shall555

It's better than...than... boiled bacon ! Felt so good to be back in the sky.

New Mexico sure looks pretty from 5 grand ! shall

Images are back up now. Yes, Bill Tharp was a friend of mine. I helped him get a gig as the mechanic for Caidin's Ju-52 (the behemoth in the pictures).

Tom Harvey jumped with his dog zipped into his jumpsuit. The chihuahua's name was "Butch."

I was going through some old photos recently and unearthed my skydiving albums from the "Steam Age." I thought some folks might be interested in seeing them. I put them on my web site, with some captions here: Skydiving in North Florida I'm currently fighting the impulse to get back into the sport a bit, but the last thing I need is another hobby that requires $3K worth "stuff" , again ! Not sure if all of these folks are still jumping. I've seen the occasional post about Maddog Maguire and I'm glad to see he's still active. He was one of the greatest folks I've had the opportunity to know. I started at Sunrise Parachute Center, Amelia Island, Florida (Fernandina Beach). The DZO was Bill Smith, an amazing guy. He had done test jumping for NASA on some of the original ram-air parachute designs and had over 4000 jumps at the time. He was an amazing teacher. He could teach skydiving techniques with just the right mix of energy, information and still communicate the safety message. He insisted that the student rigs all have AADs on the reserves ( this in 1976 ). The student freefall rigs also had KAP-10 (Eastern European) AADs on the mains. We jumped out of a rompin' stompin' brand new Cessna 185: N224CH. The noisy blast of this thing taking off soon became an alert to the island residents to step outside if they wanted to watch those crazy skydivers. The folks you see in the photos at the link were some of the best friends I ever had. Despite the fact that I was *the* dropzone turkey... TUR-KEE... they invited me on jumps and usually managed to suppress laughter as I flailed about. At any rate, check out the antique gear and marvel at the state of skydiving 25-30 years ago. Cheers, shall