i28 February!

The February issue of Blue Skies Mag is coming. (That’s what she said.) If you are a subscriber, here is what you’ll find (if you’re not, it’s quick and painless to become one and subscribe today right now here):

• New Canadian rates! More info here.
• Top ten ways to say, “F*ck You, Cupid” on Valentine’s Day
• I Jumped It: The MagBag
• Gear review by Andre Lemaire, of Jerry Baumchen’s magnetic, stowless main d-bag. Videos of the test jumps here.
• Football Widow
• Or, how not to become one. How the Drennan family keeps their love alive while Ian is living the dream as a PD Factory Team member, Annie runs her own business, and Kaiya is a professionally adorable 2 1/2-year-old.
• 100 Jumps for Mike Spann
• John E. Souders, Jr. did 100 jumps to honor Mike Spann, America’s first combat casualty in Afghanistan. Clark Word went along for the ride and tells us about the day.
• -ISM + NCCPA = TLF
• Kim Nocita tells about the great coming-together of NorCal and SoCal swoop leagues to form one that will rule them all.
• Photo Break: Invasion 2012
• Kazu Oyama and Bill Schmitz take some fine photos
• My Freefall Wedding
• Dave Udell was the first (beeeeeeeeeeer!) man to take the plunge out of Mike Mullins’ King Air when he married his adorable girlfriend Kim in 1993
• Aerodynamics for Dummies Part 3: Glide Ratio
• In the final installment, the adorable Julien rounds out his aerodynamics lesson with GR
• Turning Points: With Fresh Air and Rhythm into the Future
• Kurt, of NSL lore, fame, and glory, details why SDC Rhythm XP is the next big thing
• The Beginning of the End of My Flourishing Career: True Love
• Sydney and skydiving, sittin’ in a tree ♫ k-i-s-s-i-n-g ♪ first comes love ♬ then comes marriage ♫ then comes a back brace
• The Fuckin’ Pilot: “Bob, A Smart Man”
• A fictional tale about Bob, a tandem instructor, and the smartest decision he ever made
• Life Coaching: Tape Your Head to Hers
• Melsinore gives tips on how to clean up, amp up, and de-clutter up your non-skydiving life
• SkyGod’s Expo 2012 Calendar

Andre Lemaire wrote up his testing of the MagBag, a prototype main d-bag created by Jerry Baumchen. Here, in all their raw glory, are the test jump videos.

USPA, through their PR company JWalcher Communications, sent out this press release. Some interesting numbers among the cheeserific puns and giddy glossiness.

Contact:
Nancy Koreen, 540-604-9742, nkoreen@uspa.org

Skydivers Jump into Leap Year! — U.S. Parachute Association Reports Strong and Safe 2011!

January 31, 2012 – The U.S. Parachute Association reports that the breathtaking sport of skydiving continued to grow in 2011 and is poised to thrill even more jumpers throughout Leap Year 2012.

Last year, more than a half million people took the leap for the first time at some 200 USPA-affiliated skydiving centers across the country. Whether to cross an item off their bucket lists or discover a new hobby and passion, first-timers took the life-changing leap and experienced the thrill of a lifetime.

In addition to first-jumpers, USPA also reports an upsurge in experienced skydivers of all ages. First-timers and licensed skydivers together made more than 3.1 million jumps in 2011. At year’s end, USPA boasted membership of 33,515 – its highest since January 2002, shortly after the 9-11 attacks wreaked havoc on the aviation industry.

Even with skydiving clearly on the rise, accident numbers continue to remain low. In 2011, 25 people died skydiving in the U.S. – one out of every 125,000 jumps. Additionally, the five-year average of skydiving fatalities shows a steady decline, with an average of 22 per year over the last five years compared to 25 per year from 2002 to 2006 and 35 per year from 1997 to 2001.

Skydiving continues to improve its safety record due largely to safer equipment and better training. Student accidents are a small percentage of the total; most injuries and fatalities involve experienced skydivers attempting advanced maneuvers. USPA continues to make the sport safer by developing additional training programs and conducting its annual Safety Day – scheduled for March 10 this year – where drop zones across the country hold safety seminars and refresher training.

“We’re constantly striving to reduce the risk and increase the level of safety, especially for students,” said USPA Executive Director Ed Scott. “The sport’s continued growth attests to this improved safety and the indescribable life-altering experience of jumping out of a plane. With Leap Year upon us, what better time to take that leap?”

Image by Lambert: http://www.ereleases.com/pic/USPA-skydiving.jpg
Image by Bill Schmitz: http://www.ereleases.com/pic/Dysfunction.jpg

About Skydiving and USPA

For sheer excitement and high-speed fun, no sport comes close to skydiving. But it’s not as extreme or intimidating as it may seem. Almost anyone 18 or older can take the leap after some comprehensive safety instruction. It takes just a half hour of ground school for a tandem jump, the easiest and most popular way to skydive for the first time. Tandem jumping allows students to experience the thrill of freefall while securely harnessed to a licensed instructor.

Founded in 1946, the U.S. Parachute Association is a nonprofit association dedicated to the promotion of safe skydiving nationwide, establishing strict safety standards, training policies and programs at more than 200 USPA-affiliated skydiving centers throughout the country. USPA represents skydivers before all levels of government, the public and the aviation industry and sanctions national skydiving competitions and records. 

For more information on making a first jump or to find a skydiving center near you, visit http://www.uspa.org.

 

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Happy birthday Melanie!

Miss Melanie, of course, is one of Blue Skies Mag’s amazing contributors, and has been with us from the start. Inspirational, courageous, giving, loving, hilarious, and awesome, Melanie has helped our little magazine in more ways than we can count. We’ve heard from so many of you that her words impact your lives, too. So, join us in wishing this beautiful woman a great birthday and another fantastic year!

PS – Maybe a good birthday gift would be to like her Highcomms.com Facebook page ;)

PPS – We have a $5 reward for any information on how in hell #6 got so lucky.

The Beginning of the End of My Flourishing Career: From Cutaway to 3Ring 

Originally published in the September 2011 issue of Blue Skies Magazine. 

How do you cutaway once you’ve realized everything has pretty much gone to shit and your beloved canopy (or life, for that matter) is one big malfunction? As baby skydivers, we’re trained to look at the cutaway handle, then pull it, look at the reserve handle, then pull it, or some variation of that. The point is, it’s a very robotic thing once you actually do it in real life. However, if you’re cutting away like one of the Baldwin brothers, it’s a bit different. Some people just yank the handle and then don’t really know where the reserve is or what to do with it or how it works. Or in my case, you chop that bitch and the RSL does the rest.

This is the story of how I actually cut away. Fade to “cutaway” montage from the movie that said “cutaway” one too many times.

We left off at January 2nd, with me sitting on the bench near the swoop pond at Zhills, having just decided that I’m quitting my awesome job in Austin and going after this whole living the dream thing.

Well, let’s rewind for a second, shall we? Flashback to November, a balmy 70 degrees (compared to 30′s in Chicago) and I’m all sitting at my fancy ass computer at my superawesome agency job in Austin. I ordered my rig earlier in the season and it wasn’t ready by the time I left Chicago, so I had it delivered to the office, because I was living in this gigantic swanky ass apartment complex and I didn’t want it to get lost. Obviously. So my rig arrives and I call Doug, the DZO at CSC, and we shoot the shit for a bit, mostly me squealing about how pretty my rig is. I had been working with Doug since the middle of the summer, so once CSC shut down and Doug wasn’t as busy as he usually is in season, the emails started piling up.

So we’re on the phone and I’m giving him shit about how there’s a good chance I’m doing more work for him than I am my clients when he asked me how everything was going since the big move. I ramble on about how I’m working like a crazy person, billing 300 hours in November. For the record, 300 hours = 37.5 8-hour working days. In case you didn’t know this, there aren’t 37.5 8-hour working days in November, or any month on the planet Earth, but that’s what I was billing. I was used to jumping Friday at sunset, all day Saturday and Sunday and leaving the DZ for the city on Monday morning. I had been in Austin for six weeks and hadn’t jumped yet. Unacceptable.

Doug: “So, that’s not exactly what you signed up for, huh?”

Me: “Honestly, I’d rather just work with you full time, and come back in the spring when season starts and take care of all of your marketing and stuff.”

I said that. To Doug. Sitting at my desk at my shiny new job that I had been at for oh, maybe four weeks.

Doug said that was entirely possible.

I hang up with Doug and call the boyfriend. He’s pumped. His wheels are turning. He thinks this could be a really great opportunity for me.

I hang up with him and call my parents. Mom and Dad listen and tell me to call them later when I get home. So I do. They think I’m insane. They say that there’s no way I’m ready for this and that I JUST got to Austin and I have an obligation to them and I should stay and that the skydiving industry isn’t a great place to start out on my own in the marketing world. My parents, who have never told me that I couldn’t do anything, think it’s probably the worst idea I’ve ever come up with in the history of ideas.

That was November. Bring it back to January and my dad has just told me I’d be stupid not to go with this plan.

I come back to my job in Austin only to get sat down for our Monday morning staff meeting and be told that the guy who recruited me (a huge reason I joined the company because he’s wicked smart), is leaving for another agency. This is the biz. People come and go. However, that day, I was going to let my team know that I was planning on departing in March. So my whole grand plan of how I’m going to have this incredibly difficult conversation just went to shit.

I ask the guy who recruited me (dubbed “The Quitter) if he wants to take an afternoon stroll over to Starbucks to chat. I start by asking him about where he’s going, what he’ll be doing there and his motivations for leaving. Then I lay it on him.

Me: “So, um, I’m leaving too.”

The Quitter: Laughing and shaking his head: “You’re… what?”

Me: “I’m quitting and moving back to Illinois to do the whole skydiving thing.”

The Quitter: “You’re kidding, right?”

Me: “Nope.”

The Quitter: “Well that is really fucking awesome for you, congrats!”

Unfortunately the decision with the other guy who played a role in my recruitment (dubbed “The Stormy Cloud”) didn’t take it so well. I waited until my friend had worked out his two weeks and then I told my teams that I was outta there. I took another afternoon stroll over to Starbucks with one of the guys who was technically my boss.

Him: “So, let’s chat about why you want to leave.”

The Stormy Cloud: “Well, I am beyond excited to be pursuing an opportunity with CSC, where I learned how to skydive, and I’ll be working with them doing their marketing, PR, social media stuff, etc.”

The Stormy Cloud: “It sounds like more of an obsession than a career move.”

Me: “Well I’m very excited about the opportunity to combine all things social media and marketing with all things skydiving. It’s pretty much my dream job.”

The Stormy Cloud: “Well I think you’re making a huge mistake.”

Me: Silence

Everyone else in the office that I had quickly made friends with in my 3-month stint were beyond excited. Like, so floored they couldn’t stand it. People who wanted absolutely nothing to do with jumping out of planes, who hadn’t known me for very long, saw that this was pretty much a dream gig for me. There were many a cocktail had in celebration.

There was one last dude to tell, and that was my actual boss. He wasn’t on any of my teams, we didn’t really work together, but he is totally heads up. We’ll call him “Sunshine” for the sake of talking.

Sunshine: “So, I hear you’re leaving us. So soon!”

Me: “Yeah, I’d be stupid if I didn’t pursue this opportunity.”

Sunshine: “Seriously, Syd, now’s the time. If you screw up, you screw up, but this sounds like something right up your alley.”

Me: ::wave of relief:: “Thank you! I’m excited, obviously a little scared and kinda sad because Austin is pretty much the best city ever, but excited.”

Sunshine: “Now let’s talk about your decision. Make sure that you view this as ‘total opportunity’ – the knowledge you’ll gain, what you’ll put into it, how much you can get out of it, and how this plays into your overall career goals.”

Me: Thinking: holy shit, I’ve known this man for three months, spent maybe eight working hours with him total and he’s helping me see the big picture instead of bashing my decision. This guy is freaking brilliant. I am so lucky to have this dude in my life right now. 

So the office knows I’m leaving. Now it’s time to get down to business.

The big picture? I’ll start my own company this year, and while I’m working with CSC, I’ll start to build relationships with people who could be potential clients, I’ll figure out what my product offering will be, and eventually, over the course of the year, start putting out feelers for additional clients. This ends up working out perfectly because in my role with CSC, I’m an independent contractor, so technically, CSC is my first client. Not a bad gig right out of the gate. Thus, my RSL. I chopped that job knowing that I had a backup plan that would deploy pretty much immediately and on its own.

I was thinking of all the different ways I could incorporate skydiving into my company name. I had a bunch of bad ideas for a company name before I decided on 3Ring Media. 3Ring is pretty much perfect. It incorporates the skydiving side, as well as the actual sentiment of how 3Ring is a result of me cutting away from my former life in the agency world, and setting out on this new adventure. A whuffo friend of mine said “oh, like a circus?” and originally I was a bit miffed by it. Then I realized, yes, a little bit like a circus. 3Ring Media is my company. My circus? Love. Skydiving. Life. So, on January 17, 3Ring Media was born with the help of my friends at LegalZoom.com. I got my confirmation email that the company was legit. I didn’t know what it would grow to be yet, but it was official.

So fast forward to present day: 3Ring Media is growing. Every day is a new adventure at CSC and I’m learning a whole boatload about this industry, the people in it, and where I could potentially go with this. I’ve divided the services that 3Ring offers into a “skydiving related” and “everyone else” kind of deal. On the skydiving side, focusing on event/boogie coordination, social media and marketing education (I don’t mind doing the execution but I’m much more inclined to teach you everything you need to know about it to do it successfully, like social media boot camp), and eventually, coaching. I earned coach my rating earlier this season and I’m still working on developing and improving my skills so I can be a total rockstar with students.

All I know is I want to help people, small businesses, DZO’s, whoever – get up to speed on all things social media and marketing. There is too much power in the tools available today to not be taking advantage of it. Oh, and I’d like to earn my AFF rating someday. But I should probably make time for skydiving if I ever want to get there.

Z-hills Light Painting by Mohammad Al-Refaei

Mohammad Al-Refaei, B-36248, is a Skydive City jumper from Kuwait who took this awesome shot on Saturday after the FLCPA meet. Check out more of his stuff on flickr.

The Beginning of the End of My Flourishing Career: Is it there? Square? Landable? 

Originally published in the August 2011 issue of Blue Skies Magazine. 

Remember that one time that skydiving changed my life, I started dating one of my instructors after I graduated, decided I wanted to move to Texas so I could get paid more and thus skydive more, declared my love for the state of Texas, then I decided I didn’t really love Texas all that much and at the ZHills New Years Boogie I decided to quit my job, start my own company and CSC was my first client and holy shit I’m running out of breath because this sentence is the longest sentence in the history of sentences? You don’t? Oh, well let me tell you all about THAT.

Where do I begin? Girl meets skydiving, skydiving changes girls life, girl meets instructor, girl starts dating instructor, girl wants to skydive all the time and chase the sunshine like all of her friends that skydive all the time.

I decided early that this whole “working-60-hours-a-week-and-getting-paid-peanuts” thing wasn’t for me. At least not working 60 hours doing PR in an environment that makes me dread getting out of bed in the morning. You can only write so many digital content calendars for that hot dog company that has a car shaped like a hot dog before you get tired of all the puns and late night crises when someone finds out that the processed meat isn’t all that tasty and blows up the Facebook page about it. See, people, getting paid to save the world one Facebook post or tweet at a time isn’t all fame, fortune and glamour.

So, right, working sucks. Isn’t that what we all discover after we discover how awesome skydiving is? I know I’m not the first Corporate America worker turned skydiving bum, but holy shit did my eyes open fast.

Fast forward to September, and we’re road tripping to SkyVenture Colorado for a tunnel camp. Five skydivers, packed in Robin, my Civic Hybrid, trucking it across the midwest to the majestic mountains in and around Denver, Colorado. Day one is full of hiking and non-tunnel activities, and we wrap up the day by me accidentally mentioning that I was hopefully interviewing for a job in Austin when we got back. See, the boy was scheduled to go to Spaceland in November and I had been talking to a certain agency in Austin since June and didn’t want him to think that I was looking to get a new job in Texas because he was going to be in Texas because I didn’t know if we were actually together let alone serious. So, I didn’t tell him about the interviews.

The morning of day two starts with the boy borderline screaming about his neck and how he needs to go to the hospital. Earlier in the season he had a whacker of an opening and had continued to jump on it all season long. Apparently 16 hours in a car and hiking led us to the tipping point, where the pain was so excruciating and he could barely walk. So I take him to a hospital in Parker, Colorado, and spend the rest of the trip there. He has surgery, all is well, we go home and I go to Austin for an interview. I get the job. I move to Austin at the end of October. Now the boy is out for six months to recover from the surgery so no jumping which sucks but is also awesome because he can come stay with me in Texas and then roam around Florida for a bit.

Between me moving to Austin around the end of October and season wrapping up at CSC, I don’t see the boy for almost a month. Which is like, a third of how long we’d been dating at that point. Surprisingly, it seems I’ve grown up a lot since the last time I dated someone and it all works out. I’m not a hot mess this time. Things are working out well, despite the fact that I’m not there with him or vice versa. He comes down around Thanksgiving, we tear it up in Austin for a month, and then we take Christmas-New Years off and galavant around Florida.

We had coordinated a Freefall University trip to Skydive City in Zephyrhills for the New Years boogie. Seven 2010 grads and two instructors, rippin’ it up in the sunshine. My parents were coming out to watch the skydiving action and experience a day at the DZ after New Years. I was so pumped for them to finally see what all the fuss was about. The boy and I are walking around the trailer park at Z-Hills and he said “so, what do you think about getting a trailer and coming down here in November?” and I stopped and smiled. I had never been more excited to live in a trailer in my entire life. The thought was exhilarating. I had discussed an opportunity with the DZO at CSC to join the team and do the marketing and events, but had turned it down because I had let other people convince me I wasn’t ready. That I couldn’t handle being THE marketing department, that I wouldn’t have anyone to teach me anything, and that I wouldn’t learn as much as I would if I stayed at my agency job in Austin.

My parents show up on the 2nd, and after a tour of the place, introductions to my friends, and seeing a couple loads land, my dad pulls me aside.

I will never forget the scene. We’re sitting on the long bench sandwiched between the swoop pond and the spectator deck. It’s a bit cloudy, so I grounded myself because clouds make me nervous, and he’s just taking it all in. He turns to me, with a little bit of a misty eye and says:

“I finally get it. For the past six months all you’ve been talking about is skydiving, skydiving, skydiving. I totally get it. And you’d be stupid to not pursue that opportunity at CSC.”

And so it was. My “someday” plan was to quit my job, start my own company and take clients and spread the love and education that I have for all things geeky and social media and marketing. My “someday” plan was to work at the DZ, jump my ass off, learn as much as possible, get my coach rating, and eventually become an AFF instructor.

My “someday” plan went into effect on January 2nd, 2011. I started making plans on when to quit my job and how much money I’d need to survive. I started posting my furniture on Craigslist, looking for someone to sublet my apartment, and started to check out what I needed to do to start my own company so I could live life the way I wanted to live it.

Saturday January 21st brings the first meet of the 2012 season for the Florida Canopy Piloting League (FLCPA), taking place on the glorious pond at Skydive City, Zephyrhills, Florida. We have always been supportive of the FLCPA – it’s a league that fosters competition but also provides an incredible training environment for jumpers wanting to get into swooping, complete with top-notch coaches. It’s easy to get behind that kind of “pay it forward” attitude.

Quite a few of the top pilots in the world came up through the FLCPA, and this environment has fostered a few champions, both national and international. The FLCPA meets continue to draw a strong pool of competitors and 25 are already registered for Saturday. You can take a look at some of the names already registered on the Swoop League website. Pay special attention to competitor #20, and lets see if you can guess his or her name based on these few clues below:

• The person in question has just taken receipt of 2 brand new Comp Velocities.
• This swooper is a World Champion
• This swooper is not Jay Moledzki

Leave your guess in the comments below or on our Facebook page. Let’s see who can figure out the name of the mystery swooper!

Well, our last post evidently didn’t tell the whole story! Dreadful journalism on my behalf, but then again I hope you can forgive me. I thought footie pj’s for grownups were a NEW abomination, rather than a resurrected one from mere 2 years ago.
After we bragged about the event on Twitter, Daniel Croft was kind enough to point us to the original video of a 7-way footie PJ jump! This was initially done by some Ranch hands at the Blue Skies Ranch in Gardiner, NY, but like most New Yorker’s, they were too modest to flaunt their accomplishment.
The Ranch hands did however stick to belly only, so we will give the Blue Skies Boogie crew in Nevada the credit for the biggest freefly Footie PJ Record.

But now that begs the question, in the world of Footie PJ’s, what comes next?!
A jump off? Footie PJ hybrids? The possibilities are endless.

Fun jumping in Nevada? You betcha. And not just fun jumping, but some amazing talent met up at the Blue Skies Boogie for hard hittin’ record settin’ jumpin’.

Without further ado, we present the Footie Pajama World Record, set in Mesquite, NV on January 14th, 2012. Congrats to Gunnar Jeannette, Mike Steen, Thomas Hughes, Dan Drage, Sean Hennessey, Jason Powell and Sher Drage for a brilliant performance.

If you didn’t get one for Christmas (poor thing), these cozy little jumpsuits can be ordered here.

Many thanks to Gunnar Jeannette and Mike Steen for sharing!