The Bluest Office!

Now it’s your turn. Help the DeLand kids getting some free tickets and a night out on the town, along with promoting skydiving to the public. You do that with your mouse… or fingers for those of you on mobile devices.
CLICK HERE – look at the pretty picture and scroll down a little bit to vote for Skydive DeLand. You can vote as many time as you want. We suggest to keep on going until your hand cramps up, but that is of course a personal choice. So, get going. Share on Facebook. Tell your friends. Do whatever just help ‘em get to Blue Man!

With Boogie Season in full swing it’s time to start thinking about putting those extra dollars to good use. And no, I’m not talking about the extra beer you’ll be buying for your out of towner friends at the tiki bar, I’m talking about fundraising here folks.

This year the 3rd Annual Jump for Diabetes is coming to Skydive Chicago – and we’re mixing things up a bit. We’re asking jumpers from around the country to donate their skydives the weekend of Aug 12-14 to the cause. So, even if you can’t be at Skydive Chicago for the event – and the HUGE raffle, which I’ll talk more about in a minute – you can still benefit the cause.

All you have to do is get your friends and family to donate however much they can afford ($1, $5…you get the idea) per jump you do that weekend. At the end of the weekend, tally up your jumps, collect donations and feel good about helping out a great cause, all while doing something you’d probably have been doing anyway – jumping out of airplanes! Interested? Email JumpForDiabetes@gmail.com to get your pledge sheet.

Proceeds from the event, all pledge money, donations, etc will be donated to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) and earmarked for research. Let’s find a cure for this disease!

So how about this raffle? Well, we’ve got a custom PD main or reserve canopy (non-cross braced) as the first prize! Tickets are $25 each or 6 for $100. Here’s what else you could win for the price of a lift ticket:

Tickets are on sale now at Skydive Chicago (see Erin to purchase yours today) and we’ll be selling them at Summerfest as well. We’re limiting ticket sales to 500, so don’t wait on your chance to win this badass gear.

Huge thanks goes out to all the sponsors who have donated again this year. We love you guys!!

Want to know more? Stay tuned for the latest updates on our Facebook page here. Or email JumpForDiabetes@gmail.com.

Blue Skies!

By: Brian Buckland

If a friend asked you if you wanted to travel to rural South Carolina for a long weekend in the near 100 degree heat, put on a black jumpsuit and run around in the sun, you might think they weren’t the best friends in the world.  But when that friend tells you that’s CarolinaFest 2011, you grab that jumpsuit and run out the door!  Which is exactly what I did.  I just got back a few days ago and it was a fun time for sure, oh yeah, and there were some great jumps in there too!  Let me tell you a little bit about it.  If you’d like to SEE MY FULL POST CLICK HERE.

The best story times are the ones with pictures.  For starters, I found out early on that Simon had his tube tied.  I didn’t know he could do that, but it’s better safe than sorry!  That guys naked half the time as it is so why not play safe!  And then there was Mel.  She must have been pissed off at something cause she was throwing out the “C” if you know what I mean.  Maybe I missed a shot or something, I guess I’ll just have to try harder next time.  Or maybe she was just trying to give Simon a “C” for the top of his tube?  Not sure…

Then there was the time that my helmet flew off on opening.  Yikes….talk about all sorts of badness.  Can you imagine what my face would look like if I lost all of that expensive camera gear?  Well, lucky for my quick reactions, because when my helmet DID fly off my head, I managed to grab it at just about full arms reach away from me.  So as soon as I realized I had it securely in my hands, I did what any good photographer would do, I spun it around to catch the astonishment on my face!  When I told Angela about it later, she had the same reaction!

I told Amy about a SkyHook I just saw in action and she was like, ‘What’s the big deal?’ and getting up an in my face and stuff.  Back off Chmelecki!  It’s just a SkyHook!  But man, to see it up close and personal, it was like an instant reserve canopy!  Giddyup!

Well, that’s about it for my wrap up on CarolinaFest 2011.  If you’d like to SEE THE ENTIRE GALLERY CLICK HERE.  I hope you enjoyed my story.  To leave you I will ask you a question.  What do you get when you throw a party, tell everyone to wear a pink costume, provide 3 Margarita machines full of booze, and tell the winners that they get either a free golden Cypres or 20 jumps with 20 pack jobs?  Not sure?  Well, let me show you what you get.   The 20th Anniversary Cypres Pink Party.   Hope you enjoy!

As Chicagoland Skydiving Center makes its transition from it’s longtime home in Hinckley Illinois over to Rochelle, It’s become terribly obvious to many of us jumpers that this real work crap is tough!

The amount of construction going in to the Rochelle’s Kortz field is staggering. With Bull dozers and construction workers everywhere, there’s no doubt that CSC will be around for some time to come. The road, parking lot, trailer spaces and groundwork for the new hangar are underway, yet bookings and jumping haven’t slowed down one bit.

When Mother Nature decides to cut us, and the rest of the country a little bit of slack, there’s no doubt that they’ll be a shit load of jumping going on!

You are hereby cordially invited not only by “The Fuckin’ Pilot”, but all the rest of the CSC family to come out and play, as we all fully intend to play as hard as possible thru our “growing pains”!

Last year’s drop zone awards went so well, we’re making it annual! Click the link below to tell us your favorite drop zones for all things important. We know you love your home drop zone, but try to keep an open mind to all those other DZs you’ve been to.

Our only requirement is that you’ve jumped at more than one drop zone, please. We know that one is super awesome, but it doesn’t provide quite the sample size we’re looking for to be really objective.

Happy voting! (click me! click me!)

It’s road trip season, yay! For our May issue, we’ll talk about skydiving/paragliding/BASE/fun road trips, highlight one and show you a few cool apps, tools and tricks to achieve road trip nirvana.

What’s your favorite road trip route? Got any good tips or apps you like? Share!

Hit the road!

photo by Flickr user Dr DAD (Daniel A D’Auria MD)

We have it. Bad. With the sun staying up a little bit longer every day, the temperatures climbing and the unnatural curse of daylight savings time about to come to an end, we can feel the gypsy blood in our veins starting to boil. It’s time to broaden horizons by visiting new dropzones, meet up with old friends and maybe make some new ones. It’s time for fun jumps, geting a little silly, drink cheap beer and swap stories around the bonfire.

With how much skydivers like to travel, it’s no accident that we devote a couple of pages in the magazine every month exclusively to featuring events and places to jump. But we need help from the Blue Skies Mag community here, to pick the right ones to attend. Which ones can we not miss out on? Which ones suck? Are there any new ones that we should know about?
How about records, fundraisers, community support or any of that fun stuff?
Well, we want it all. Those of you involved in planning for your respective DZ’s, make sure to sign us up for your newsletter and list your events (for free) in the Events section of our website. If you don’t have a newsletter, fine – just drop us a line – but make sure you give us at least 8 weeks notice if at all possible.

For those of you just burning to write an article about your boogie experience –

keep in mind that we accept those, as long as you can find a unique, fun and interesting way of presenting it. If you have an cool idea, by all means read this and then chat with the editor!

Happy Boogie Season!

Skydive Carolina had their annual awards party Saturday night, and made this tribute video for their home teams. Enjoy!

Jeffro. Dubai. Big buildings. Woah. (Click the “Read More” for the video. You won’t regret it.)