SkymonkeyONE

SkyCAT Equipment sells it as well (910) 875-7231

That was a really good post! Where you are wrong though, in some parents cases, is that there are a lot of over-protective/sheltering parents out there who don't let their kids ride bicycles without helmets and who don't let them do snowboard unsupervised. In my opinion those are the only people who could possibly have a problem with allowing their 16 year-old to do a tandem or sit through a FJC. If you can drive a car, then you can definitely skydive. Chuck

I don't know why USPA would want to retire the awards. Regardless of how few people apply for them, the system is already in place and what paperwork and patches are needed are bought and paid for by the recipient. Doesn't make sense to ditch it. Chuck

Raeford Parachute Center, NC www.jumpraeford.com (910) 904-0000 We do 16 year-old AFF and tandems too with notarized parental consent. Actually, the dropzone has been training the USPA minimum age (16) since it was opened over 30 years ago. Chuck Blue D-12501 AFF/SL/TM-I, BMCI, PRO

You clearly know neither Marcus nor Sonic. Chill out, the ads are parodies.

At Raeford I personally get at least ten per year who have never once been on an aircraft. I think it's incredibly ballsy to do that and every one of those people always have a blast. Chuck

Yeah, don't fight it, bro. It works fine for Punisher and Sonic.

See you on the 12th.

200 jumps is not a lot of jumps to put on a canopy. What's the rush with swapping? Chuck

Katie just bought my tickets for me. I arrive on the 12th at 5:40 pm and fly home on the afternoon of the 18th. See you chimps there.

I am staying with Justin Thornton. Yall have fun wasting your cash at the hotel.

I can actually get a canopy to pack most-compact by flop packing it.

If you intend to continue skydiving and not "tourist out" on the sport, then yes, you should absolutely find something else to do and/or get better at. When it stops being very fun, then you are just wasting your money and time (assuming you are not making money skydiving). There is a lot of different things to do in skydiving, but for some reason the majority of people pigeonhole themselves into believing that they must only do one discipline. I have burned out on more than a few disciplines in the over-24-years I have been jumping. Burned out to the point that I was making well under 100 jumps a year some years and instead spending my time participating in other sports and activities until I really got the skydiving bug hard again when something new and exciting came along (skysurfing, then PRO demos, then AFF instruction, then swooping and wingsuiting). Do something different and have fun doing it. Chuck

I didn't miss your point at all. I am just telling you that what you propose; faking; would absolutely happen without video documentation. Also, most people who have gone three minutes simply would not give a shit about applying for such a number; I know I would not. Particularly not if there were any way to make sure the numbers were issued to each and every person who had done the feat, and in order. But hey, that's just me. Chuck Blue BMCI

If you are going to Colorado than I am definitely going to be there. There is no way we can go a year without setting the standard for these chimps. The party standard that is. Chuck

I don't consider that at all. What we do is make sure we track far enough away from each other prior to opening and then we keep a keen eye out for each other during our canopy descent. Just like any other night jump, we are marked fore and aft with chemlights and we wear a strobe, generally on top of our helmet. Vertical separation is generally also taken care of by different wingloading. More critical on night wingsuit flights is insuring that you don't get out so far that you can't make it back to the lighted/marked landing area. It's much better to get out short and have to fly in a circle over the top, knowing that you are going to have a 100% chance of landing where you want than to land in the middle of a barely-lit street criss-crossed with powerlines a half mile from the DZ.........Right, Blair???? Right, Kevin???? Chuck

Yours is but a baby ditch. I swooped every inch of it, popped out, carved 90 left and stopped past the fuel tanks Sunday when I dropped by Sunday afternoon. I stopped by the DZ on the way back from Deland on my Harley. One cold shower to relieve my massive sunburn, one hook turn, two beers, and I was back on the road. See you in October, fools! Chuck

That's not true, Matt. Loic has posted here.

That is exactly what I would recommend.

I will be 42 in under one month and I started skydiving when I was 17

He always owes beer to me.

Is that right? Skimmy won the meet? Was Joe really drunk or just hungover?

I do. I don't think anyone with under 1000 jumps (and thus automatically in the Standard class) has any business whatsoever wearing a bunch of weight. What do I consider a bunch of weight? Certainly 20 pounds is. Those of you who disagree are free to your "freedom of opinion" , but I will state several things unoquivically: 1) If you cannot regularly make the entrance gates and score clean, scoring rounds on 99.99% of your turns, then you are wasting your time up-weighting for extra speed and distance. The intent of the "Standard" IPC/USPA nationals/CPC is to get people accustomed to making gates and flying cleanly. It is not a place where young, non-professional competitors are supposed to be going balls-out, all or nothing, and trying to "be like the PD guys." 2) If you can't jump in a pool that is over-your-head deep and tread water for at least one minute with your competition load on then you are overloaded. I don't want to have to be the guy who rescues you out of the pond at The Ranch or The Farm if you pound in with a ton of lead on. In the Carolinas CPC league I try very hard to get people to jump their normal canopy at their normal, "regular" skydiving wingload. I would MUCH rather have my guys performing clean turns, make the gates, and have to kite out the back of the course than have them auger in after busting a 360 at 200 feet. You, seriously, don't need to be wearing anything you would not normally wear in order to compete at this level. Clean runs will determine who the top five competitors are in each region, not how far they went after they verticalled the gates. Now, as to the weight restriction for this meet, I can't help but think that it's going to keep some people away. To those people: I would seriously recommend making it to another professional-grade, open event (like The Ranch PSN). Competing anywhere at the open/pro level qualifies you, assuming you have the requisite amount of skydives, for the Open category at Nationals. Once you have competed in Open, then you are Pro. There were quite a few faces at Nationals in Open last year who I had never once seen at a PPPB/PST event. Some had competed at a RedBull meet or The Ranch, but there were plenty who were not PST guys. With the integration of the PST and several of the overseas leagues, I don't see how the PSI is not going to be able to let anyone who has already competed at that level from participating at any of those meets in the Open/Pro level. I guess if it is a competitors intent to start swooping competitively as their primary discipline in the PST (now PSI, the fourth naming of the league structure since 1999), then they are going to jump through whatever hoops they are faced with. If that means (Ian, J.P., Lew, etc...) that you are forced to show up at Nationals and not jump lead (assuming you are in the top five from your district), then that's what you are going to have to do. It's a shame that the news of this weight restriction came so late, but once again I am going to have to state that I am really against wingload-management-by-weight at the CPC/USPA Standard level in the first place. I wish you all the best of luck in your decision making process. Chuck

Jay took everyone's lunch money!

I can definitely think of a time when Chris wish he didn't have his web gloves on though!