Fast

If I limit myself to your list of dropzones I would suggest SevenHills or Wissota. Both are good dropzones operating Cessna 182s. If you end up with a group bigger than you expect, or the date you want to go they can't accommodate you, check us out at Sky Knights. We operate a larger plane and are just a bigger operation and can handle a bit more business. Hope you get your group together and make it out to one of our places this year! ~D Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me. Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka

Dave, what kind of bandwidth are you talking about and what kind of storage. Have you considered amazon or other similar cheaper alternatives? ~D Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me. Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka

Awe, why you have to shoot him down. What if he really likes mirage and wants to support them anyways. I don't, I'm not a fan of their rigs, but I really like PD and vector and have patches from both companies and stickers on a lot of my stuff. btw, if you're worried about Mirage caring, just call and ask them, but I doubt they will. ~D Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me. Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka

I agree with flexvision. We use mostly those as well. It's all I will use with my AFF students. (I don't do tandems) I can't stand them for personal use though, much prefer the flex-z cause they are more comfortable, but they don't work for students cause the band doesn't stay tight unless you tie a knot in it. ~D Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me. Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka

I think this goes w/o saying, but maybe not. Don't wear ANY rings while you are skydiving. Not even a wedding ring. The risk of getting your finger stuck somewhere on the ring and then having your whole body hanging from that finger (i.e. having your finger ripped off or badly broken) is up there. ~D Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me. Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka

One of the things that we have started to do at my DZ is help jumpers who are really interested get to the A license. We are trying to make this affordable. In the end, the cost is still there, but we are in an area where 5 months out of the year there isn't a whole lot of jumping. So what we have done is offer free finacing to students who have made at least an AFF Level 1 and are sure that they want to continue in the sport. it lets them spread the cost out over winter when there isn't much to do as well as work forward in the program faster so they don't sturggle to remember things. I have 3-4 people on my DZ right now that would not be skydivers if it wasn't for this program. They come out and jump as much as they want working towards their A license. We have a program that is similar to SDCs AFP. (most of the DZs around SDC do) and we end up with a person with 25 jumps their first license and they can participate in a 4-way. We also do everything we can to help them find used gear (not new gear) and in fact steer them away from anything new. It's made a BIG difference for us. They get to come out and make the jumps and get to the part of the sport where they are participating with others and they aren't taking 6-months and 3 recurrency jumps to do it. ~D Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me. Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka

That dudes pin got pulled on exit. If I was the video guy I would have: Gotten the FUCK out from above that formation. I am going to guess he didn't notice it and honestly, PAY ATTENTION VIDEO PEOPLE! Both of them could have been killed. He should have abandoned the skydive and went in with a middle finger up followed by pull sign. "You're fucked, pull" As one of the other RW jumpers if I noticed it, same thing, "You're fucked, pull" At the very least, get the hell away from the guy cause he is having a really bad day, (considering having to use his reserve, and how hard it's going to be to find that bag lock from altitude) he doesn't need me to make it worse! He sped up after he had the bag lock deployed and was bouncing off people... Crazy video! ~D Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me. Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka

Glad you got it sorted out now don't get hurt!.

That seems really bizzare, are you stowing them as the manufacturer reccomends? Yes, I stow them as described in the pdf I linked to earlier in this thread. With break fires I mean that the toggle has come lose from the eye in the line, not completely loose. The bottom pin has still retained a part of the line so the spinning has not been that bad. Which is exactly the point of the tru-lock system. I have 2000+ jumps on tru-lock toggles and the worst that I have experienced is a "top of toggle" release. The majority of the brake line remained stowed with the pin at the bottom and it kept the resulting spinning from being out of hand and causing a malfunction. I have conversly had a brake fire on a non-trulock system which resulting in a much more violent spin (and this was a much more docile canopy) than with the tru-lock protection. It didn't result in a malfunction either cause, step one of "spinning but no line twists" for me is checking the brakes! ~D Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me. Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka

Not required - though highly recommended. There is an option in the settings of the device that will allow you to turn the "Power On with LCD" option off. this will require you to turn the device on and off with the power button under the LCD but it also prevents it from going off when you close the LCD. i don't have my camera in front of me to tell you specifically where it in the menu system. RTFM ~D Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me. Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka

I am a HUGE fan of the RWS/UPT Truelock toggles. ~D Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me. Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka

Wanted to mention that we aren't taking pre-orders anymore for t-shirts as we have had to order them now to make sure they are ready for the week of the boogie! Pre-registration is still open and includes access to the CRW organizers and: Spaghetti Dinner Friday Night (+ free beer) Subs for lunch on Saturday A Wisconsin Cookout BBQ with burgers, dogs and the like on Saturday night (+ free beer) and pizza for lunch on Sunday for those who stick around. You really are getting a lot for the cost of this boogie fee! C-ya all very soon! ~D Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me. Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka

I have always wanted to run a few of these, just afraid of bumping up against the shutter life too much on my XSi. ~D Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me. Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka

I am going to go out on a limb and guess that the "risks" her mom are worried about don't really have anything to do with the skydiving part of things. Maybe, but come on, 20 year old girl + dropzone, what could possibly go wrong? Tandems are just as dangerous as solo skydives in my opinion, they have all the same risks so...? That said, my parents went so far as to tell me I had to move out of their relatively low rent home or quit skydiving. I packed my shit up and moved out and it was the best possible decision I could have made. Since then I have been 99% dependant only on myself and feel pretty damn good about it. I'm also really bad with "do this or else" stuff, tends to push me to "doing this" to see what "or else" really is. So maybe I'm not a great person to take advice from. ~D Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me. Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka

My post was more directed at the people who would rather make up an excuse as to why they weren't at the DZ. Rather than just admit they didn't feel like going to jump. Those people don't last long. I agree, too much of something can be a quick path to burnout, but that wasn't really the point I was trying to get at as much as, if you're sitting there coming up with reasons you could do something else, then you aren't going to last long. Even if you go out to the dz now and then and maybe make one or two jumps. There are also a whole lot of people who show up at the dropzone looking for something other than skydiving, and when they find it, they leave too. ~D Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me. Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka

My dropzone is a club operation, but, this is the reason we keep most of the news/information on a whole seperate site. Any customer can find it if they go looking, but the average customer only sees our commercial facing website. That said, it's important to keep things current all around! I think that any dropzone that has the latest news post from even the very begining of the year, isn't working hard enough! ~D Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me. Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka

There are a few people at my DZ who don't feel that you're going to stick around till you have made it past 7 years. I think i read somewhere that most people drop off at that point and only the truly dedicated keep going. Depends what you are looking for in your life though. We have a whole handfull of people at my DZ who are going strong 7, 10, 20 years plus. We also have a lot of people who have gotten a few hundred jumps and come and go. If someone from the DZ asks you "Why aren't you out jumping today?" and your mind goes first to the ten different reasons why you shouldn't be there, and you don't actually go, you're not hooked. For the most part, my "life" goes on hold saturdays and sundays. I deal with as much of that shit as I can during the week and over the winter. Here and there I miss a day, but not that often! Even with a broken neck (from jumping) I still was at the DZ every weekend once I was able to like, move about. ~D Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me. Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka

Would weekdays be a better time to jump? Probably your best bet actually. ~D Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me. Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka

The first revision of them didn't work so great, but they came out with a MOD for that version and revised them quite a bit since the first rigs were made with them. I have a rig with the first version and have not yet modded it (extra magnets) and my dz has rigs witht he newere version which I like much better. ~D Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me. Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka

Yeah no mispellings, which is why I as a web developer have an actual trained editor read everything. Makes a big difference. I think the most important thing is presenting the information in a reasonable manner. Get everything that you might need to tell your customers out there so when you are talking to them on the phone you can easily refer them to your site. Helps keep the customer service people on the phone for a shorter time. Our site isn't perfect, but it's very feature rich and paints the whole picture of our dropzone. I also custom coded a bunch of stuff so our customers can buy gift certificates right online and we post all our student videos online. I think that it's also important to have a site that is browser and platform neutral so that major functions of the site work for any customer that might happen upon your page. ~D Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me. Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka

Nice list! I wanted to add that we now have the preliminary T-Shirt Design for this event posted. We are doing the shirts as pre-order only. (Due July 29th to be sure we have them at the time of the boogie) So If you want to have one, pop on over to our site to pre-order or at the very least, contact us jump@skydivemilwaukee.com so we can include you in the count. See everyone soon! ~D Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me. Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka

With your experience level (and anyone who is just starting out) don't just watch people on the dropzone do stuff and figure, "oh, ok I can go do that too!" cause you are most likely wrong. I am sure you have seen guys swoop in with some kind of speed inducing manuver too, doesn't mean it's a good idea to just go out and try it. My students are warned that if they just go try something they read about or saw someone else do or think they are capable of, they will get to repeat the jump. Particularily on level 3, cause I have ha da few people think that it was a good idea to go do turns, even though that isn't the objective of the jump. ~D Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me. Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka

There are some experts on here regarding larger guys, but my understanding is that at 275 you're going to have a hard time finding traditional sport gear that works for you (legally) Tandem Weight Limit is 500 pounds including the tandem rig, any other gear, passenger and instructor. (Just fyi, some people have been known to be willing to take the heavy guys cause they are lower weight skilled/strong instructors.) ~D Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me. Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka

Is this not the purpose of the 180 turn follwed by 90 turn that is part of the A license card. To teach the maximum performance of a canopy to new students and the concept that they can induce problems? Anytime someone does this I go over this exact thing happening, and that it is easier to make it happen when in more brakes combined with any kind of radical turn. Thoughts? ~D Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me. Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka

Are you responding to me? Or just cause i was last in the thread? I'm well aware of all this information and uh, don't call my airport pipsqueak! ~D Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me. Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka