Captains Call March 2017
by Greg Jack
Hi everyone and welcome to March’s edition of our monthly Newsletter for 2017.
Firstly, for those who were not able to attend the highly successful Dan BC Big Way Camp at Nagambie in November last year you may not know that the APF sponsored Christian Whyte to make a short movie on the Event titled “An Australian Story”, in particular the Australian Sequential Record attempt. This movie features in air footage of the record jumps by Steve Tonson, Steve Fitch and Shaunn Segon and is posted on the APF and Aussie Bigways websites.
“An Australian Story” by Christian Whyte
Now I have just returned from a fantastic 4 day 16 to 60 Way P3 Camp, a very challenging and thoroughly enjoyable 18 jump camp involving more intricate and fragile formations with many side and outfacing slots.
We had 6 Aussies there – Adrian Lloyd, Vivien Merz, Martin Klapper, Cullen Habel, Chris Howard [Aussie skydiver who works in the industry in Philadelphia and has been on all of our Record Events] and myself + we had BJ from NZ who had so much fun with us down at Nagambie in December last year.
I have been asked a few times lately from some of the newer “inductee’s” into our journey towards May 2019 about exactly where P3 came from, so here is it in a nutshell:
The P3 [Perris Performance Plus] concept came about around the year 2000/01 when the build up towards the 300 way formation record attempt was being organised.
Up till this point there were those who were experienced large formation skydivers and “in” the big way circle/circle, but a great many of these skydivers flew the same slot – you were generally either a base person, a diver [short, medium or long] or a floater and you were mostly given a very similar slot each time a world record event came up. Not normally did people change slots that much and there was very of opportunity for skydivers wishing to learn large formation skills, let alone in some form of formal or graduated approach.
Obviously with the 300 way plan there was a requirement to have more experienced big way skydivers and the requirement to be able to coach/train more skydivers in large formation skills and the P3 concept was created by Kate Cooper-Jensen, Dan BC and Tony Domenico. It has matured into a highly successful approach to Bigway skydiving and one which Aussiebigways have embraced to so far achieve 4 new national records and one Aussie POPS record.
So here we are March 2017 – a little over 2 years now until our next National Record Event – we have Doug Forth’s [P3 Coach] Big Way Camps at the end of the year both in Moruya and York and many more smaller events this year as we continue the journey.
See you on a DZ somewhere soon, jump safe.
Blue Ones,
Greg
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