Basejumper.com - archive

Hi m8s.

I'm now taking my AFF course and close to finish it and I want to get on base jumping. I'm now looking more to get experience on as many basic free fall jumps as I can for long as I can, but what I really wanna know is after how many jumps did you fellas started base just to get the picture.

Thanks lads

My advice is here.

I had about 300 skydives when I started BASE jumping. I wish someone had pointed out to me that freeflying and high performance canopies didn't have much skill translation, and had steered me toward CRW, Accuracy, and (max) tracking, instead.

I agree with Tom that CRW and Accuracy skills are one of the skills to train while skydiving before getting into BASE but I wouldn't say that freeflying doesen't have much skill translation. What I've found out is that all that body position awareness and body control (that are essential skills in freeflying) have come very handy in BASE. If you only jump flat-and-stable accuracy and CRW exits out of ariplanes and never have to learn how to recover stability out of different unstable positions (a skill that you will learn while practising freeflying) how are you supposed to do that on a BASE jump ?

Your translation of skills transfer is limited. If you are only going to do 300 skydives or less before BASE jumping then sure.

However some of the best BASE jumpers and BASE canopy pilots I've seen are accomplished freeflyers with a lot of honest to goodness canopy piloting skills.

Time does make a huge difference.

dont rush
skydiving is new for you and u can enjoy it to the max. accuracy and tracking are skills u can develop in skydiving enviroment but first you have to be fair with you and to know when you are ready to jump. After you feel you are ready put 100 jumps more (focus on accuracy and tracking), try some baloon jumps, search for a FJC, get contacts in your area, find a mentor, groundcrew as much as you can, rethink again if you really want to do it. After all of this probably you will jump and see if it is for you or it was just a ¨be cool thing¨
Numbers are only numbers... i made 80 accuracy on 7 cell canopy and 30 tracking jumps and i am far away to be ready for BASE. Everyone is different

take care and enjoy skydiving (BASE will come to you at some point)

I wanted to base jump around 6 months before I did my first skydive. Before I did my first base jump I had the following:

350 jumps in less than a year, 150 within the past 3 months.
250 jumps on a F1-11 9 cell loaded at .9
75 jumps on my base canopy, working on accuracy/canopy control on every single one. All jumps within 4 months of first base jump.
~20 CReW jumps on my base canopy
~20 CReW jumps on my other canopy

Though I didn't take a base course or anything and didn't really have a mentor, just a bunch of guys who are like family.

Also, I started base just after I turned 18. This is one reason why I have absolutely no clue why some people start base with less skydives/experience/whatever and say they can't afford it or anything - especially if they live in a 1st world country.

I am going to have to disagree that freeflying is not benifitial to BASE. Freeflying skills can really help understand your body orientation, and minipulating the air in no matter what body position you are in, to get yourself back to the position that is desired for a smooth on heading opening. If you have never been on your back, feet, or head, and you end up that way during a nice delay BASE, it sure is nice to know how to get out of it. Plus if you freefly, you tend to get invited on a lot more multi-way max track dives. It is all good skills to obtain, and you should never stop learning and think you know it all because you can fall flat and scary, track, and proficiantly fly your 7 cell.

of course, if your on your feet, back, or head at anywhere near freefly speeds, you have other problems.

I think that my comments are being misinterpreted.

I did not say that freeflying had zero value, or that swooping had zero value, or that making more skydives had zero value, to learning BASE.

Here's what I said, in a nutshell:

Jump for jump, CRW, Accuracy and Max Tracking have, on average, a higher value as BASE preparation than Freeflying or Swooping.

That means that a freeflyer with 10000 jumps is still likely going to be better prepared than a CRW jumper with 100.

My point is that when evaluating the value of any specific skydive as BASE preparation (when considered by it's opportunity cost--that being any other specific skydive), I wish someone had pointed out to me that doing a CRW jump (for example) would better prepare me for BASE than doing a freefly jump (on any specific jump).



I repeat: I am not saying that any skydive has zero value as BASE preparation, merely that some are more valuable than others, when considered one by one.

I had around 2400 skydives and was flying a 79 when i first started and of course the more time in the air the better. I am not even going to get into freeflying due to someone else capturing my ideas on it quite well. All skills help period. Some do help more than others.. the skill i hold highest on list of ANY .... i repeat ANY is canopy time. CRW is great and there is alot to learn from it for base. But the little clip about high performace canopies not having much skill translation is a bit of hot air and here is why....
Tom only had 300 jumps and didnt fly a true High performance canopy therefore never benifited from one.

The real deal
A High Performance canopy can help induce faster response time. Why.....

Flying a true High performance canopy gets you used to doing everything in less amounts of time. .... (you never have alot of time in base) It helps you with getting used to determining distance, glide, speed and being accurate all in short amounts of time alot better than the slower canopies that give you the feeling of minutes before you hit something... If you can land a canopy that doesn't give you much time on landing .. then a base landing will seem like an eternity... and that is a good thing . The more you can process in short amounts of time the better your chances are.
Anyhow... if you want to swoop then swoop it will still help you towards base.

Only you know when you feel up to getting into base. Their isnt any specific number of jumps set on where it is proven that you will always be safe. Of course the more you do the more it will help. Hopefully people will inform you on the way.

Oh and i sure hope you pass a background check!!!!

I didn't actually think you meant that it was zero. In general, I agree with you. Pardon my lack of details in my previous post since I believe your intended meaning is accurate.

Here's why I agree. If you just skydive and fly a canopy for fun and transportation back to the ground, chances are you are not practicing skills that may be needed in BASE. Many people do not choose to advance their skills simply to be a better skydiver. Those are the people that are not prepared or are preparing to BASE jump either. Many people are part of this group. They see BASE jumping and want to do it with a mindset that they have 400 skydives so it must be ok to BASE. This group is often filled with people that also believe that landing off the dropzone is really scary and dangerous. That's not good.

If you are using your time to train as a skydiving athlete, then you are probably training to simply be skilled at canopy and body flight. This trains reaction time and judgement. Landing anywhere is second nature. <== this reminds me of a current demo thread where all but one person landed poorly in an area that skilled BASE jumpers would consider huge.

On the other side of the fence. Many skilled freefallers and high performance canopy pilots struggle in the beginning since they do have all that skill. A big challenge is the initial switch to flying a large seven cell. They fly it fine but here's the catch. It's very comfortable to be under a parachute so people often begin performing more technical jumps before they've developed proper reactions suitable for some BASE environments.

The condensed version is... highly skilled skydivers often get over their head initially by not reverting back to basics for a while. Once the realization of flying a seven cell like a seven cell sets in... all that air time comes in handy. So if you are going to only do 500 jumps or even less, then actually train to be good at it.

Hope that helps.

Yah especially when you don't have any relative wind to work with.

Consider the difference between where you live and where he lives. My guess is that his initial BASE experiences were off a terminal cliff in Norway, where you are likely to get some relative wind to work with, eventually.

Maretus, remember that many people are learning from much lower objects, where they never reach terminal (or anything close to it). Standard instructional technique here is to begin with a PCA jump (where there is virtually no freefall).

I just looked in my logbook, 1 of my first 20 jumps was above 300 feet, with 15 being freefalls from 270-300. Hell, most of my jumps now are from 270 and below.

Living in a flat area sucks sometimes.

I, being the lazy MF that I am, didnt take this into account until AFTER I posted. I officially admit to being a jerk off poster and owe the thread owner a dinner or four, plus many local beers and spirits.

That guess is correct. :)


I do know that Tom and I'm fully aware that probably majority of first base jumps annually made are off low stuff (PCA's or HH's). I peronally started in terminal wall but have done my fair share of slider down stuff as well. My last 50 or so jumps for example have been slider downs and haven't done SU jump since last october. I still claim that overall body awareness and body control (a skills that are vital for a freeflyer) help you out with low stuff as well. Relative wind or not, knowing your motorical skills and being able to work with your body position is a nice skill to have for a base jumper. Think this other way, a person like Jeb Corliss for example probably would become a world class freelfyer (he even could be, don't know) very quickly due to his motorical skills and awesome body control he has lerarned through his extensive aerobatics training in BASE. Is there a skill transfer from BASE to freeflying ? If there is why there wouldn't be the same transfer the other way ?

Yes, but is it a more important survival skill than an effective track, or good object avoidance canopy skills? I certainly don't think so.




Remember that we're talking about someone just starting skydiving, with an eye to BASE, here. Do you really think that encouraging them to emphasize throwing aerials as their primary skill set is such a good idea? Wouldn't they be better served to work on survival skills, such as creating object separation and canopy control? Wouldn't it make more sense to focus on the aerobatics after you've mastered the basics that are necessary for survival?




Why should it matter for a beginner? What is the most important skill or skills for them to focus on? Do you really think that it's aerobatics? Wouldn't they be better served to focus on skills that transfer more directly to the survival skills of BASE?

In my opinion, the priorities for a new BASE jumper are survival skills like stable exits, object avoidance under canopy, and object separation prior to deployment. I believe the skydiving skill sets most likely to transfer best to fundamental survival skills are CRW, Accuracy, and Max Tracking.

I do not believe that aerials are a fundamental survival skill that new jumpers ought to practice before mastering other skills. I do not believe that freeflying has as high a skill transfer for fundamental survival skills.

I am not saying that freeflying develops no transferable skills for BASE jumping. Nor am I saying that mastery of aerials does not increase your chances of survival on any given BASE jump. Just that those things are less important than many other areas, and that beginners ought to be steered toward the skill areas with the maximum return in terms of their survival chances.

It might be taken off the context but in your earlier post you wrote "I wish someone had pointed out to me that freeflying and high performance canopies didn't have much skill translation" and that was the only point I'd to comment in this thread. I agree that there are much more crucial skills to learn and you can learn them better from other forms of skydiving then freeflying (like CRW, accuracy). I still have to disagree on the idea that we should guide people to
only do CRW and accuracy, I'd like to think that being most versatile and all around skydiver with wide range of skills will pay off eventually when getting into BASE. But then again, I've always said to people that take minimun 500 skydives, preferably more. With 500 jumps one has had much more time to experiment with different things and develop different skills in skydiving. If one is to do only the minimun 200 skydives he probably is better off with 100 accuracy jumps and 100 CRW's than 200 freefly skydives with swoop in the end. :) With my referral of Jeb probably being able to become a world class freeflyer I did not mean to encourage anybody to start doing aerials nor did I not mean that aerials are any primary skill to learn in BASE. What I only meant is what I wrote that in both enviroments, BASE and skydiving, body control, body position awareness and motorical skills are important skills as well to master and there from my opinion is a clear skill transfer between the two sports. Granted I do look this thing from European perspective where probably the skill set I'm looking on is different from people living elsewhere. But that's primarly one of the advantages of this thing called Internet so when can compare our views with other people.