (Local) 25- Rob Jones (Local) 26-Scott Bland (Local) 27-Chris Ware (Local) 28-Scotty Burns (Local) 29-Jeff Nebelkopf (Local) 30-Mike (Local) 31-Paul Mazillo (Local) 32-Scary Perry (Local) 33-Mark (normis) Cochran (Local) 34-Manny (Local) 35-Lurch? (NH) 36-Mudbug(TX) 37-Murphy (AZ) 38-Harry Parker I think we need to add these: 39 - Dr. Parkin a.k.a. Pendragon (U.K.) almost, 40 - Sam a.k.a. 980 (Canada) as of a few minutes ago, HAVE ticket WILL travel! - and you too Avery cya sam edited to fix

Tom Unless I get magically greenified I can’t change the poll options, so it’s pretty much up to you. (thanks for numbering them, by the way) I did not want to quantify experience because it’s so subjective, but if you can come up with more useful options for experience, or you want to quantify the ones I have, please feel free to do so. Maybe we can have a poll on how to quantify experience for this poll? As for the suggested added options, those look good, please add them and any others you’d like, or anyone else suggests. Add a freefall object strike and survive option too for Russell etc. What would be really cool is if you could get the text in the results cells to go more than one line vertically to make it more readable. Dexter – it was raining and I opted to not jump in the rain (again), so yes, I had way too much time on my hands. Thanks Sam

I voted like this: Options: 4: 307 BASEjumps (3 yrs), 735 skydives (5 yrs), 1 strike, jump no. 88 7: I turned a perfect on heading deployment into a wire strike, more skydiving experience would've helped, more training would've helped, better judgement would've helped 12: just check out the recent posts! 15: guy wire, the one that attaches to the A at 200ft 19: everything went well until I started flying the canopy stupidly 23: freefall for sure 25: luck bucket took a major hit that night 31: never got full flight again, but did get enough flare to stand it up 33: I certainly did. 34: I have. and I will again. conditions were great. 40: I do wear a helmet on some jumps. 41: no doubt in my mind 43: no doubt 48: no video 51: I'm still hoping... 52: doesn't yours? Yes folks, I did a very dumb thing and if you have some time to kill here's the whole 9 yards: I got used to jumping in fairly windy conditions and unstowing the brakes and whipping the canopy around a quick 180 to land nearer the base of the A where the nicer landing area and shorter walk is. The winds were much lower than the previous few weeks. We went to an A that I had jumped 10 times before. I had 17 A jumps at that point. I went stowed from a platform at 530ft on a 3 wire A. Did a 2 second delay. Had a perfect on-heading opening... ..which I immediately whipped around 180 degrees to make the nicer landing area, only to see an Antenna coming at me real fast. At this point I knew I fucked up good and knowing it's the wire that attaches to the A at 200ft, I feared I was too low to recover from a stall or stall turn and went to the deepest brakes that I felt was just above stall point. I was still moving forward and I got the really stupid notion that I could fly under the wire, through the inverted V between the wire and the A, close to the attachment on the A. I almost made it through, when my left endcell (or maybe stabilizer) connected the wire. I hauled on the brakes and swung way out in front of the canopy. At this point the panic had stopped because I knew I was going to die and I was in that zen-like calm state, where you are almost just looking from outside yourself and reality, at what you are doing in this situation. With a morbid curiousity, but no fear or concern for your own safety anymore, as that ship has sailed already. Time had slowed right down for me and I finally buried the toggles to try and avoid getting hung up on the wire because I knew that could turn very bad. This and the wire strike stalled the canopy and as it started collapsing it also dropped back off the wire. Thank fuck I'm not riding the wire in! Now past the stall point, I waited what seemed like forever for the canopy to drop off the wire completely and then started letting the toggles up very slowly and as little as I dared. The canopy reinflated and started pressurizing and flying almost instantaneously (go Blackjack! - vents and valves rock!) Sarah, who jumped first, is screaming something from below, but all I'm taking in is the sight of tower in front of me. The canopy had turned to face the tower dead-on as it recovered and I now flew the canopy toggles WAY down, I backed it up until I felt I had room to turn (this felt like it was taking ages too and I fully expected to hit the ground or building below at any second). Once I felt I had room to turn, I kept one toggle WAY down and let the other up slightly to affect a slow right hand turn. Just enough to get me pointed away from the tower and another strike (one a night is plenty, thank you very much). Since the canopy dropped off the wire I had gone from knowing I was going to die, to thinking I was now going to hit the tower, then the building below me and finally my vehicle, as I started letting the toggles up super-gradually from the moment I had turned away from the tower. I did this to get whatever flight I could out of the canopy before hitting the ground. It wasn't much more than 30-40 ft off the ground when the canopy had recovered what felt like flight (instead of plummet) and boy did it feel too damn low! I got to about 60% of full flight when I flared and took a downwinder about 40 ft from the tower, but stood it up. Finally standing on the ground I could not believe that a person could be as stupid as I just was and not even get a scratch on them. I knew I had just gotten exceptionally lucky. After discussing this with my mentor in detail I finally realised what he meant when he said: 'Assess, assess, assess.' Often when I climb that tower (I have just over 50 jumps from it now) I look at the wire I hit and the whole surreal experience replays itself in my mind. Don't be like me, be smart, know what height you can still have your canopy in a stall and recover. Think about the conditions. and 'Assess, assess, assess.' PS - My Blackjack got one tiny little hole in the stabiliser. I inspected it twice, had two riggers inspect it and after getting the all OK and sticking a little ripstop patch on, I jumped her again the next night, off the same tower. She's since been back to Marty for a full inspection and new lower brakelines and got the all OK once again. PPS - Wire strikes are like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're going to get!

ADDED: I posted this to try and gather a lot of object strike information in one thread and get some idea of what the real stats are like. OK, so the rash of recently publicised object strikes made me wonder... then I got carried away with the poll options and I kept going to see how many you can add... READ HERE BEFORE VOTING IN THIS POLL, THANK YOU!: 1. only vote if you BASEjump or you are voting by proxy for a BASEjumper (post if you do this) 2. please post also and provide some background and experience (BASE, skydiving, training, etc.) about yourself 3. include in your post what options applied to you. thanks I'll even start us off...

dude PM sent and I believe you will find Peter got banned, which is why you get that silly PM message cya sam