Coach Rating

Well I have finally completed one of my goals in skydiving which is getting my Coach Rating. I finished the classroom part of the training a couple of weeks ago but due to weather, I just finished the in air evaluations this past weekend at my DZ. Over all, I have to say that I was mentally ready and prepared and it went as well as I could have desired.

So before you ask, no, this does not mean that I can take you skydiving. The coach rating is a step on the way to being an AFF instructor for me which is a totally different progression/equipment than taking people for tandems. The coach rating allows me to teach the majority of the first jump classroom lecture, jump with skydivers released from their student program but not yet licensed, and lastly complete recurency jumps for skydivers that are not current with their license requirements and ensure they are ready to be released again solo. It really allows for some cool interaction with new skydivers and students in my opinion.

Both of the eval jumps went just fine. I had Val as my "student"/"evaluator" and she threw some good things at me. The first jump we had a very good exit followed by her just wandering off which required me to go get her. We completed some of our objectives but she did not leave at the right time to track away - I responded correctly by leaving her. The second jump freaked me a bit in that she misrouted her chest strap so that it was really barely being held in place. I caught this on the ground. Over all it went well. During both jumps it was kinda cool to look over and see her deploy and get line stretch looking over at me. You don't see that too often in free fall.

Sure enought I had not competed my debrief for literally five minutes, one of the staff came up to me and asked me to do a recurrency jump. My ink was not even dry so off I went. My jump with my student went well and he did ok when we were done. It was fun. As an unexpected bonus, I even got paid to skydive for once after all this time doing that jump. Hows about that one, cool right?