Safety net
Hey all! Saw something on a jump recently that was fucking brilliant -- like "embarrassed I've never thought of that" brilliant. I haven't seen it posted here (though I may have missed it), and in case it might help somebody else, I thought it'd be worth posting, though the incident itself is not my story to share. The idea is simple... Your buddy is hung up on a wall, in a tree, something like that, 20-50 feet up (hell, maybe more). Among the things you can do to help is to clear the ground below and stretch somebody's canopy out like as a safety net, with a few jumpers (or more people if possible) holding the edges.
Having seen it in place once, I feel sure that this could be the difference between serious injuries and few or none at the altitudes above. In fact, if I had a friend stuck 100 feet up, had come to the end of my usefulness otherwise, and could get a dozen people around the edge of a canopy, I'd do it there too just in case it might turn a fatal fall into a marginally survivable one.
Like I say, I wish I'd known about this earlier. Keep it in your bag of tricks if it's not there already, and tell your friends.
