25way CRW formation

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

Here we go to 700!

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)

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Some personal highlights:

• NPSL Meet 4. Our team, Wissota Wild, finished in 2nd place for this meet and 2nd place overall. Whoever won this meet was going to win the overall standings. We had one bad round and it cost us. Congrats Team JETT
• PD was onsite and I got to demo 2 different canopies for 71% of my total jumps, that is 10 jumps on demos and 4 on my own canopy. Two fold, a) I didn’t put wear on my own canopy, b) The Katana is a very fun canopy, I wanna get one!
• AWESOME jumps, this year I made a point to make some off the wall jumps, including something called a “Tube Jump” and a “Magic Carpet” – The tube was insanely fun. 3×3, 9 person, that we rolled out of the back of the SkyVan.The tube spun forward about 3 times, backward about 1.5, stalled out, and then silo’d, estimated speeds of 150-160+ mph. It lasted until about 8000 feet until Marty let go of it. Then it broke up and people were scattered all over because we were going so fast.
• My first Caravan jump, kinda neat but not a plane to write home about.
• Oh yea, free beer 24x7

Good times had by all.