Packtice makes Perfect

I'm sitting on my sofa, shattered. I've just run my first half-marathon in 3 years. Monika is curled up next to me. She's just run her first half-marathon ever. I'm dead proud of her. It's been a good weekend, even if I haven't got any jumps in.

Yesterday I packed my parachute completely for the first time. Packing is basically the art of getting a parachute into a bag that any normal person can tell is obviously too small for it.

Glorious, but terrifying

The first thing I learnt, after unpacking my parachute, admiring it in all its glory and setting it up as if I'd just got back to the manifest (daisy-chaining the lines, stowing the breaks), is that my flat is nowhere near big enough to pack in. A quick rearranging of the furniture helped, but I still had to run the lines down to the container in the hallway.

The second thing I learnt is that I find the idea of packing pretty scary. They say all parachutes want to be open, but the doesn't help when you've got hundreds of square feet of nylon piled up in front of you. My little brother got me a packing guide video for my birthday, so I manned up and started.

It started really well. I've had a couple of packing lessons at the drop zone, and the first steps were pretty easy. I had the lines sorted quickly.

However, after this I had to start counting and sorting the cells and this was difficult. Eventually I had it basically right, so I tried to fold it to get the four sets of lines on top of each other. This did not go well. After a couple of false starts I had everything in basically the right place, but instead of neat groups my lines were in a mess of spaghetti.

This clearly WILL NOT GO

Next I had to fold the canopy to get it to a size that would go into the deployment-bag. This will go down as one of the most frustrating events of my entire life. The false starts we numerous and infuriating. What little order existed in the way the cells had been laid out disappeared completely. The video said not to stuff the canopy into the d-bag but I couldn't see any other way. Eventually, on about the eighth attempt, I got the damn thing in, though it was overflowing through all the gaps and looked pretty dangerous, and I was drenched with sweat and in a generally bad mood.

To finish off I brought in the lines and stowed the d-bag in the container, closing it with a proper pull-up cord instead of a shoelace. I've done this before a couple of times so found it easier.

The whole process took me over an hour and a half. A professional packer can be done in less than 6 minutes. At the moment the £5 for a pack-job seems like the most economical choice I can ever make, but I need to get good at this and it was my first unsupervised attempt. I'll take it to the drop zone and get some advice on the best techniques (every parachute is different).

Am I pleased I've done it?

Yes

Would I jump that pack job?

Not a damn chance.

Victory