(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.

Over the past weekend, I was at Sky Knights skydiving drop zone near Milwaukee, WI. The main event was the [canopy relative work (CRW)][3] 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.

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][1]. (I blame the overall weather this year.) Hopefully I can pick it up abit towards the latter half of the year.

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.

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.

In response to my [last post][1], 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.

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.

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][1] on the PD blog. They are jumping at ground zero with 7 US flags of various sizes trailing thier canopies.

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.

For those of you that don’t know, CouchFreaks is a skydiving boogie (party) held every year over Labor Day weekend in Fort Dodge, Iowa. They bring in Skydive Arizona’s Turbine Fleet of aircraft which is great lift capacity. Honestly, they could use one more turbine to solve the manifest delays but that would also create more problems. Some personal highlights: NPSL Meet 4. Our team, Wissota Wild, finished in 2nd place for this meet and 2nd place overall.

This past weekend, we had a CRW camp at [Skydive Wissota][1]. Hopefully I can get some pictures soon and update this post but I am pretty excited about CRW and will be going to a CRW boogie down near Milwaukee, WI in August. [1]: http://skydivewissota.org/