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As long as you are at least a little bit height weight proportionate you should be fine. Find a Dropzone that flies what is called a turbine aircraft. A smaller, piston driven aircraft, like a Cessna 182, is going to limit the DZ in the size of the passenger simply because the cabin is so small. In a larger aircraft, it's no big deal taking people up to 260, and I've seen 310lbs bowling ball shaped women go without incident (not that I'd suggest it).

When turning with your legs, try to get your knee into your armpit with your foot flat, toes pointing out. And good job flying those exits. Always find it odd when people race to get the drogue out. Tandems are fun, eh??

I haven't noticed much neck pain... Or back pain really. Only chronic repetitive issue I've seen is your right shoulder. Every long term TI I know has shoulder issues. The big thing for me is to find the parts of the jump that tax the body and avoid them. I have the student help us get to the door, I twist my arm and use my (massive, toned) bicep to get the drogue out of the pocket rather than my shoulder. I also worked on my in plane harnessing technique to minimize effort. If you're experiencing neck pain, like others said, it's probably from deployment. Get some outside footage of yourself and see what it is you're doing, and do less of it. It's impossible to say without knowing what it is you're doing. But don't just accept that ruining your body is part of this. It doesn't have to be!

Just like full price, cash dropzones, there are good ways and bad ways to do discounted, presold dropzones. I've worked in all four kinds of DZs, and the best one for me was the well run discounted presale DZ. They are busy with guaranteed customers. Smart DZOs make up the decreased revenue with upsales and cross sales. T-shirts, altitude, video, gear rental, booking fees, etc. It is hard not to earn more money if you triple the number of people walking thru the door. Sell them shit. Decreasing pay is the sign of a lazy, greedy and/or stupid DZO. Any TI who would jump for $15 doesn't deserve a dime more.

new jumpers always complain about this. i had one tandem student who was particularly vehement in her claims that she couldn't breath. while skydiving. on her third jump i brought along a handcam. in the door she takes a big deep breath and holds it and then spends the whole freefall with her mouth closed and her cheeks puffed out, like a kid underwater. nobody has ever passed out and died because they couldn't breath, and i've never heard of an experienced jumper with these issues. from my own experiments (executed while bored in droguefall) if you point your face straight down and open your mouth wide it gets hard to breath. i have no issues breathing with my mouth closed, wide open if facing the horizon, etc. so, just do some more skydives and relax. save your worries for any of the other 80 things that can kill you :)

Has anyone done any work there? What was your experience?

N/A

Just got my rating and am curious what advice you all have :) Tips, tricks, things to do slash not to do, things you add or remove from your briefing, etc

Jeff Bodin. County shot down on airport landing about a year ago.

Ends Soon! Http://1800FUNJUMP.com/BlackFriday

The turkey, the stuffing, some canned beets and Aunt Janice, that beastly excuse of a human you are so unfortunately related to. You stuff your face, you feign interest, you hug and be hugged. The gluttony, the family and the napping. So kids, pack up your leftovers, say goodbye to Grandma, hop in your car and come jump out of an airplane with your real family. Join us for Skydive Hollister's First Annual Turkey Day Leftovers Boogie. As you may or may not know, we're going to be saying goodbye to the Bunkhouse for the season. Don't fret, my little dears, it'll be back next year, but for now we must bid farewell to that magnificent house. And what better way to say such a tearful goodbye, we ask, than wine, women and song? Well, we know exactly what would be better than to stuff one's face with food and booze amongst family. The only thing better than such a glorious gathering would be to stuff one's face with food and booze amongst friends and family after a day of $10 slots. Forget Black Friday. I heard someone was selling a 40" HD Flatscreen Supertron 5000 for $250. Whatever. We're selling $10 skydives. Cash only. From the PAC. Friday thru Sunday. BYO women. And wine for that matter. The turkey is on us. So join us, skydiving family, for a weekend of $10 slots followed by a huge family dinner, gluttonous consumption of alcoholic beverages and more merriement than you can shake a stick at. The tl;dr version: -$10 slots Fri (12pm), Sat & Sun (9am) -Potluckish, leftover fueled dinner Sat night -Wine, Cheap Slots, Turkey, Fun

Well fellow skydivers, it's that time of the year. The skydiving season is coming to an end, the holidays are approaching, and the clouds are rolling in. It's never too early to start thinking about your New Year's Resolution, what you're going to get Aunt Margie for Christmas (or yourself for that matter), or what the hell, how about Valentine's Day? We're here to help. Skydive Hollister is putting up a one week special to help with all of the above. http://1800FUNJUMP.com/WeAreCrazy We wanted to come up with the craziest deals possible to get you back up in the air. For our Tandem Jumpers we're going to take $70 off all of our tandem prices and $30 off our video. You may have heard of our Groupon promotions, well, if you missed it here it is. We're also going to do our AFF Package for $999. Get trained to jump solo! Buy the package as part of this promotion and we'll throw in 10 free solo skydives for after you graduate, in addition to the 7 jumps with instructors that comprise our AFF course. Do the math. And lest we forget our Funjumpers. The Million Feet is back. Fifteen. Dollar. Slots. $1000, 67 tickets, 15k, the PAC. GOOD GOLLY HOW DO I BUY ALL OF THESE SHINY THINGS? Visit us online at http://1800FUNJUMP.com/WeAreCrazy or give us a call at 1-800-FUN-JUMP. Skydive Hollister's 3rd Annual Halloween Bash will be held Halloween weekend, October 29th through 31st. To get everyone out, we're going to be giving everyone the benefit of $15 slots. The catch? The only catch is that it's cash only. Not too big a deal. If you have tickets and want to use them, feel free, but it's not very often you can jump out of a PAC for $15 cash. In addition to the $15 slot craziness, we're going to be running Night Jumps on October 30th. Strobe lights, glow sticks, $40 slots, the whole nine yards. And finally, we're going to be opening up our Staff House to everyone for Saturday night to make it a little easier for you guys to come down. So pack up the glow sticks, dig out your strobe light, get your costume together and come down to Hollister this Halloween! Say goodbye to an epic season the right way.

Register today at http://bit.ly/GravityOlympics It's going to be great fun! From June 10th through 13th Skydive Hollister will be running the Gravity Olympics! With crazy Solo Events to crazy Team Events and plenty of Mayhem in between, this is going to be one event you don't want to miss! We even have some Special Events such as a Packing Race, Creeper Madness, and possibly even an Obstacle Course. The Special Events are probably going to be pretty dangerous, so bring a helmet. Without further ado, we bring you the best ideas our team of highly trained Chimpanzees were able to come up with: Solo Events -Fastest Freefall Bust out the spandex because this one's all about speed. Big Chris we're looking in your direction. We're going to slap a ProTrack somewhere on your person, and whomever gets the highest average speed on their jump will walk away with a shiny Gold Medal. -Slowest Freefall Time to get some creative outfits going on. This one is all about drag and beach balls. The jumper with the slowest average speed on their skydive will sleep that night a Champion. A slow, drag laden Champion. -Accuracy! No tuffet, no gigantic canopies, no winning by a hair's breadth. There are two portions to this combined score event - you will be dropping something from under canopy and hitting a target and then landing your own parachute on a target. Don't be a punk! Register at http://bit.ly/GravityOlympics Team Events -Farthest Birdeo! This is going to be tricky, but we're essentially strapping Skydive Hollister's Very Own GPSTrackamajig to your rider's foot and seeing how far you can fly them around the sky! -The 3-Way 3D Competition It's easy! 3 head down docks, 3 sit docks, and 3 belly docks. Fastest to complete takes the prize! -3-Way Hybrids Starting as a 3-Way Speedstar, the fastest team to get all 3 jumpers to hang will win the Gold! -3-Way Hoop Dive Similar to the Hybrid Event, this jump will start as a 3-Way Speedstar. The team that can get each jumper through the hoop twice will take first place! -4-Way Belly Jump A traditional 4-Way competition with outside video, points and judges, this event will put your booties to the test! Dirt dive and flat pack your way to the top of the skydiving food chain! Don't forget! Register today at http://bit.ly/GravityOlympics

Oh no! I work here, and one of the things that we try to get right 100% of the time is the service end, it's the easiest to get right and the most important (besides safety) to the customer. Pleasing everyone who walks through the door is the goal, but its impossible. We do our best and we genuinely do care. As far as the jumpsuits, that disgusting. We wash them every week or two, but you get one unhygienic AFF student wearing the suit around for a few hours stinking it up and it doesn't matter how often you wash them. In regards to reserve rides, everyones position is different. Ours is that it is business as usual and nothing to worry about. It's easy for people to freak out and we want them to think about how much fun they had rather than how close they 'think' they came to dying. We brush it off with our students, others may do something different. And we try, oh how we try, to make sure our instructors give our students the best service in the industry. We've 86'd more instructors than I can count for not providing the right kind of experience, from lewd comments that are business as usual other places, to just not giving a shit about the 'screaming pillow' in front of them. It's easy for instructors to forget that these people paid over a thousand dollars in some cases, more than I spent on my car, for this experience. All it takes is a smile and some small talk. Like I said, we try to get it right 100% of the time, and when we don't we try to make it right. If you would be so kind as to PM their info I'll see if we can't get it right the second time. Thanks a bunch!!

This Friday at 3pm we have some RIDICULOUS stuff planned. There was quite the debate raging internally in the Principal's Office. As is usually the case, the "which has a higher fun factor" litmus test was applied, and a decision was made. This Friday we're going to give $10 slots a try. $10 SLOTS? Yes. $10 SLOTS. Out of the PAC. Could it be true? Yes, fellow freefall addicts, soon we're going to be paying you to skydive here. But before we go that far we're going to offer $10 slots to 10k. Starting Friday at 3pm and ending when the sun goes down on Friday. How can we do this? I don't know either so don't think about it too hard. Just get here early on Friday and premanifest yourself because these are going to go fast

Jay Stokes is coming to Hollister and will be here Thursday May 20th through Tuesday, May 25th. What exactly is he doing? EVERYTHING. Coach, Tandem and AFF. If you wanted any of these ratings, now is the time. Check out Jay's site at http://certificationunlimited.com! Sign Up Here: http://bit.ly/JayStokes Here's the rundown: The Coach Rating: If you have a hundred jumps or more, you need one. You learn a lot and you get to jump with students. You need: A B-License and a 100+ jumps. The Tandem Rating: Unlocking a lifetime of riches and fame no longer requires a real estate license and a pile of self help books. The drogue, America's Secret to Financial Freedom. You need: A D-License, 500+ jumps and balls of steel. The AFF Rating: For those who really want to give back, and really want to get paid to freefly and swoop. You need: A Coach Rating for a year or 500+ jumps. If you are thinking about enrolling, let us know and we can get you on some Eval jumps to get you ready for the course. How do I do all of these cool things? Sign Up Here: http://bit.ly/JayStokes

Ugh, what a punch in the gut... A friend brought this to my attention yesterday. Sorry you got such a runaround from us. This is Joe, we spoke via phone and email a couple of times regarding your refund. Nothing really to say except that we went through three Gear Store Managers and your refund kept getting lost in the shuffle. The buck stops with me and i dropped the ball. Not much to say except I'm terribly sorry. As I said in my email to you yesterday, I hope this doesn't spoil your future sales via DZ.com, regardless of seller. I processed your refund last night via PayPal and added an extra $75 on there. Again, I feel terrible and I'm nothing but embarrassed and sorry. Best of luck John! Let me know if the PayPal payment went thru ok!

If you haven't been to Hollister is past six months, come join us March 20th and 21st and your first jump is on us! Skydive Hollister's First Annual Spring Boogie will be held March 20th through 21st, next Saturday and Sunday! This is going to be a lot of fun, so don't miss out. As an added bonus, if you haven't been to Hollister in the last 6 months, since September 14th, 2009, we'll hook you up with a free Jump Ticket! In addition to some awesome organizing, we're going to have a ridiculous crazy awesome Boogie Bag, which for $30 will get you: -A postdated Jump Ticket (for after the Boogie) -A Tri-Tip ticket (mmmmmm BBQ) -A red cup (for the keg) -Great joy and a sense of fulfillment -A Skydive Hollister T-shirt (yes, you read that right and no, you haven't seem them before and yes, they are awesome) -Some Skydive Hollister Stickers (yes, you read that right and no, you haven't seem them before and yes, they are awesome) -$15 slots. All day. Saturday and Sunday. For real. No fine print, no catches and no indian-giving this time. -A Raffle Ticket! Which brings us to Skydive Hollister's First Annual Spring Boogie Raffle-a-Thon! Everyone's best friend Peter Learmonth is going to be shaving his head for science! And by that I mean to raise money for finding a cure for children's cancer. Saturday the 20th Peter is going to be re-shaving his dome (the actual event will be this coming Tuesday) and all proceeds will go to the St. Baldrick's foundation. The prizes will be dispersed Sunday evening after Sunset load returns and the keg is tapped. There are a number of things you can do to participate! -Donating food and clothing to Skydive Hollister's very own Poor Mexican Kids Who Watch Us Skydive In Baja will get you a couple raffle tickets -Donating a prize to the prize pool (anything at all, from pack jobs to DVDs to coach jumps) will get you a couple raffle tickets -Purchasing raffle tickets ($10 each) will get you, well, raffle tickets. The proceeds from these raffle tickets is what we'll be donating to St. Baldricks! So buy them! Come on down and check the new hangar out!

This coming weekend, November 14th and 15th, DarkSide Hybrids are on the agenda with organizing from Dan Manners! We're going to try to build up to busting through Hollister's 12-way Hybrid record! If you’re new to the idea of hybrids this is a great time to come out and get your feet wet, or if you’re an old pro this weekend will be awesome time to show off your mad skillz. We're going to start with smaller ways and hopefully by Sunday we'll be funneling 10-way bases! Now, since we'll be needing lots and lots of outside video, this is the perfect opportunity to test out that mad new L bracket you taped to your Pro-Tec! To sweeten the deal we're going to set up the projector Saturday and Sunday night, and everyone from the best Hybrid of each day is going to be getting a Jump Ticket, Videographer included! That's right, your blingin' video of that sick 6-way can win you all a free jump!

The course, my friends, is confirmed. Jay Stokes will be here from November 20th through November 22nd! Slots may be limited as there has been a lot of interest in the course. With enough students, Yong will be here as well. Head over to http://certificationunlimited.com/Pages/Coach.html and check out the requirements! The course is three days, and the costs are as follows: -$200 Course Fee ($100 due in advance in the form of a deposit, $100 due on Day 1) -Slots for the Candidate and Examiner -Transportation fee (usually $50-100, depending on number of registrants) And that's it! ************** To sign up, fill out the form here: http://coachwithjay.sign-up-sheet.com/ ************** After you sign up we'll get in touch with you for the deposit! Do it!

That's right, Halloween falls on a Saturday this year, so we'll be tearing it up! We are still offering our Million Feet package through Halloween, so pick one up while it lasts! All bets are off after Halloween, this is your last chance to buy that Million Feet you've been hearing about to take advantage of some $15 slot action seven days a week! The Bash! Those lucky winners who come dressed in costume will get: $15 slots on flights 15k $25 slots on flight to 18k (Million Feet owners will go to 18k for one $15 ticket!) Free beer at the Bunkhouse (and you can crash there for free too!) Costume Contest! Shenanigans! And a Raffle! Everyone loves Raffles! The problem is you never win. So, in our Raffle everyone wins! Tickets will be $10, and you're gonna win something!! -Jump Tickets! -Free Wingsuit Course -Gravity Pilots DVD -Free Nights at the BunkHouse -Tube Stoes -A Reserve Repack -ACS Clothing -And the Grand Prize: Point Break on VHS So come down and spend your Halloween in Hollister!

This coming weekend we're going to be having a package deal on tickets. $1000 67 15k tickets Over an hour of freefall $15 slots This weekend only! Call for details! 1-800-FUN-JUMP

We're going to be running Coach, Tandem and AFF Courses with Jay Stokes. The Coach and Tandem Course will be happening August 17-22. he AFF Course will begin the 24th of August and finish when all of the prospective instructors have finally been reduced to a gooey pile of tears, broken dreams and maxed out credit cards. Bear in mind, the course fees below cover only the cover the training and examiner's fees. They do not cover: the examiner's transportation or lodging expenses, nor do they include slots, video slots and fees, or evaluators' slots and fees. USPA Coach Course Fee: $200 USPA & Sigma Tandem Course Fee: $300 AFF Course Fee: $475 OMG HOW DO I REGISTER?! http://www.certificationunlimited.com/Pages/Contact.html Pay the $100 deposit (or the whole course fee if you are feeling squirrelly), download the forms, and then shoot us an email. OMG CAN I REALLY DO THIS?! Yes, and please do, so long as you: For the Coach Rating- -Have a USPA B License -Documented proof of 100 jumps -Have a completed Coach Rating Exam (located in the back of the IRM) -Assisted with one complete First Jump Course (email us!) For the Tandem Rating- -Have a USPA D License -Documented proof of 500 jumps -Have a current FAA Class III Medical Certificate (oh god get it now!) -Have at least 3 years in the sport (your 1st Tandem counts!) -Have a USPA Coach Rating (we're doing the course at the same time!) For the AFF Rating- -Have a USPA C License -Documentation of 6 hours of free fall time -Have a USPA Coach Rating (we're doing the course at the same time!) For each of these courses, be sure that you put down the deposit and then download and complete the required forms before the course. You're all skydivers and they know this, so the forms use big fonts, lots of numbered directions, and are generally idiot proof. Especially the tandem form. I love you.

4th of July weekend was a ton of fun, with more great Night Jumps and some after hours shenanigans at the bunk house! This weekend we're going to be having Dan Manners out coaching all of you who've always wanted to join us on the Darkside!! Come and learn to Freefly, all you need is an A-License! To make it easy for you, we're going to be running a Ground School Orientation at 9am for $15, and then 2-way coaching all day with Dan for $45, video included. I know, that's a Coach Jump for less than the cost of 2 slots. We're just crazy like that. The $45 will cover your slot, your coach's slot, their instructional fee, as well as the training video. We'll dub the training video for $10 and you can take it home and show friends and family your new mad-ass freefly skills! For those of you already proficient on your feet/head, there'll be freeflyers out organizing and some newbies looking for some small-way action, so you officially have no excuse. Unless you're like married or something. But even then. -Skydive Hollister

The PAC is back from Davis and we're going to run a mini-Boogie down here in Hollister this 4th of July! A $20 registration fee will get you: -Nightjumps! Regularly $40, save $10 if you pre-Manifest, $5 if you Manifest the day of! -$20 slots all day on the 4th -Free Beer! -Free BBQ! -Crash for free at our new Bunkhouse! (bring warm things to wrap around your body) It's going to be a crazy day, so bring some fireworks and we'll blow shit up all night long! Next weekend Dan Manners will be back doing a Freefly Workshop! Ground School for first timers and lots of 2-way coaching for those of all skill levels. Join us on the Darkside. This Friday we'll be starting at 9am and going all day. Saturday starting at 12pm and going all night long. Sunday at 9am (for real, it's going to be a busy day!). Monday is TBA. See you guys up there! 1800FUNJUMP.com