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Skydive Arizona: 2011 Holiday Boogie

Jeremy Olexa — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:13:18 +0000

(I realize that I go on 7-8 skydiving “trips” per year and I often don’t write about them. It may be fun to read about the special events later, so I’m going to try my best to publicly write about my adventures. For an aggregation of random skydiving blogs, check out planetskydive.net)

A few weeks ago, I returned from a 12 day skydiving trip to Skydive Arizona. The highlights of this trip were 2011 Holiday Boogie, freefly load organizers, an hour of tunnel time, getting food poisoning, and a CRW Bigway camp. All while meeting new and old friends. This was my first far-away skydiving trip that I went on by myself, it takes abit to figure out who to jump with but just introducing yourself to the load organizers helps with that. Soon, they are seeking you out to jump because it is their job to encourage you to spend money

So, a great success overall. I made 53 skydives in 10 days (minus 2 days for the food poisoning incident) and had a great time. There are pictures of the CRW camp, here. A couple of my favorites are these…

And of course, my cutaway…

Wisconsin State Canopy Formation Record

Jeremy Olexa — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 02:50:23 +0000

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)

600 skydives!

Jeremy Olexa — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 05:05:54 +0000

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!

New Project: http://planetskydive.net

Jeremy Olexa — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 05:03:19 +0000

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)

Purty Canopy

Jeremy Olexa — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 15:34:18 +0000

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

Jeremy coming in to land

D-license

Jeremy Olexa — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 16:04:28 +0000

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.

200 skydives in ’08 so far

Jeremy Olexa — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 04:06:40 +0000

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.

500 skydives!!!

Jeremy Olexa — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 02:56:36 +0000

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…

Remembering Sept 11.

Jeremy Olexa — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 16:18:46 +0000

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.

Learning to be a video flyer

Jeremy Olexa — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:13:00 +0000

I spent the majority of last weekend skydiving with a video camera strapped to my head. This is not the first time but it was the first time trying to film a tandem skydive. It actually went really well. I kept the pair in frame the entire time, I got the entire exit including the plane leaving, and I also was able to flip on my back and film the deployment. Some things that I need to work on include conserving altitude, staying closer to the tandem pair (there was quite abit horizontal separation at first), and being able to fall slower. I need a baggier suit, which I am working on this week.

The guy that I videoed didn’t want to pay for a video, so I utilized it as practice time. My skills are no where near paying customer quality. Afterwards, we were watching that video and I was getting tips from the local experienced skydivers and the tandem passenger was watching as well. He liked it and wanted to “support my cause” and offered to buy it. I didn’t charge him full price but he even threw in a tip above what I asked him. Very cool.

Overall, it was a good learning experience. I think I will like flying video and hopefully I can get even better at it soon.