So lots of tunnel time continues, with regular Friday night sessions at Basingstoke. Currently up to 11.5 hours of FS tunnel in total and plenty more planned !! We did more tunnel time with Mayhem coached by Chris and this time, we made it up to a 7-way, with Chris and the tunnel rat also in the tunnel to try and keep things under control ! Much more confident of our abilities to work together so hopefully that will carry through to training in the air. We have managed a few jumps although Paul is currently out of action due to an operation, and we had to sub in some random FS jumpers to get the numbers up. However, doing 2 floats to come up to the base is working well, especially when we put the person at the back of the door out first (much to Paul's disgust!). I still do the count but whoever is behind me leaves marginally before I do, so I jump out a bit further into clean air and 'slide down the hill' in a hard arch to try and stay fast enough for the base not to zoom past me, leaving me to dive to catch up again, lol. Am now regularly wearing 8-10lbs of lead in the tunnel and the air to keep my fall rates high enough and I'm still a bit heavier than I would normally expect to be in the summer months! I guess my rig is smaller so is also a bit lighter than I am used to.
The switch to IC worked well in our 4-way, so currently our team for Cahors is Jeff as OC, me as IC, Jonathan as Tail and Malcolm as Point. I somehow seem to manage more tunnel time than anyone else (doing 4-way Friday if no-one else can make it) and am now much more confident in my ability to fly my slot and wait for whoever is missing to come back to me. Finally got together in the air as a team on Saturday and managed 3 jumps despite a slow start and several weather holds, and the tunnel time is showing its value. There are lots of moments on the videos where Jeff and I are holding our relative positions, even in Randoms where we don't have grips on each other, waiting for Point and Tail to take their places.
Definitely need to do more work on our exits - my presentation is improving and we managed to keep a 3-way together launching a P for our last jump, though we lost Tail after a hesitation in the door. Didn't have video for that dive so not really sure what happened on that one!
I've managed 15 jumps so far this year, though it took a bit of psyching myself up to manage the first one after nearly 5 months off, coming back to it with a new rig, different downsized canopy and nil winds for the first landing! Jeff was very patient with me and restrained himself enough to only point out once that he could have done 2 hop 'n' pops in the time it took me to actually get brave enough to manifest, lol. And as with last year, as soon as I was back in the air, it was all fine. Pulled a little higher than usual and didn't bother trying to collapse the slider, just concentrated on practice flares, turns and how the rear risers react. My descent rate is significantly steeper on the Sabre 170 than on the Silhouette 190 and it caught me out a little on my pattern (right at the far end of the runway, out of everyone's way!!) so I had a crosswind landing to avoid a very low turn. I was tempted to just take the downwind landing but a few other people had had the same idea as me about being well out of the way, so consequently, there were 3 or 4 other canopies in my pattern! Getting more used to it now and also more used to judging the likely glide length though the wind directions have limited my target practice since I still want a decent amount of height on my turn into final until I am confident of the recovery time and I've been running alongside the runway on the crosswind leg both at Nethers and LPS.
Started FS coaching with Stef today - he did very well and I learned a lot about how to teach. Just because someone says they understand on the ground doesn't mean they'll actually do it in the air, ha ha. Need to get my cutaway system on my open face helmet approved and attach my camera. Will need to try a few jumps with camera on my own before I attempt to jump with anyone else. I think I can probably switch it on and forget about it since I am usually concentrating a lot on what is going on during the dive, but so many articles say it doesn't happen like that so I am a little wary. Will need to sort some video editing software too!
