Leisure and Hobbies

Skydiving or parachuting brings to mind familiar images from films and TV commercials. Who hasn’t seen one or a hundred people floating through the air, wind flapping against their jumpsuits, followed by a swoosh and a colorful canopy blooming?

Every skydiver faces risks. Though they’re often exaggerated, about 1 jump in 100,000 leads to a fatality every year. Compare that to the risk of being in a fatal car crash within 25 miles of home, which is about 1 in 6,000.

In broad outline, how a modern ram canopy parachute deploys is pretty much the same, barring emergencies. The skydiver extracts a pilot chute that fills with air and tugs on attached lines. Those lines are also attached to the main canopy that is pulled from the D-bag in the backpack. It in turn fills with air. Simple.

Skydiving looks so simple. You open the canopy, you drift down. What could be simpler? In fact, there is an amazing variety of gear used in even the most elementary jumps.

A modern parachute is a complex piece of equipment - and lucky for the skydiver that it is, too. All that complexity is there to serve a purpose: to bring skydivers to Earth safely while providing a quality experience in the air.

Beyond the classic face down, belly-toward-Earth flying position, there are many skydiving techniques that it’s great to know. The more you know, the more fun you can have for those few precious seconds during freefall.

In days past, Static Line was the most common method of skydiving for beginners. As the skydiver exits the plane, an attached line deploys a pilot chute, which then opens the main canopy a few seconds later.

Tandem and AFF (accelerated free fall) skydiving methods get a lot of attention. They are, it’s true, two very common ways of instructing students in the art of falling out of a plane with a parachute. But there’s a traditional method that is still very frequently employed - Instant Opening.

Skydiving looks both exciting and scary. But to make it more of one and less of the other is pretty simple. It will help to get a little bit of information about how such an amazing activity is even possible. It just takes an ultra simple physics lesson. No math required.

There are several ways to get initiated into the exciting activity of skydiving. One of the most common is something called a Tandem Jump.

Tracking is a skydiving skill emphasized very early in training. It involves positioning the body to produce horizontal movement.

No one wants to have to deploy their reserve chute. And, fortunately, it’s rare to have to do so. But hang around a busy dropzone for a few days and you’re almost certain to see at least one instance.

There are two basic types of air flow, laminar and turbulent. Despite the fancy names, the ideas are very simple. Picture the smoke rising off the tip of a cigarette. Near the hot end the smoke flows smoothly upward. At a certain point, it starts curling and swirling. That’s turbulent flow.

No skydiving lessons are needed to know that if your canopy has trouble, you have trouble. But that trouble comes in different forms and lessons can tell you what they are and how to deal with them.

Skydiving is often thought of as a major adrenaline producing sport. And, for good reason. It is.

TV commercials and magazine or Internet ads featuring hammocks often show someone lying in one under palm trees with an orange sun in the sky. That image, obviously, is designed to create a certain mood in the potential buyer. But it is only successful because there’s a lot of truth in it. Hammocks are great.

Using a hammock is trickier than it looks. Images of someone peacefully asleep under palm trees, swaying in a gentle breeze, are common from films and TV. But they rarely show you anyone getting in, getting out or changing position. That takes a bit of practice.

In many cases, there are no conveniently located trees from which to hang your hammock. Porches, lawns and many other locations don’t offer a nearby pair strong enough to support your fine piece of outdoor furniture.

On a scale of 1 to 100, hammocks are not particularly dangerous. Let’s more or less arbitrarily set the number around 10. But there are nevertheless a few things it’s a good idea to watch out for, in order to drive that number even lower.

Hammocks come in a wide variety of types, styles, materials and sizes. Which one is right for you depends on your size, your climate and the hammock’s intended use.

Talk of hammocks brings to mind the image of a cloth bed hanging between tall palm trees in a tropical breeze. But there are in fact many ways to enjoy the comfort of a relaxing hammock bed - once you get it hung.