Hey everyone,
For our last day in Florida, we decided to make it a big one! We made a 2 hour trek from Daytona Beach all the way south to Sebastian Florida.
Sebastian is a small town with a BIG drop zone… The DZ is known for it’s proximity to the ocean and the beach jumps that they organize.
We got there on a rainy-ish day with mixed weather. It was sunny, then cloudy, then rainy, then sunny, then rainy, etc..
For our first jump, Geneviève and I just decided to go and enjoy the view. On the plane, I met a guy named Nick.
Nick, as it turned out was a CReW dog and was going to have fun in the sky. I got so caught up in conversation with him, I barely noticed that my helmet, that I had put on my side before take off had fallen out the pilot’s door which he had opened to get some air. Luckily, I caught wind of it before we took off. (Good thing too!)
She and I did a 2 way fun jump and I opened high so as to just enjoy the view. It’s truly a beautiful view. The plane takes off from the DZ, flies over the ocean then flies back towards the DZ to prep the jump run. Being that the wind was coming from the ocean, we flew out pretty far. Now, Geneviève having never been to the ocean before this trip was in awe. Someone even asked her on the plane if she was scared because she kept looking out the window haha! Come landing time, I ended up making a bad decision and attempting to land crosswind. This was a terrible idea and I ended up messing up my landing and cutting my leg up pretty bad. Luckily, it started raining, so while I was off cleaning myself up, I wasn’t missing much.
Afterwards, Nick offered to lend me a CRW canopy so that I could jump with him. This canopy turned out to be quite famous. It belonged to none other than Mike Lewis. Now, for those of you who don’t know who Mike Lewis is… He is a Skygod… But not just any Skygod. He is a CRW Skygod who has helped this part of the sport grow enormously. He has participated in countless records and this canopy was the one he flew for the world record. He joined the formation as number 100. Needless to say, this canopy was more famous than I was haha. It also has 3 holes in it that are un patched and is probably almost as old as I am… Perfect for CRW!!!! =)
So after swapping out my Safire2 and showing me some tricks for replacing your canopy (Thanks Nick!), Nick had put the Lightning into my container. Notice the beautiful look it gave my brand new Vector?
Anyways, during the jump, Nick showed me some basic CRW control maneuvers, we did dock once, I was on top of his canopy on a 2 person stack. We tried to have him dock onto me, but I wasn’t able to get myself below him and close enough to him to do so so we flew side by side and he taught me how to lose altitude in quick bursts before coming in for the landing.
As usual, a CRW landing is a fairly rough rolling or sliding landing. I hit my leg again and suffered some more pain. I also ended up getting my new rig filthy… Again! Since I was leaving within 12 hours, I grounded myself so that I could get it clean before putting my main back in there.
Overall, I loved the drop zone, it’s much more of a laid back place then DeLand is, it seems to be a DZ where you can just go and have some fun. There are relatively few belly fliers there, most people either do CReW or they Freefly.
If you have a review of a DZ that you’d like to share, send me an email, I’d like to post it.
Adam