nws01

Boston Providence...

Out in the west Texas side of El Paso, I fell in love with a Mexican girl.

Congrats Michele! I can not think of another person who will represent our sport as you can. Your posts on here have been very very well thought out and educational. Good luck with the taping and remember to

Velocity, Vengeance, Sabre, Spectre, etc.

I disagree. I have a Tony RW suit and I have a very good sit with a very good fall rate. I tried with shorts and running pants before and I had a hard time getting comfortable in my position. Something about my RW suit just places me in easy freefly positions. Maybe it is because I have a lot of jumps with it and I am comfortable with it. Skydiving is a mental sport anyways.

That is one hell of an idea. You can practice your roll overs, etc. You can use the paddle to help with balancing. Use a nice Cobalt for the two staged opening and you are talking a hot new wave. Screw skyboards. Kayaks are the way to go. Too bad I sold my Dagger!

I jump a Spectre loaded at 1.5. I love the canopy. I had 50 jumps on a used Sabre loaded at 1.2 before I bought it. I broke my back and was tired of the painful Sabre openings. The Spectre opens nice and soft and on heading. At this wing loading I feel very safe and stable in all conditions. I will keep this canopy even when I downsize to something smaller. I doubt I will down size for quite a few more jumps because I enjoy it so much.

Check with Skydive Delmarva...http://www.parachutesarefun.com/

I have never tried crack. With my mind I do not need it. Believe me.

This is strange but it is about an author. I had a dream last night that Dove was coming to Boston and needed a place to stay. I got all excited and had her stay at my place. For some reason I put up a tent in my house for her to sleep in. I asked her if she wanted to go out to get something to eat and she told me she had a date with J.D. Salinger. He came to the house and picked her up. I was jealous but I was happy thatI met J.D. I am messed in the head I know.

Hang in there Drew. Enjoy the drugs! Heal quick and get back in the air!

I asked HH on his Greetings from Africa thread if he would bring us two when he comes to the states. He is obviously not going to have us over to his house for the party. Maybe the twins don't like company. I don't know. I think he and Bill Booth had some Giraffe steaks though. I would settle for Hienna steaks at this point.

It will not be on a Saturday. It will be on a weekeday. Friday, October 18th. Lummy will pull up the Let's Roll the Odometer Over thread and we will have fun again!

I use to whitewater kayak in the Carolinas when I lived in Atlanta. I have not done it in awhile though. I love rushing down a rocky river. Not as much as skydiving though!

My graduation jump was bad. I flared about 15 feet too high and stalled the canopy. I fell straight down and landed on my butt breaking 3 vertebrea in my lower back. That hurt. My tailbone hurt like hell too. Then there was the power line landing. I had to land off and I picked what I though was an acceptable landing area. I set up for final, saw my friends coming in a truck to pick me up, and I was going to land right beside a road in a ltlttle grassy area. About 25 feet off the ground I realized the place I was landing was actually power lines beside the road. I flared my canopy and tried to turn it and ended up standing on the power line. It was windy and my canopy stayed inflated. I hopped off the powerline and flared to a nice stand up landing. My friends in the truck looked at me with bug eyes and asked me how and the hell I did it and survived. I told them I had no idea but I wasn't going to try it again. Then there was the landing at Skydive Orange. I was new to the dz and met someone who jumped there. We were going to be the last out and needed to pull a little high. We completed a 2 way sit. At about 6K his visor on his Z1 opened. He kept trying to close it but could not so we tracked away from each other and opened around 4k. We were way off from the dz. He landed off. I said to myself, "self, you can make it." The winds were approx. 25 to 30 mph and I lifted my legs and headed toward the dz. As I get closer I realized I would not be able to turn into the wind to land. If I was going to make it it would have to be a downwinder. Instaed of finding an out at the last minute I said to myself, "self...downwinder! I was flying through the sky like a bat out of hell downwind with 30 mph winds on a canopy loaded at 1.5. I swooped about the entire landing area and plf'd it. I got my canopy together and everyone at the hanger was looking at me. Some students there that were waiting to do tandems said "your awesome man!" The DZO and the S@TA just stared at me. I went in and put my gear down. Went and got a soda and sat down with the group. They were all staring at me and not saying anything. I said "I wanted to make it to the dz so I did a down winder." Everyone busted out laughing and said that I was lucky I did not kill myself. I agreed it was a stupid thing to do. All of my landings have something wrong with them. Oh well, I will perfect them sooner or later!

~Talk about dz politics~ I will not name the dz or the names of the people involved. But this is what I experienced at a dz while my one year of jumping there. It is a long story but funny as hell. A husband and wife owned the dz. Had a nice indoor packing / manifest, leased caravan and they had a nice small dz to call their own. They did not have jobs out side of the dz and got in major debt. Somebody came to close the dz down but one of the instructores there purchased the dz and kept it open. The previous owner was also an instructor there and thought that he still owned the place and the other instructor just bailed him out. The other instructor had more business sense and knew that the other guy would run it into the ground again so he told him that it was now his dz. He owned all the rigs and things anyways. The person they leased the caravan to was friends with the previous owner and began charging the new owner a lot more for the planes. They had a disagreement and they stopped leasing the caravan. Because of all this turmoil a lot of the experienced jumpers started going to other dropzones to stay away from it. The new owner leased a 182 and kept the dropzone open but had to build it up again. Because the new owner had another job full time and did not have the time to run the dz he "gave" the dz to another employee at the dz. The other employee started running the dz and was still going through bullshit with the first owner. The first owner wired the electricity from another building at the airport and did not have a county certified sewer system. The first owner called the county and reported all of this. The county came out and turned off the electricity and the sewer and told them that they would have to have a site plan, etc to have a business there. ($10,000+) The first owner called the FAA and told them that the 182 they were using did not have a "acceptable" jump door or step on the plane. The owner of the plane took the step and the door off. It was cold jumping with no door! The first owner tried to open another dropzone at the same airport but the airport and county would not allow it. So they closed the building down and to this day they have to set up a temporary DZ at the airport FBO. I could tell you more but would involve affairs, back stabbing, etc. and I do not want to get into it.

For some reason Westborough, Mass has some severe storms. A couple of weeks ago we had a heller storm. The lighting and thunder was so loud and close that it shook the building. My hotel got hit and it knocked out the fire alarm and the elevator. The office building across the street got hit and caught on fire. there was so much smoke that you could not see anything. I took some pictures but for some reason I can not download them. We have some people from India staying here. During the storm they walk through the lobby with their swimsuits on with their kids. "Where are you going?" I asked. "We are going swimming." they said. I told them the pool was closed because of the storm. They looked at me weird. A few minutes later their husbands came to the desk. In a strong Indian accent they said "Why will you not let our wives and kids swim in the pool?" I explain to him that "in case he did not know" the loud noises he was hearing was thunder and lightining set the building across the street on fire. He said that his wife and kids wanted to swim. I told him I would not allow it. Is their some religious belief in India that swimming during a thunderstorm is good? I still do not get that conversation.

Your just jealous because I stopped stalking you TG. Skymama ROCKS!

I looked at this again this morning and it was just as nice as it was yesterday. I am going to make this picture my morning ritual. Looking at it is all. No touching myself or anything.

Good point Dave. I think we all have enough politics at work and some of us at the dz's. "Can't we all just get along?"

1. You have double the posts of the second highest poster and everyone on the site loves to pick on you for fun. 2. HH send you a private message about scratching a sleeping lions balls with a hot fork. 3. You change your screen name because everyone including yourself got tired of the senseless postings you had before. 4. When the site goes on a little fritz you fall to the ground shaking in convulsions until it comes back up. 5. When HH takes the site down you find a little hole to get into the forums and you post although it takes you 20 minutes to transmit it. 6. People wish you would post whore more often because you have started instant message whoring them, however, it appears like your posts have decreased on the forums. 7. You start getting in trouble because you have missed all of your deadlines and have not gotten anything done but you could write a detailed report on the posts for the whole week and not leave anything out. 8. You are late for work on Thursdays because you stayed up late drinking and chatting in the pub. 9. You start a thread about post whoring. 10. You have absolutely no idea what post whoring is. Please add to the list...

The Dropzone and the people involved will remain nameless. Although a couple of people on here will no what I am talking about. It was a pretty cloudy day in Florida and we decided to go up and try to find some holes. On the way up we noticed that the clouds were from 1500 feet to about 6,000 feet. The pilot of the Cessna had a GPS device and told us when to open the door. I looked out the door and all I saw were clouds. GO yells the pilot! We all look at each other in the plane. GO he yells again! We all look out the door and at each other. We see a little hole through the clouds so out we went. We built a formation and we decided to turn and track a little high due to the fact that we were in cloude. I tracked, deployed and was under canopy by 4,000ft. I could not see anything because I was in a cloud so I did not want to make any drastic turns. It was a big airport so I figured if I kept a straight postion I would be safe and not run into anyone under a canopy. I noticed that these clouds had like little paths through them. I tried to take a path out of the cloud but had no luck. i kept going into other paths. It was pretty cool. This was my 35th jump and I took off my helmet and goggles and I was flying in the clouds! At about 1500 feet I saw the ground through the clouds. Next thing I knew I was out of the cloud. I could not see the airport. All that was under me was flooded fields and trees. The only dry space was surrounded by power lines. I did a 360 and saw what looked like the airport a long way away. The only place I could land was on the concrete road. I did not see any cars coming so I set up for final and had a nice butt landing on wet concrete. (ouch!) I was there approximately 15 minutes when the DZO drove up. "How did you get way over here and why did you jump out?" he asked. Only having 30 jumps I replied, "The pilot told us to go!" We drove back to the dz and I was about 4 mile from the airport. I was lucky because if I would have jumped out on the other side of the airport I would have landed in a large lake in Florida that is known to have a lot of alligators in it. Lessons learned: 1. Do not jump out unless you can see the ground and can make out what is down there. (Like the landing area). 2. You make the decision on whether or not you are jumping and do not listen to pilots with their GPS's. 3. If you are open in a cloud do spirals to get out of it. If you remain in a straight line and follow the tunnels you may put yourself flying downwind in high winds after a long track which may end up putting you farther from the airport than you may want.

Phree you average 6.9 posts per day and I average 1.2 posts per day. You are a bigger post whore than I am!

I have some "lotion" I can put on your new piercing Andrea to make sure it doesn't get infected. I need your assistance creating it first though. TG, there is an old song that the group Cinderella used to sing...."Don't know what you got, 'til it's gone." Lummy...I will be snorkeling in the water keeping an eye on you.

Ok. TG and I have severed our ties so now I am going to begin stalking SkyMama. She's mine, all mine, mine,mine, mine, mine!