Jumping Journal: January 31, 2007

A short evening.  VERY short.  It must be high school season once again.

 

After spending all the time a couple of weeks ago making snow, tonight was the night to finally get my first few rides of the year off of the K32 at Newport.  With only two more regular weeks of high school ski jumping left for the 2007 winter it's about time I get out and do some jumping with the kids.  It has been a tradition ever since I started jumping to take a few jumps with the kids before the meet.  Last year I even suckered into forejumping one of the high school meets.  Talk about a strange feeling, try being the only adult jumping/forejumping in a meet with 30-40 other 9-12 graders.

 

I knew I would end up marking the meet tonight so I wanted to get their early and try to get quite a few jumps in.  I ended up showing up after three of the schools were already there.  No one was jumping yet but they were suiting up as I arrived.

 

After learning my lesson back on Sunday I made sure after I arrived to take a look down the landing hill and out toward the outrun to see how things look.  Normally, Newport has rougher conditions.  The hill is typically handpacked vs machine groomed.  They do have a pull behind groomer that they can attach to a snowmobile to groom it but it doesn't have the weight of a regular groomer to help pack the snow thoroughly.  Worse yet, as people was talking about tonight, they make too dry of snow and that makes packing the snow even more difficult.  Tonight the soft snow ended up causing a lo of extra time spent during the meet doing repair work to the hill.

 

After looking at the hill I went inside the jump inn and quickly suited up.  I walked up the tressel and got the signal to go for my first jump.  It was the best of the three jumps I took for the night.  I was somewhere down around 27-28 meters.  I was a little surprised by how far I went, especially being the first jump off the hill in almost a year.

 

I walked back up top and went to put my skis on and noticed that a screw had come out of the binding and another screw was loose.  I'm not sure if it was like that on the first jump or not but when I saw it like that I knew I wasn't about to try to take the jump.  I walked back down the tressel and after spending 15-20 minutes with a screwdriver I had remounted the cord sencher(?) on the one ski.  It still wasn't as tight as what I would like it to be but it seemed like it was going to hold.

 

I walked back up the tressel and joined the crowd.  All the schools were there by that time and I had a nice line to wait behind.  The second jump was by far not as nice as the first one.  I was even questioning while in the air if I was still having binding trouble as the ski in question didn't seem to act like I thought it should.  Maybe I was just trying to place it ?safe?

 

The third and finally jump went better but definitely not as good as the first one.  It is amazing what a difference confidence in your equipment can make.

 

Crash