sky surfing

[pojj 0]

hey jumpers how many of you are involved in sky surfing and is it as hard to do as everyone says...

[Tuna-Salad 0]

apparently not many.. I think wing suits are the big thing now (Atleast to all the whuffos I know)

Millions of my potential children died on your daughters' face last night.

[grimmie 173]

Skysurfing is SO 90's! And it's pretty hard to do.

[CazmoDee 3]

Someone very wise told me that all the really good skysurfers were dead.

I'm behind the bar at Sloppy Joe's....See ya in the Keys!

Muff 4313

[SPAWNmaster 0]

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Someone very wise told me that all the really good skysurfers were dead.

I've heard that as well..

It is my understanding that it's not very popular these days...considered a very solitary sport...hard to learn, even harder to master and considered one of the most dangerous disciplines in skydiving.

But what do I know.

[Stuntbabex 0]

I still want to try it someday. Im gonna bring back the 90's just you watch!

[hookitt 0]

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hey jumpers how many of you are involved in sky surfing and is it as hard to do as everyone says...

Everyone who?

Short answer... it ain't exactly easy to learn.

My grammar sometimes resembles that of magnetic refrigerator poetry... Ghetto

[hookitt 0]

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Someone very wise told me that all the really good skysurfers were dead.

He may be wise but that is a strange comment. It's also definitely not true.

Here's an old, short, and very incomplete, list of good skysurfers. <==

I'm pretty sure they're still alive. I've had the pleasure meeting them all at one time or another. Some of the people on this list have mind blowing skysurf skills.

They are not the only ones still around.

My grammar sometimes resembles that of magnetic refrigerator poetry... Ghetto

[sraja 0]

I met a sky surfer during the nationals and he was planning to setup a coaching program for wannabe sky surfers using the Paraclete wind tunnel. I am not sure I remember his name but he walked away with the gold last nationals. The tunnel could be a very effective and safe way to learn sky surfing if that does become reality.

[pchapman 261]

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Someone very wise told me that all the really good skysurfers were dead.

Not literally true but there is that element of truth as a sarcastic offhand statement.

I really don't know the history of this but a quick list is:

Jerry Loftis (while skysurfing)
Rob Harris (while skysurfing but accident unrelated to the board)
DeGayardon (not skysurfing)
Laurent Bouquet "Silver Surfer" (not skysurfing)

So they may have been out there pushing the limits and doing a lot of good skydiving, including pioneering skysurfing, but it wasn't usually skysurfing that killed 'em.

[edit - corrected Harris info.]

[Cashmanimal 0]

I have a couple jumps on training boards. It just felt like frustratingly difficult freeflying. Like trying to stand on a boogie board when you are holding it underwater in a pool.

It's all fun and until someone loses an eye... then it's just a game to find the eye

[happythoughts 0]

Basically, there was never a lot of skysurfers to begin with. At the larger dzs, you'd have one or two.

When ESPN threw it into the Extreme Games in the late 90s, a dozen teams showed up.

When ESPN lost interest, there was no tv ad money to drive it. In the last couple of years, I have only seen one person who still does it.

It used to be that you had to have 500 jumps and be very stable stand/sit/headdown before you could get instruction on the beginner board.

I know people who lost control on a board and admitted that it damn near killed them, so they quit skysurfing.

It is difficult to learn and you do it by yourself.
Not a lot of people want to put that kind of time into it.

[pchapman 261]

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Rob Harris (while skysurfing but accident unrelated to the board)

I was wrong. For the record, Rob was not on a board on that last, 3-canopy jump.

This is based on a PM from someone there at the time, and Douva who has posted skysurfing history on this site.

Douva put it well in a good skysurfing risks & history thread:
http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=2236438

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First, skysurfing pioneers Rob Harris, Patrick De Gayardon, and Jerry Loftis and skysurfing camera flyer Vic Pappadato (teammate to Troy Hartman) were all killed in separate, unrelated skydiving accidents (Loftis was the only one to actually die on a skysurfing jump), between 1995 and 1998.
Imagine where freeflying would be if Olav Zipser, Omar Alhegellan, and Orly King had all died in the first eight years of the discipline's existence.