Jeremy's Weblog

Over the past weekend, I was at Sky Knights skydiving drop zone near Milwaukee, WI. The main event was the canopy relative work (CRW) state record attempts. I had only participated in approximately 25 CRW jumps before this, but I was able to add another 13 jumps this weekend. The previous state record for CRW in Wisconsin was 14 and this year we completed a 25 way diamond on our second attempt to set the new record. I was able to jump with eight CRW world record holders which was awesome and really helped me improve.

25way CRW formation

I am in the third row from the bottom on the left side. (Photo Credit goes to: Eric Bernetzke)

About a month ago, I hit my 600th skydive. It wasn’t anything special per se as the weather was quite sub-optimal that day. Just a solo from ~3000 ft  However, it is a milestone that should not go unmentioned. This puts me at about 80 jumps for the calendar year and it is below my previous year numbers. (I blame the overall weather this year.) Hopefully I can pick it up abit towards the latter half of the year.

Here we go to 700!

I’ve completed my new project, finally. I am proudly releasing http://planetskydive.net to the world. Planet Skydive is simply a one stop for people to read skydiving blog posts.

Have you ever wanted to blog about skydiving but thought it was pointless because no one would read it? Well, now you have an audience.

I wanted to have a place that I could subscribe to that would aggregate all the skydiving posts that people wanted to contribute. Anyone can contribute, the only thing that you cannot do is advertise products for sale. This is not a classified page, for that you can use dropzone.com

If you would like to be added to this site, send an email to “jeremy at jolexa.net” with your blog address, point of contact email address, province/state & country if you want a flag by your posts. Then you can make a post and it will show up here. This index is updated hourly, so it is not instant.

Some post ideas:

• Your journey at your first bigway camp
• Some achievement (being selected for a world record attempt, first 4-stack CReW, first otter jump, whatever)
• Objective review of a new dropzone
• Your dog’s first skydive
• Your goal for becoming USPA dictator, I mean, what you are doing on the USPA BOD and why we should care.

If you don’t have a blog yet and want one. I would highly recommend either wordpress or blogger. (both free)

Thanks to Paul, I now have a picture of me under my canopy…Cool!

Jeremy coming in to land

As I previously wrote about, I just received my D-license yesterday. The D-license is awarded to applicants from the USPA who have achieved 500 skydives and a couple of other requirements. Anyway, my license number is D-29580. That means that I am the 29,580th person to receive my D license. To put that in contrast, the city of Minneapolis has 372,833 people alone. If you take all the people that have received a D-license, there is less than 10% of the population of a major city, and not even the largest major city. Now, it feels like I am in a small community even more. Imagine, walking around in Minneapolis and being able to talk to 1/10 people about skydiving, that would be pretty neat. Now spread those 29,000 across the US and imagine trying to converse in a sane manor with anyone about the sport of skydiving..

Of course, there is (maybe) more people in the US that skydive that don’t have 500 jumps yet or they don’t get their D-license period. However, if there is one license to get, it would be the D because that is the highest one that you can…so, I don’t know how many people there are that skydive in the US.

Another tidbit: According to here at the time of this writing, the US population is ~305,378,753. I am 0.0096863% of the population. Interesting.

In response to my last post, I just hit another milestone today..that is 200 jumps in a calendar year. I now have 200 skydives in ’08.

Let me look at my log books and break it down for comparison:

• 2008: (so far) 200 skydives
• 2007: 199 skydives
• 2006: 85 skydives
• 2004: 19 skydives (not including static-line, training jumps)

It is interesting to note that I was close to 200 last year, but I have had a much better year this year while being around home more often and spending more time with my girlfriend. I think I have struck a very good balance this year and I am very happy about that (not to say that it can’t be improved somehow?).

200 is an arbitrary number and has no real meaning, just a round number that is nice to see.

Woa woa. I just did my 500th skydive on Saturday the 20th. 9/20/08. All I have to say is “w00t”!

This particular skydive was very fun. Lynn, Jamie & Marty were on my 500th. It also happened to be Jamie’s 800th. Very good timing =) Basically a screw off dive, built a round then we all dropped a knee and spun until we couldn’t hold on to eachother. We were then flung around the sky and we sorta rebuilt before breakoff. Me and Marty did some proximity flying under canopy and were about 4 feet away from a 2stack dock. God I love this shit…

I know, cliche as this post may be…I remember all too well where I was on Sept 11th. US History class in 9th grade. Sitting in the desks watching CNN.

I think this is real touching and a very good job by Team Fastrax, a skydiving team of really experienced canopy pilots. Original post can be seen here on the PD blog. They are jumping at ground zero with 7 US flags of various sizes trailing thier canopies. The plan was to drop all the flags at the same time at approximately 10:30am ET, the time when Twin Tower two fell.

The team views this jump as a very special honor and a way to say thank you to the members of all the fire fighters, law enforcement, and military personnel, who have served to protect the freedom that we all enjoy.
Below is the list of jumpers and sized flags they will be jumping during this special event.

Travis Donley – 7800sqft
Stuart Schoenfeld – 3700sqft
Niklas Hemlin – 2000sqft
David Hart – 1100sqft
Dan Pangeti – 500sqft
David French – 500sqft
Robin Heider – 275sqft

Good job guys, times like this that make me proud to be associated with skydiving.