Tag: Skydive DeLand

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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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5 more days…

Hey everyone!

 

I didn’t forget all of you, I simply ran into a few bumps in the road that sort of stopped me from skydiving for a couple of weeks… My credit card got compromised and I was somewhat tight on funds being that I’m heading to Florida this coming weekend and need all the spending money I can get. DeLand is gonna be sweet!

We may also be making a stop off at Sebastian before coming home, so look out for a multi-part article about the trip. 🙂

We’ll be making a stop off at UPT to hopefully get a tour of the place and I’ll have an article about that one as well.

 

I’ve got a great announcement to make as well. Bruno from Brainshell has agreed to sponsor Skydive Addiction with an awesome new helmet design. For those of you who don’t know, Brainshell is the company behind the awesome custom airbrushed helmets some of you have seen in the skies and at Skyventure Montreal.

I’ll be doing a series of step by step highlights of how they do their work and what everything looks like before, during and after the job is done. That will be done over the winter so look out for all of that so keep your eyes peeled for that!

 

Blue Skies everybody!

 

Adam