Pedro Assunção » sports

Landing is every man for himself

Pedro Assuncao — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 00:24:37 +0000

I hurt a knee the last time I was out jumping, on a downwind landing. And it was all because of a combination of stupidity and lack of knowledge.

The first because I did something I shouldn’t: I trusted a fellow skydiver’s direction instead of the wind sleeve. Turns out his direction was perfect for his canopy’s rate of descent, which allowed him to make his final turn upwind.

The second cause for the crash was the lack of experience to deal with a downwind landing. Apparently one of the safest ways to do it is to land like a tandem: on your butt

Lessons learned and hopefully my knee will heal fast so I can jump again soon and put all this behind me.

Blue skies

A nicer way to pack your pilot chute

Pedro Assuncao — Wed, 26 May 2010 11:24:01 +0000

My good friend Ricardo recently pointed me to this video on how to properly pack your pilot chute.

This method has the following advantages:

It’s faster than traditional methods;
You don’t have to deal with excess of bridle;
It will make sure that you don’t have horse-shoe malfunctions due to the pilot beeing stuck inside the pocket;
It’s way cooler!

Good blogging desktop client for mac (osx)

Pedro Assuncao — Wed, 26 May 2010 08:13:47 +0000

When i think about my mind’s typical excuses not to write on this blog, the one that pops up the fastest is usually the lack of a good blogging desktop client for mac.

I know, i know, i should just shut the hell up, use WordPress’ web admin interface, and quit whining. But i have a big problem when it comes to writing: i’m lazy. Anything that takes more than a few clicks in order to start writing will make me want to fire up my desktop PC and play something. I once bought a desktop blogging client called Ecto (which i still use, from times to times), but i think it’s no longer maintained properly since illumineX acquired it from it’s maker – Adriaaan Tijsseling – in the spring of 2008. And to be honest it never felt quite awesome, complaining all the time about the malformed-ness of my youtube embedded code.

So i was wondering if any of you – the 2 people that actually read my blog – know about a nicer (WP) desktop client for the mac.

In other – completely unrelated – news: I have my own parachute rig now. Here are some pics:

DSCF0866 by nocivus

DSCF0867 by nocivus

Jumping, working, jumping, house hunting

Pedro Assuncao — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 13:31:24 +0000

I just realized i haven’t posted in a while. The reason for that is threefold: i have been working a lot, jumping a lot more than i used to, and searching for a new house. That’s right, i finally decided to actually buy a house, mainly because i’m tired of moving my stuff around all the time; i moved 5 times in the last 3 years (rented places in Holland).

Regarding skydiving, i’m currently looking for a nice used equipment (everything) with a 150ft2 main canopy. Preferably a Stilleto. So, if you know anyone who might be selling something like that, drop me a line.

Last weekend i managed to do 3 jumps, 2 of which in great company. You can check it out below:

Saltos Sofia from Pedro Assuncao on Vimeo.

Blue skies!

Another day, four more jumps

Pedro Assuncao — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:31:51 +0000

Yesterday, against all odds, we went to Évora, Portugal again – praying for some holes in the low clouds. Somehow the universe did hear us and we ended up being able to jump 4 times. It was the first time i was recording video and i have to say it went really well. The GoPro Hero HD really behaved

Some notes of learned things, yesterday:

Mind your head, when carrying a camera. Especially inside the airplane!
Always, and i mean always, be frozen stable on target when deploying with a camera on your head;
Rain and skydiving are hard to mix. Unless of course you have a full face helmet. If you don’t it will feel like people sticking needles to your face;
Be careful when downsizing, but get a wing load of 1:1 as soon as (safely!) possible. Otherwise you will be moving back when in high winds.

Here’s the 4 jumps

Blue skies!

5000 km road trip to Holland

Pedro Assuncao — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:37:10 +0000

I have to say i felt completely exhausted. Humans were just not meant to spend 22 straight hours inside a car, much less sleep in one.

In any case, i really needed to get my stuff out of the Netherlands and the alternatives were more expensive so it had to be done. Here’s roughly how it went:

The cool thing was that we ended up going through Roosendaal, which contains a nice wind tunnel. Here’s my performance, if you can call it that

Another day in Teuge – 3 more jumps

Pedro Assuncao — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 21:30:19 +0000

This Saturday I went back to Teuge for another day of jumping out of airplanes. The day started a bit foggy but windguru never failed me so far, so I knew that it would clear eventually. And so it did; around 11 clock in the morning I was part of the first load of the day in the Cessna Caravan, ready to jump.

I decided to try a new canopy this time and having jumped with 3 different 190ft canopies before (Sabre, Spectre, and Silhouette) I was curious about the Pilot, for I had been told it was a more progressive kind of wing. Turns out they were right: In the air I found it to be much faster to turn (and drop, in sharp turns) which is a lot of fun, but I also noticed a couple of things I didn’t really enjoy:

Deployments. The deployment of the pilot are “fast and dirty”. Compared to it the silhouette is very gentle and smooth;
Landings. Compared to my previous experiences with other types, the pilot feels very unstable to me. I know I don’t have a lot of experience (39 jumps) but I did notice the difference between landing the Silhouette and the Pilot.

Funny story: In the first jump I thought the hard/fast/clumsy deployment was due to the fact that, while packing, I forgot to wrap the “skirt” after putting the cells inside and right before putting the canopy on the floor to get the air out (packers should know what I mean) but I later noticed that this happened in every jump (not me forgetting that, the whole fast deployment ).

I had planned to jump 4 times but when waiting for the 4th flight this guy came to me and asked if wouldn’t mind giving up my seat so he could go with a friend of his that was going on a tandem. The clouds were awesome (checkout the video) but, being his 2000th jump, I abode and let him go. The downside was that it was the last load of the day, but I figured I had just made someone really happy

Stuff I tried/trained in these 3 jumps include maintaining a stable sit fly for most of the jump and really getting down the details of my fall rate. It will really help the next time I jump with my friend Ricardo in my home DZ.

As a last comment I have to say that one of the loads was reaaaaaally full. Let’s just say that my private parts were not too happy with that ride up. Enough said

Blue skies!

My first two way skydive (exit video)

Pedro Assuncao — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:24:45 +0000

I already wrote about it in the past, but now we finally got the video of the exit (too bad we can’t record video ourselves yet, but the time will come ).

Here’s the link to the video.

One weekend, one jump, totally worth it

Pedro Assuncao — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 20:11:44 +0000

I woke up today at around 9 am and proceeded to call my buddy Ricardo to see if he had talked to our big master Mario Pardo about the DZ’s weather forecast for today. He had. Mario told him that the clouds were ok and, although there was a bit of wind, we should go there.

In half an hour I was on my motorbike on my way to my friend’s place. We took his car and drove the 1 hour trip to the DZ while imagining the stuff we would do in the air. But when we got there the wind was just too much. 21 knots average (we can only jump with max 15-17). Since there were some tandems to be done, we missed the first flight due to the wind, though the sky was beautiful; Two layers of well stroke – massive – clouds with the sun rays shining through them. Absolutely gorgeous.

During that first flight we helped the tandems to land (high winds are tricky, and require someone on the ground ready to pull the brakes chords all the way until the canopy collapses, preventing the tandem instructor and the other guy from getting dragged backwards on their asses ). It was really interesting watching the most experienced skydivers land in those conditions and one can learn a lot from it.

Then the wind started to slow down, and we got to go on the second (and last, unfortunately) jump. We planned to go out already docked to each other, eventually let go after getting stable, and re docking. Suffice to say that people that jump together for the first time have no clue what they are doing and it was really interesting what really happened.

We left the airplane together, as planed, and did not let go. The main problem was that we spent around 10 seconds fighting to get stable. When we eventually did, we noticed that Ricardo falls faster than me which means that I was always higher than he was. When we managed to get on the same level (I had to retract both my arms and legs a lot, and he compensated by spreading them a bit) we were ready to undock. As soon as we did we went apart really fast and spent the rest of the flight trying to compensate in both vertical alignment and proximity until the audible alarm went off at 5000 feet. We turned away and tracked until deployment altitude.

The landing, even if in high wind, went pretty smooth which made me more confident in my canopy landing skills once again

All in all, it was totally worth it to wait the entire weekend for one single jump. I guess that’s how you know when you are addicted to a sport: when you are willing to travel 240km two days in a row just to enjoy 1 minute of it.

Blue skies

Weather issues, no jumping

Pedro Assuncao — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 20:18:06 +0000

Turns out that Portugal is in calamity alert due to the heavy winds and rain. The only place that seemed to escape this destiny was the country side, with just a few sprinkles in the morning and an afternoon of no rain.

My only problem were the low clouds. As all skydivers know, low clouds are one of the possible reasons for not being able to get inside an airplane and go fly, and that’s exactly what happened to me today

The only good thing about it was that me and my friend Ricardo got to mingle and network a little bit with some of the guys at the DZ and took the chance to introduce them to jumperr and talk about some possibilities for the future.

Let’s hope that tomorrow the weather will be better and I finally get to jump together with my brother in jumps

Blue skies.