Euro Tour 25 Part Two

High Summer in Europe offers skydivers a lot of choice of where and how to engage with their sport. From your local club being a bit more open, through a big old Pink Skyvan coming to town for a week, to a bells-and-whistles innhopp bonanza. The efficiency with which skydiving events get done has ever been a mixed bag, but the full spectrum of experience is there for the adventurous.

FYRESDAL, NORWAY

Norway is a pretty fancy place and Tønsberg is a suitably spiffy spot to go skydiving. They employ a Twin Otter, occupy nice buildings with a sauna, and when invited on a Midsummer beach jump a few years ago, there was an old-timey jazz band playing Jungle Book songs. For reals. The town of Fryesdal is a bit to the North, and quite pretty by normal standards, with a big lake and some mini mountains. It is not a tourist destination though, made very clear by the hundred-or-so big white camper vans that all turn immediately West off the Denmark ferry towards the coastal mega-fjords, leaving me to solo the interior route. The Skydive Tønsberg community now make use of this location to avoid a big annual RC event at their home airfield, after learning the hard way last Summer about how much space those things use. Modern radio-controlled model culture is fascinating and spectacular, with their FPV and their specificity and their power-to-weight ratios, but I cannot be the only gravity-and-fabric enthusiast who sees an aircraft that you cannot fly in, that costs the same as an aircraft you can fly in, as a missed opportunity. So we swooped the little mountains and jumped by the big lake somewhere else while they got on with it.

SKANE, SWEDEN

A place where you can make all the noise you want is of paramount importance to the success of an old-school tutu and facepaint boogie. Additionally, a space to party in that is not the same hangar where everyone spends theie daylight hours is a vital upgrade. Over twenty years of events, Tora Tora have learned these lessons well, and elected to use Skane as their anniversary jamboree facility.

I am not one for party games and fancy dress and whatnot, but a great many people find these things a way to connect and bond with one another. This is what skydiving is for too, so here you can choose – go hard through the night among the trees and bonfires, and sleep late – or jump in true freeform boogie style by corralling a group and a coach while the sun is up. I don’t know who won the games. I am an early morning type, by necessity. I hide behind workday professionalism, but in reality, one must make it through the season alive. All versions of a skydiving event have their own particular value, and while there are voices our there that decry the erosion of ‘traditional’ dropzone experiences in favour of new ways, this is proof that it is still perfectly alright to be deeply hungover in an aeroplane.

GRYTTJOM, SWEDEN

At the nutrition-and-bedtime end of the events scale, Fly4Life offer a premium product. While knowing them individually, I had previously never been present for a camp, so remaining in Sweden to check out Gryttjom and do so seemed like a nice idea. Some legit admin tasks needed doing, but after a big and busy couple of things one must also consider the effects of everyone going hard around you all the time. Small details make real differences to the how an event can go, and if there is something in particular you get to understand well by bouncing from one thing to the next to the next, it is that any and all successful skydiving is an exercise in communication.

Hard-earned practical flying skills will only get you so far if you cannot telegraph them into other people’s brains and bodies, and this extends from individuals to group and teams. A huge part of maintaining progression and consistently enjoying skydiving is always reaching for and understanding the next level of information transfer between each element of the whole show. Your perception of how every cause-and-effect function on a dropzone adds up to a good day grows over time, and can be facilitated by a good team that like each other and work well as a unit. If every piece of the puzzle is managed and smooth, there is direct access to understanding it. This is how you occupy the top of the pile. Half of them still looked like shit after the party though.

WARSAW, POLAND

Novelty jumps are an important part of one’s skydiving journey. Expensive and logistically complicated, it takes a brave operation to aim for as many of these as possible all at the same time. The Warsaw Sky Festival promised pretty much the full set, with night jumps, a couple of different helicopters, glider slots, balloons on multiple days, and two innhopps. The desire to do these things doesn’t go away over time, but becomes tempered by the inevitable, unavoidable logistical faffing about. One is both hungriest and most patient for this stuff in the earlier years of a skydiving career, which means I signed up for everything but only ultimately achieved half – these being the things I could get done without having to commit to mystery timeframes and administrative vaguery. I need consistent sleep and regular feeding to be a friendly boogie rep. The girls and boys of Skydive Warsaw did a good job of keeping this one on course. With so many moving parts to attend to, it is no small achievement that most of those who turned out for such a rare gathering of parachuting opportunities will tell you it was great.

HOHENEMS, AUSTRIA

People ask a lot about where my favourite dropzone is, which is a difficult question to definitively answer. This is partly because things change with the ebb and flow of the industry – the whims of whichever forces alter our sport from year to year. It is also that my priorities can be somewhat different. With a week-by-week list of skydiving locations to occupy, the opportunity to jump is less of a concern than running out of clean underpants. When I present my opinions as a points-based list regarding the quality of the showers, the presence and reliability of the laundry facilities, and the specific walk/bike/drive distance to an acceptable supermarket – mentioning nothing of aircraft or ticket prices and such – people nod and smile politely. By way of resolution, I will often say Skydive Hohenems, because it is lovely.

This time we are here for the IPC Speed Skydiving World Cup. Speed is an odd affair, and while doubtless both scary and difficult to do well, it also has a generous barrier for entry and a very supportive community. Within the realms of sport skydiving, the speed folk are super niche – but simultaneously the gig is simple to understand for non-jumpers who will offer anything from mild confusion to total incomprehension when presented with any other ruleset. Go fast at the ground. Got it.

In a sport of many contradictions, Speed Skydiving contains some of the most fun. At the serious end, the numbers are wild and represent the ability to go faster than every other human pursuit that doesn’t potentially end by dying in a massive explosion. On the way in, though, you can sign up at the start of the season, march through an Austrian village to a band with trombones and tubas in August, and look like a bad motherfucker on the front page of your local newspaper when you get home. Glorious.

By the time the temperature drops and the rain comes, I am ready for it. Touring in this way is a unique way to engage with the communities around the world that we support, and I am grateful to everyone who plays a part in being able to do so. It never stops for long though, and only the briefest interlude leads to the next logistical spider web as we look towards what is next. Thanks everyone.