MagnanimousAnt

Of my 1200 jumps, 90% have been at Elsinore. I completed my AFF training there in 2006 and considered it a second home for a long time afterwards. The people are great, the school instruction is outstanding, and it's a very fun place to hang out. However, the dropzone makes very little effort to keep intermediate jumpers, well, jumping. Most events and activities cater entirely to newbie jumpers. Little is done to encourage or facilitate skill advancement beyond the most basic levels. Even the skills camps offered are now mostly run by jumpers who themselves have merely 500 jumps or less. This has resulted in a situation where as jumpers gain experience, they simply move on to another dz. Every year, it seems that fewer teams train at Elsinore because of this. Elsinore hasn't even had a strong open class team to be proud of like Perris Furry since Gravity was dismantled in, I think, 2006. Also every year, there are fewer and fewer experienced fun jumpers around with whom you can throw together a challenging jump that doesn't immediately turn into a zoo dive after exit. Basically, the overall experience level of "regulars" has dropped significantly in the past few years to the point where I no longer desire to jump there. I'm completely.... bored. And for that reason, I wouldn't recommend Elsinore for anything other than AFF or tandem jumps. (Or Chicks Rock, which is usually a lot of fun no matter what your skill level.) I wish the owners would make an effort to return Elsinore to its former glory, but my impression is that the owners have lost their passion for skydiving as a sport and now think of their dz strictly in business terms. It's too bad.