Re: [RayLosli] TF (Minor) Landing Mishaps
Ray, you're point, summarizing between you're two posts, seems to be as follows: That the Perrine is the easiest jump ever, and people are getting hurt because we are putting sub-standard jump students off of it. While I agree wholeheartedly with the first assertion (yep, Twin is as easy as it gets), and suspect that you may be right about the quality of some of the folks making their first jump there (particularly if they're paying 100$ for their first parachute experience ever), I don't think you've gotten to the heart of the matter. In fact, I think commentary like your first post is part of the problem, accurate as it may be.
I think I had the dubious honor of being the first hospital injury of the weekend- although, thanks to some timely Demerol, I actually got there after the broken-pelvis dude, who hammered in 30 or so minutes after me. In short, I made a slider up flat-n-stable (of the previous millennium), took a 3+ delay, did not have time to turn in, and pounded in cross/down wind and sprained an ankle that had been previously injured on multiple occasions. I would like to take this opportunity to thank gweeks for half piggybacking me to the boat ramp, as the boat itself was not running on Thursday.
Anyway- what pisses me off the most about that jump was this- Due to an injury in October, I had made exactly 2 jumps in the last six months, the last one at least a month and a half ago. I was certainly in your category of experienced jumps in need of a quick Twin-style reccurrency. And I could have had it, had I had the goddamn good sense to take a few slider down, 1 second jumps, landed on the football field and re attuned my LSJTMMGMSA. This sort of reasonable thinking, I'm afraid, never actually came into play. My only thought was to whether I should do a flip or not. In fact, all I really thought about was how easy the Perrine was, and what sort of new stuff I would try. I had after all, taken 5 sec. canopy rides there before with no problem. So rather than get recurrent and then have a blast all weekend, I spent most of the rest of the time(I did hobble out and make a water jump the next day) sitting in a hotel room, disgusted with myself for what was, in hindsight, clearly a silly-ass combination of dumb and arrogant.
As the weekend went on and the injuries mounted, one of which was the comp. fracture to a new (and very heads up, despite a shitty chain events she set off with what was almost certainly a packing error) girl who was with our crew, my disgust combined with a sort of mind-numbing sadness, which culminated with Monday morning's trifecta of shit. Or maybe that was from 5 days of Vicodin and beer. In any event, what I am getting at is this: I think that because the Perrine is so easy, because it is such a comparative "cake walk," many of us have had a fairly skewed perception of risk when we are there. Or at least I am completely certain that I did, and several other experienced jumpers I talked to expressed the same sentiment. I would assert that this sense of the Perrine as a cakewalk might manifest itself in; the nature of the jumps we choose to take ourselves; the type of folks we choose to put off; and how we act around the fledgling jumpers we make there.
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