Jan 17th 2009
It all began with a common desire to do something different. We know we all do things differently but this was something totally different. We all had been talking about this for a long time, but never gave it a serious thought. It started as a inconspicuous thread on BBC and BikeZone after Vinay and others posted about doing dirt jumps at a place where they had been previous week. Modi and Ravi had been to a place off Sarjapur road 2 weeks prior and after a few posts by Ravi, Vinay and Modi the thread went haywire, there were people pouring in by the minute saying they wanted to do it. And by the end of the day, there were about 12 people who signed up and about 5/6 more who were ready but being a saturday just couldn’t make it.
Start Point
As Always we start…
Since there were so many people pouring in from different parts of town, it was decided to assemble at 6:30 am at the Sarjapura-ORR junction. Of course, since IST is eminently stretchable, we finally ended up leaving the junction at around 7am. Modi, Nelly and Sharath started off from jayanagar and were joined by sreenandan at Jayadeva hospital. Sharath accompanied the trio in his car till ORR junction and parked his car at Ravi’s house. Joy and suresh had come in their car as well and parked their car near koramangala and joined everyone at ORR juntion. We headed towards Ravi house and waited for pradeep to come and sharath to fix his bike.
Finally after lot of confusion and lot of calls between the riders and the support (Pradeep and Vasu) we set out giving directions to the support to join us later. We decided to first explore a lake near Chandapura, in the hope that the lake-bed would be dry and we’d have access to some good quality dirt for building the ramp. The lake was about 7-8kms from Ravi’s house, we passed through wooded areas near ravi’s house and reached a road that led us straight to the lake.
In-between we stopped by a small village and finished our breakfast. You people know how riders eat their breakfast, poor guy at the hotel, he was left with nothing after about 15mins of our arrival.
Pradeep and Vasu were travelling all over town, by mistake they were off to chandapura and we had to give then the GPS location for them to locate us. Having GPS enabled mobiles / GPS devices does help a lot. Its so much more simpler to locate a place than to tweak your brain to remember or give directions to people.
The Lake
The lake bed had turned into a…
However, we found an alternative thanks to the embankment, which was about 15 feet high, we managed to do a few jumps off from the top to the road below, not 15 feet though :).
That was fun, everyone tried their bit but we decided to move on to explore the other location which Modi and Ravi had identified about 2 weeks ago. Click here and here for the links to earlier rides.
The Dirt Jump!
Finally we found…
We did several more kilometers of mixed tarmac and off-road to finally hit the farmland trail that Ravi and Modi had been talking about. It was an interesting setup – three small jumps already in one straight line (or as near straight as possible..). It seemed quite well done right from the word go. This set-up was no nicely done that, Nelly managed a huge 6-8 foot jump without any modifications to the second jump! However, we decided to modify the second jump to get some more height in the jumps before everybody started jumping.
Preparing the Ramp
Adding water from the…
First we dug out a bit of the sides of the jump, and then added a small lip to the jump to give a good takeoff point for the riders. Ravi had carried a showel in his cavernous backpack, and it came in handy during this ramp building phase. After adding a bit of water (refer to Nelly’s pic pranks :p) and letting it dry a bit, we started on the Jumps!
The Support
They were our…
When we were at Ravi’s house, Pradeep called saying he was at ORR junction and being on his motorbike we thought he could catch up with us easily. Gave him the directions to the place where we were going and asked him to join us there. But unfortunately as you know, he went all around town and finally met us half way between the lake and the dirt jump. He was along with Vasu, who rode for about 5-6kms despite his injured knee. These guys were really helpful bought us water, sandwiches, juice. Finally Abhi also joined us to click photos. He’s clicked some amazing pics, do check them out here
The First Jump (and Crash!)
Third guy from…
By far, the first jump sequence was the best!
It was initiated by the Deadly Trio of Nelly, Ravi, and Dev. We set up our cameras about 10 feet from the second ramp, everyone gave way for the Trio. Vinay, Sharath, Naveen and Sukhdev were standing at the second jump’s edge and for everyone the excitement was building up.
First came Nelly wow! managed about 5-6feet, next ravi jumped, missed the footing and sat on his seat with his legs wide open :) and then came the third, he lost control on the first jump, somehow managed to regain control, and after the second jump……..he crashed just in front of the camera…wow! that was a sight to watch.
Everyone burst out laughing! and thankfully our man was not hurt, but just had some bruises on his arms and legs. And guys, please please do where helmets when you are riding. When you are trying to such things it is all the more important to be wearing one.
He crashed and fell to his right and it could have been worse if he had fallen to the left. phew! that was close!
Jumps! Jumps! and only Jumps!
Jump as high as…
Then there was no stopping us, only the first jump was a little scary. After that, all we did was jump, jump, jump, go back to the start point and jump,jump,jump again :).
Check out the entire set of pics here and youtube playlist here
End of an awesome day :)
~ Dirt Jumping Team :)
PS: Thanks to Rohan with setting up this wonderful Wiki for the biking community. He has dedicated tons of his time in maintaining this wiki and its time for everyone out their to start contributing their bit to make this even better.