The close of a great season
After hard work on our training camps and the EU-record attempt, Marc Calluy and Brord van der Maat invited us to close the season with a ‘CF for Fun’ event the Zwarberg DZ with Skydive Flanders.
An invitation which we accepted gratefully. On arrival, the manifest tried to get everybody ‘appy,’ but their attempt burbled away the morning jumps. We were more pleased with the package the weather lords had stored for us. The promised Saturday of sun was followed by rain during the night and an unexpected great sunny Sunday closed the weekend package.
The BBQ setting on Saturday evening was a great compliment to the weekend. After a nice day of jumping, the group of crEUw jumpers, from Berlin to as close as Antwerp, were pleased to be presented with such a well-prepared feast. Any onlooker might have thought that a gruesome bunch of friends were celebrating someone’s birthday. What a party it was and indeed a day to celebrate. 😉
So, during this weekend, Zwartberg DZ transformed in to the place to be for CF-minded skydivEUrs. Evi Mellebeek took her first steps into CF under the fatherly care of Marc. 4 jumps on the Saturday transformed her into a real crEUw cat with enough CF skills to join the bigways on the Sunday. Thank you Seele for offering your canopy to Evi. This weekend also saw the first steps into big-way CF for Wouter Haas and Tobi Koch. Tobi did well; as may be expected for an experienced swooper and Storm CF competition jumper he showed an ability to make the nice no-momentum-docks we like to see in big way. Also Wouter, who had made his first CF jumps during the skill camps at Texel DZ, fought his way through the echelon, completing his progress with some docks on the big-ways during the Sunday dives. Congratulations Evi, Tobi and Wouter, it is great having you on board with the crEUw team. Also a big welcome to CF goes to Marcel Leën, and thanks for doing the CF video work for the first time this weekend. We like your work so far and hope to see it progress as well Marcel’s, which can be seen here.
It was also good to hear that Skydive Flanders is thinking about buying a set of four CF canopies. Actually this is not such a strange idea. The goal of a sport club is to facilitate its members in exercising the sport, especially in the first stages of their involvement with the sport. If you buy student rigs for the first jump students, why not for the first steps in a discipline? The crEUw team is very interested in this way of supporting and promoting the CF discipline. Good luck DZ Zwartberg with this initiative, we will follow this with interest.
Also nice to see that during the CF for fun event Koen and Wim, members of Skydive Flanders, were doing their CF2-way Storm jumping as well.
We came to appreciate DZ Zwartberg for the endless care offered. However, this took an abrupt down turn when one of the DZ-officials wanted to explain the very basics of the left hand circuit to Tobi. That was a bit over the top for our proud swooper who takes care of canopy control courses in Germany. Nevertheless, we did appreciate the general level of care offered by the staff, especially the smooth pick-up after an off DZ landing.
The jumps of this weekend were again of the high quality that we’ve come to expect from the engineering of Herman and Gerben. Thank you guys for keeping us safe and making the FUN happen.
For those who would like to join the fun … we will not sleep this winter. Just give us a shout if you would like to do CRW.
crEUw skies, Henk