We have our first skydiving (formation, 4-way) competition in a few weeks time! The first of the Grand Prix's. The 4 of us have been doing lots of tunnel time and did 6 jumps at the weekend together, mostly on Sunday. Saturday was a bit of a frustrating day, as it was the first gorgeous Saturday in a long time - and the pilot at the DZ was ill! So we had to hop in the car and take a trip to a nearby DZ; Weston. That meant becoming members there (another £25), getting all our kit and docs checked, and buying jump tickets for that DZ. We did get to jump a Dornier though, which was nice practise for the Nationals in August.

Sunday we went back to our usual DZ, Hinton, and got in 4 jumps. The first jump totally funnelled (went wrong on exit) and it was all my fault as i slipped and lost my footing on exit! I found it was a difficult exit ("Sidebody" and I am Outside Centre) - it was one we had tried successfully from the Dornier at Weston, but that has a much bigger door. The plane at Hinton has a smaller door and it was much more cramped making my position difficult. The rest of the jumps went ok though, we spent the time doing drills and practising one exit over and over (Bow) as this will be our "stock" exit. There are 16 formations ("randoms") and in a competition you have to do 3, and repeat them over and over as many times as you can. But you don't have to "launch" the first formation. It's nice if you can, as then you can use it as the first point and save time. But at our rookie level, there's no way we can perfect 16 formations to launch just in case they come up. So we picked one, and will use that. Later on, we will try out more exits, but for the moment we will stick with just one.

We have another session in the wind tunnel in a few weeks and are going to make sure we have tried out every formation - as so far we have been sticking to the easy ones! We need to have a go at some where at least one of us is outfacing. I doubt we'll get 3 easy ones come up on the big day. Hopefully we won't get three we've only done a couple of times though!

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