Re: [avenfoto] U still on Meds ??? / Just got OUT ? / Problems ...?
Now that I've embarrassed all those other guys I'll take my turn . . .
This is 1988 and the jump I earned my BASE number on. All I needed was a cliff. But at the time I was working as an Skydiving Instructor and getting 2 bucks a head for slinging static line students and eating Top Raman Noodles to survive. And my area of Southern California was cliff poor. So a road trip to El Cap was out of the question as I couldn't have come up with the gas money . . .
And in fact I didn't jump El Cap until I had 70 BASE jumps. And it was the highest BASE jump I'd ever done at the point, and in a way it was so much better that way.
Back then most of us weren't doing really low jumps unless we could freefall them. So for most of us 300-hundred feet or so was the limit.
Meanwhile across the pond in England the Brits were pioneering the low stuff through static line. And mainly it was becasue they had to make due with the low objects they had. But over here in the States all we heard about was the early SL mishaps they were having so we weren't too enthused about it. Static line BASE just seemed too complicated to our feeble American minds.
Of course some of us were doing SL. Carl Boenish was doing some amazing stuff with 80-foot long static lines at places like Canyon De Freedom, but still it all seemed like voodoo to us lessers so's . . .
PAPA HAS A BRAND NEW BAG!
Then in 1987, or so, an American jumper named Mark Hewitt came up with the direct bag method. Suddenly almost everything too low for freefall, at least for us, become jumpable. So this is me direct bagging a small cliff into a 15 knot headwind (the direct bag didn't automatically give us any brains) with a home-made BASE rig and Todd S. holding my bag.
Another thing about those days is we suffered with badly designed toggle systems. We didn't yet have Zoo type or pin type toggles and jams on slider down jumps were a common problem. So on a lot of low jumps, if you didn't need to toss a toggle because of a line over, we just left well enough alone and landed using the rear risers.
On a no wind jump this produced a good crash landing as we were still jumping small 220-ish skydiving canopies. But here the headwind that might have messed with me on the initial jump saved me on the landing. I told the guy filming to keep going no matter what happened. That's why he asks if it's all right to stop at the end. And that's kinda funny now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skkWFoM1POo Then, becasue I now had the four objects, I had to phone up Jean Boenish right away. And, or course, in those days, that meant finding a pay phone. And I do recall seeing this vid right after and not thinking much of it. But now, so many years later, I'm so very glad I have it . . .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8a9fthGjcs A year or so later, we started to discover, because cell phones were coming into fashion, all the cell towers dotting the Southwestern part of the USA.
Here's Ritchie, J.D. Walker and others taking advantage of them. Ritchie was about the only one doing SL regularly at the time. He was a direct descendant of Carl Boenish, as Carl was his mentor (before that word mentor was ever used) and it amazed us that he could do it alone with no one to pin check him. But he did a lot of SL solos and was very comfy with it . . .
The "Check the Fucking O-Rings" thing is a reference to the the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster which had just occurred.
Part 1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8GXt6im2mM Part2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xx4d2VP7tew Man, all that looking, viewing, downloading, uploading, splicing and dicing! I gotta grab a rig and head downtown . . . !!!
Enjoy!
NickD
BASE 194