Tag: fun

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The off season….

So while most people here are “enjoying” the off season… Some of our friends are out in Dubai living it up at the world skydive competitions.

 

We’d like to give a shout out to Rise N Shine (Bruno from Brainshell’s team) as well as the Flying Ferns (Shan from NZ Aerosports’ team).
To those of you who who are competing, we’d like to wish you all the success in the world!

We’re all watching you!

 

I unfortunately haven’t gotten the rights to post any photos yet, but as soon as I do, I’ll have an update!

 

Blue skies everyone!

 

Adam

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Party d’halloween et fin de saison Atmosphair – Par Pierre “Peter Pan” B.

Hey everyone, bonjour tout le monde!

This one’s only in french as I didn’t write it and don’t have time to translate it, but I’ll re-write it later this week for all you Anglophones out there.

Je n’ai pas pu être au party de fin de saison et d’Halloween à Atmosphair, donc j’ai demandé à mon ami Pierre de m’écrire un article à propos. Voici le résultat:
Un party à l’image de Parachutisme Atmosphair : simple, authentique et combien énergique. Le moment est venu de dire au revoir à la belle saison 2012 et son party de fin d’année devait être à la hauteur de la belle saison et surtout à l’image des parachutistes.

 

Après une dernière journée de sauts pour les moins frileux et les plus crinqués, tous sont invités dans le hangar pour souligner la fin de la saison : un party costumé! Plus de 100 personnes (certaines arrivaient même de Montréal!) se sont déplacées pour participer à ce party. Ce fut un franc succès : décor, musique, personnages venus on ne sait d’où, tout y était!!!

 

Parachutisme Atmosphair a la chance d’avoir parmi ses membres deux artistes bourrées de talent : Julie et Joany qui ont su réchauffer la salle et mettre une belle ambiance pendant qu’on se régalait au buffet à Marquis.

 

Qui dit party de fin de saison dit place à ceux qui se sont démarqués! Soulignons la personnalité masculine de l’année : Guy Labarre, les personnalités féminines : les Kit-4 et la recrue de l’année : Jimmy Desbiens.

 

Après le repas, place à la danse! Dj Sp@cE y était pour dégourdir les pattes et tenter d’épuiser les infatigables. L’esprit est à la fête et les gens en demanderont encore et encore, en passant par les demandes (très) spéciales, et ce, jusqu’à 4 heures du matin! Quelqu’un a osé croire que ça se terminerait tôt?

 

Sans oublier les nombreux prix de présence offerts. Un remerciement particulier aux commanditaires Adam de Skydive Addiction et Frankais qui ont fait plusieurs heureux!

Parachutisme Atmosphair peut dire sans prétention : mission accomplie!
Blue skies tout le monde!
Adam

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So I’m back from Mancun!

Hey everyone!

 

Sorry about the major delay in posts, spent some time down south getting away from the cold.

The weather here’s not so bad, but it’s quite cold. I was hoping to get some skydiving done at the skydive mex boogie, but I ended up on more of a party trip then anything else.
The weather in the Cancun area is really not permissive of safe skydiving anyway… It was about 25-35 mph of wind every day, great for surfing, but that’s about it…
So before my trip, I got to go to the tunnel for about 40 minutes of flying time. 30 minutes at the “nuit blanche” (All-nighter in english) which was a blast. I got to fly with 3 friends of mine who also happen to be much better skydivers than I, so I got to learn enormously and have fun at the same time. We did 3 sets of 10 minutes broken into 2 minute splits. The first 10 minutes involved a lot of getting through the rust I had built up (being that I hadn’t flown in nearly a year in the tunnel) I had quite a laugh when I almost rammed head first into the wall during the first 2 minutes. Afterwards things pretty much progressed nicely. I got to practice 4 way formations, work on my levels, formation speed and we worked towards getting as many points as possible.

By the last 10 minutes, we were doing swimmingly, but it was also 4 am and we were burnt.

 

A few days later, the day before my trip, Geneviève and I decided to go fly for 10 minutes during the day. We couldn’t find anyone else to join us, so we just flew together. We flew as if we were flying with 2 other people that were in formation with us and worked at mostly fun formations. Over-unders side by side, over-unders while doing 180 degree turns, position work, 360 degree turns while holding each other, etc.
This was quite a fun 10 minutes and would’ve been fun to continue.

I received my sexy new suits from Deepseed a while ago, had to mail them back for re-sizing as there was an issue with measurements… Kinda sucks when the company’s on the other side of the planet, but I’m REALLY excited to get them back as the suits are the best looking suits I have ever seen.

Blue ones everyone!

 

Adam

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Flaming parachute? Yes please!

So you thought the last video was crazy?

 

Troy Hartman decided that it’d be a good idea to set his canopy on fire… While he was flying it…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3h-RVieE4Y&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]

 

Once again, THIS is crazy…

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How can you skydive? That’s crazy? No it isn’t…. This is crazy!

So over the years, people have told me that I’m crazy for skydiving, they said that I was crazy for jumping off of planes, they said I was crazy for wanting to do it day in, day out.

Then, when I decided that I wanted to learn CRW (Canopy relative work – AKA: Parachute formations) I was told by even more people that I was crazy… Some of these people are skydivers themselves!
Geneviève has always supported the fact that I want to fly CRW but she herself refuses to do it claiming that it’s crazy to “play in each others’ lines”.

When I was in Florida at Skydive Sebastian, I mentioned that I got to fly with a guy named Nick. Well Nick and I have kept contact and yesterday, he went a step above simple CRW….
Yesterday, he and a friend decided to attempt a jump using his Sabre2 150 loaded at 1.34 and a Velocity 90 loaded at 2.5.
He calls this Crazy CRW, I agree with him… On that note though, I want to try this!

Check it out:

 

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHgHO0buCww&list=UU1s3Dldm_XS5qNMvGceDocw&index=1&feature=plcp[/youtube]

 

(Image above by Eric Bernetzke from a 25 way CRW record in Wisconsin)

Blue skies everyone!

 

 

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Skydiving in Hurricane Season – Part 4 – Skydive Sebastian

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

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Skydiving in hurricane season – Part 2 – Review of Skydive DeLand

Hey everyone!

I’m not really sure how to start up a part 2, so I’ll simply continue where I left off.

On Day 3, the weather was looking great out and being that we didn’t get to jump at DeLand on our first or second days in Florida, we were DYING to get into the sky.
We were supposed to stop off at UPT for a tour of the place, but couldn’t hold back from going jumping.

We got to:

And immediately proceeded to the Manifest.
Being that it was a Tuesday and the weather’s been on and off, there weren’t many skydivers… But we were extremely lucky, there was a group of Military jumpers following a Flight-1 canopy course. And where there’s military jumpers…
There’s the SKYVAN!!!!!! We had a lot of fun jumping from the Skyvan that day. We were about 3 or 4 going to full altitude, the Military guys were all doing hop and pops, so we basically had the plane to ourselves up high leaving us a lot of space to run =).

After doing a few jumps, I did a quick tour of the place, it’s really quite a big DZ..

Fairly straight forward, this is the DZ restaurant/bar

Outdoor “Tiki” bar which is pretty much just an open area anyone can go behind to bar tend.

Flight-1 School building

Waiting area/loading area

Packing room/climbing wall

more of the same packing area (Very comfy carpet)

Team room/packing area #2

Team room – another angle.

Tandem room – Mad Dog is Tara’s father and currently works at UPT… He is an extremely bad ass individual!

Enormous creeper pad / waiting area.

My overall opinion about Skydive DeLand: The drop zone has some extremely talented skydivers, a really cool Manifest staff and some awesome planes. The coaches there really know their stuff and are always keeping their eyes open for opportunities to coach you and help out (and not always for a price). The drop zone has plenty of indoor packing area to go around, lots of room for people to just hang around and talk, plenty of benches and a great restaurant that actually has reasonably priced food and good portions.

And to boot: Jump tickets are 23$!!!!!!! They have bulk options as well (50 tickets +) which lower the price, but at 23$, Geneviève and I were extatic (Being that it’s 35-36$ back home).

Needless to say, DeLand is set up to be a busy drop zone and it’s been said that DeLand is the epicenter of the North American skydive universe. But According to Mark Klingelhoefer at UPT, it’s NOT because of Skydive DeLand.

Tune in later this week to find out why…

Blue Skies in the meantime!

Adam

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Skydiving in hurricane season – Part 1

Hey everyone!

This is the first part of my multi-part article about my trip with Geneviève to Florida.

We left Montreal on Saturday the 8th at 6 am, the TSA was quite easygoing with Geneviève’s rig at the airport, they even let her through with her hook knife (We’re unsure whether or not they even noticed it).

I got the whole drug and explosive scan done where they swab my hands, belt and shoes to see if I’ve come in contact with anything suspicious. (Good thing I left my grenades and cocaine at home that day or I’d have been in a ton of trouble haha)

 

Once in Florida, we did the usual rental car thing, got a pay as you go plan and headed over to our hotel. Perry’s Ocean Edge “resort”. It was a 2 1/2 star Motel on the beach, couldn’t really ask for more in Daytona Beach without spending an arm and a leg. And what skydiver in his or her right mind will start paying good skydiving money to stay in a nice hotel when he or she is used to sleeping on an airplane hangar floor?

The hotel staff were nice enough to upgrade our room and give us a view of the ocean. Geneviève, having never seen an ocean before was extremely happy about that.

 

We didn’t really do too much that day as we were exhausted from our super early wake up and our flight.

Come Sunday morning, we met up with Tara from UPT who took us to a breakfast restaurant called The Old Sugar Mill.
It’s in a protected park that has some very nice trees and scenery.  It’s a pancake place that lets you make your own pancakes on a griddle in the middle of the table. It also happens to be the only restaurant in a 50 mile radius that actually serves REAL fruit. (this will be important in a later article)

 

After breakfast and a mini tour of the area, we headed back to Skydive DeLand where Tara had parked and she handed me a box… A 30 Lb box…

This 30 Lb box however, contained my rig and my new Neptune N3 altimeter!! =D

 

We toured around the DZ (The tour will be in the next article) and with enormous excitement I opened my box to find all the goodies inside!

Here’s a picture of Tara and I while I was trying it on.

 

The day was way too cloudy and windy to get any loads in the sky, so after hanging around the DZ for about 3 hours we headed back to our hotel. I went to take a nap and ended up like this:

 

Needless to say, I was a VERY happy camper.

 

Coming up in the next article: Our tour of Skydive DeLand!

 

Blue skies everyone!

 

Adam

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Great weekend at the Tokaya Chick’s Boogie

 

 

Hey everyone!

So I was at the Tokaya Chick’s Boogie over the weekend… And apparently, so was everyone else! There were over 100 people signed up for the event and it looks to be that there will be even more next year.

The event was organized by Karine Lemelin and Karine Provost, the two ladies also run Tokaya, a green company that basically designs and sells clothing made of Bamboo.

I wasn’t present for the whole weekend as I had to work on the Saturday, but I did manage to get there just after dinner time. They had turned a barn into a dinner hall and did a wonderful job at it!

As a side note: The boys from Parachute Montreal all skydived in wearing dress shirts and bow ties which was quite funny to see… Pretty much a James Bond style jump.
Dinner was raw vegan… Not exactly my thing, nor my girlfriend’s, but I’m guessing that for those who are into it, it must’ve been great =)
After dinner, they started some games, had a couple of bodyguards (guys) strip their clothes off for prizes, who could do the most squats with their lady friend in their arms, etc… I found some of the games more fair than others as some were geared towards applause, which usually leads to who has the most friends there winning. But all that aside, I’m pretty sure everyone had a lot of laughs.

This was followed by a percussion band who played as they walked everyone from the barn to the Manifest where there was a DJ booth set up and people could continue to party the night away.
The drummers played at least a couple of hours and got everyone engaged which was great fun.
The DJs looked kind of bored though, but that was simply because people were having such a great time with the percussionists.

There weren’t any drinks available for people who hadn’t thought of bringing anything with them, so for some people, it was a dry night, but the night went on until at least 3-4 AM.

 

The next morning was sort of rough for some people as an 8 am wake up for skydiving isn’t always very easy after partying all night, but there were plenty of people in the sky.
I was on a couple of loads organized by none other than Melanie Curtis. I only got on two loads that day, but Nick Grillet (From Arizona Airspeed) got into the skies and showed people how things are done!
He came up with a bunch of fun skydives including a Speedstar to back flip 10 way. (10 people racing to form a star, then all back flipping).

The day pretty much continued on that note, there weren’t any activities on the Sunday unfortunately, but from what I read on many Facebook statuses, people seemed to have had a great time.

Sorry I didn’t have much more to say about it, but I wasn’t there for the whole time. 🙁

Blue ones for now everyone!

 

Adam