Well, we all know that the HU World Record will be going down next year and the evidence is already splashed all over the social media world. (By the way, congrats to everyone on the HU Florida record!) So, I wanted to get on that train. Because my HU is not so good. And I want it to be better.
Instead of traveling somewhere to practice, or paying an organizer to tell me that I’m not so good at this, I decided that this season, I’m going to bully my friends into regular HU practice days so that we can all get some reps. We did our first day yesterday, and this post is my recap.
Where: Skydive California
When: Yesterday, which was the most glorious skydiving day we’ve had in a long while
Who: Some local crew! Señors Butts, Rainbowsuit, Troncoso, Ozanian, Cashman, VanDevender, Madame Poliner & I. My specifications for joining the group was that you must be able to approach on your head, and leave on your head. Seemed like a good starting point?
So, What Did We Do?
Lesson 1: Don’t start your HU Exit completely inside the plane.
Well, we started with a HU 3way base exiting the Caravan, with two floaters and a diver. Our plan was to have a 3way base, with 3 stingers. The first attempt, the base only stuck our rigs out; we didn’t properly climb out. Which, put Peter, the person pushing it out, very far inside the Caravan. We tumbled. We blew up. And by the time we got back together, the all 3 members of the base decided to standfly, for stability I guess. (Me included.) Overall, 3/10.
Lesson 2: HU Bases are hard
We attempted the same jump again. It… didn’t go as planned. This time, we had a contingency plan: if the base finds itself on it’s head, we pancake. That was the only contingency plan. Alas, it was not enough. We needed a leader instead of 3 leaders. Too many cooks in the kitchen. Two of us thought that the base would settle out, so we tried to stick it on our feet. One of us thought we should just carry it two our heads. Once we were on our heads, one of us was ready to flip. The others, waited a second. Sheer chaos ensued. Honestly, after two jumps of
Lesson 3: Do a Feets Star to Feel Better
We did a feets star, a.k.a. a head-up speed star. We don’t follow the “everyone must be in the plane” rule. We don’t enforce whether people have to be on their feet the whole time. We just try to hold hands on our feet. It’s a great palate cleanser, even when it’s not super successful
Lesson 4: I Guess We Need a HD Base
So after much flailing about in the wind on our feet, we decided, to give the head up flyers something to approach that vaguely imitates a base, we should send out a head down base. So we did that, the rest of the day.
So What’s Next?
More of these days! Now that I’ve tried to get people together for a day of this, I have a better idea of what on earth we’re capable of. So I’m super psyched to do another!
- Bully more of my friends into coming
- Start out with a HD base. It actually gives the head-up flyers a base. And, I always worry about people not feeling challenged, or feeling bored when they have to do things like a head-down base. But I have to remember that people can find ways to challenge themselves, even when they’re in the head-down base, for example: keeping your legs still or keeping the thing on heading or working on your awareness and recall by keeping track of who showed up to the formation at what altitude.
- Practice, practice. Man. Headup is hard. I’m glad some people were willing to come out and endure some relatively unsuccessful jumps while we worked out how to practice this.
- Figure out how to play our videos on the tv at Tracy. Man. There was some especially epic footage from this week. Also, bring my computer to steal everyone’s footy. Hilarity really did ensue this weekend.
Vimeo and WordPress aren’t playing nicely to display an embedded video, so here’s the link: https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/816634045