Tandem Skydive Experience with Extreme Sports Cafe at our partner Drop Zone in Sri Racha near Pattaya in Thailand.

To do a Tandem Skydive requires no experience but there are weight restrictions.

The maximum weight for a Tandem Skydive is 95 Kilos. (fully clothed)

Available all year round

WE ARE NOW TAKING BOOKINGS FOR TANDEMS FROM 14th NOVEMBER 2008

Full Tandem Price 9,500THB

Bookings now being taken..

RRL Promo Video

Sound like a video game?

Of great interest to us was the comment on the video that you can play *against* real Rocket Racing League pilots online from a console!!! Mental stuff! 

The Rocket Racing League® is an aerospace sports and entertainment organization that combines the competition of racing with the excitement of rocketry. The RRL was established by X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis and two-time Indianapolis 500 champion team partner Granger Whitelaw to advance the technology and increase public awareness of space travel. The NASCAR-style racing league features rocket-powered aircraft that will be flown by top pilots through a ‘three-dimensional track way’ at venues throughout the world. With millions of fans who enjoy racing and air shows, and an even wider audience enthralled with humanity’s next step into space, rocket racing is destined to become the future of racing! 

http://www.rocketracingleague.com/

You can learn how to kitesurf in many spots around the world, but few offer the ideal conditions of Extreme Sports Café’s new partner Kenyan kitesurfing school for learning: wide beach, soft sand, protective barrier reef, no corals or rocks, cross winds and last but not least very warm water! Africa is like no other place on earth and kitesurfing there will be a holiday of a lifetime!
Extreme sports Café can now offer you incredible kiting conditions and a very chilled and unique type of holiday, in a new, uncrowned, exotic destination that combines great kiting conditions with a fantastic beach holiday.

Extreme Sports café’s newest partner is an established Kitesurf School on the beautiful Kenya Coast — it was actually the first school to open in East Africa 8 years ago. A small exclusive refuge situated on a deserted golden beach on the fringe of the Indian Ocean, set amongst a coconut palm plantation. This “barefoot luxury” resort is built of local rustic materials in true Robinson Crusoe style……….

More info here, and kitesurfing booking online here.

Needing a local number I went and bought a SIM card. The iPhone being on O2 here I grabbed one of theirs.. The one that said ‘50 Free Minutes’ on the packet.

It seemed reasonable at £10.00.

However 10 minutes later flashing down the M25 iPhone in one hand, steering wheel in the other I realized it’s a big stinking scam. The ‘50 Free Minutes’ is only for calls to a number outside the UK, and only once you’ve loaded some more money onto the phone!

Customer Service calls are charged at 25p from a fixed line or the mobile itself.. There is NO WAY to get in touch without paying, or loading the SIM.. even if you simply want help or advice.

Furious I dived into a petrol station to deal with some ‘local’ who barely spoke English and shovel another $20 in O2’s direction… So I could then finally call friends to let them know I had arrived back in rainy blighty!

Much later reading through the notes for the O2 SIM card I realized exactly how badly the phone companies here shaft travellers.. Your first 3 minutes of calls on any one day are charged at 25p each. That is actually more expensive than the normal per-minute rate to call Thailand (for example). After that it drops back to a more normal rate for the rest of that day. This ensures that the average traveller making those odd contact calls each day gets shafted each and every day.

Any direct internet connection is barred. On the iPhone the Edge stuff is completely disabled. They throw you some free multi-media messages, and a free ring tone.. But any internet access is at an exorbitant rate and only via their WAP service.

To call and complain, or get advice is billed at $.50 per call, and is not possible at all until you load and enable the SIM. That’s right.. That’s not a typo.. To get any help or advice you must load the SIM, and pay to speak to Customer Service.

Total cost to simply make a call once in the UK : £20.25 or $40.50

That is £10.00 to buy the SIM.
£10.00 to load the SIM. (It’s impossible to get smaller top up amounts).
£00.25p for your first one minute call to say ‘Hi. I am here’.

Alternatives.. Find a working Payphone at Heathrow (Ha!), or Roam using your home country SIM. That option is almost certainly cheaper for one or two contact calls while finding your feet…

I assume the other networks are the same but am not willing to cough up another $40 to find out. I have gone back to roaming on my Thai SIM.

Moral of this story. The UK is still in the dark ages for phone communications and cell charges, as well as wet, miserable and full of crap food, and people who don’t speak English at Petrol Stations!

DO NOT BUY O2 Pay as you Go SIM cards when in the UK.

Cool article on Wired.com..

Maddox has been into skydiving for 20 year and used to compete in tracking contests, where free-falling skydivers move horizontally across the sky at speeds approaching 120 mph. His buddy was always just a little bit faster, so Maddox thought “it’d be fun to strap a jet engine to my chest and make myself into a human missile.”

He discovered turbine jet engines are expensive. But pulse jets are as cheap as they are simple, so Maddox set to work building one. “All I started with was a schematic out of an encyclopedia,” he says. The engines are basically a long tube with a fuel pump, a spark plug and a reed valve. Air and fuel are mixed at the front and ignited in a process that repeats - or “pulses” - about 70 times a second. 

Maddox soon had a working engine and he developed a throttle that allowed him to control the level of thrust - something he says is rare on a pulse jet. He made three jumps from a plane (that’s him in the pic) but quit because “the fuel system was a little scary” and he worried about setting the plane on fire. But Maddox was hooked.

Original Article.

On the 6th March at 10:45am local time I jumped out of a helicopter from 2,800 feet. I opened my parachute after 1.5 seconds. We opened over the ocean and flew back to land on the beach where over 1000 Vietnamese locals looked on with interest. I jumped with Wendy Smith who happens to be the number one rated female skydiver in the world as well as flying the camera for me that day.

It was a day of firsts.

• First time I had been to Vietnam
• First time I had jumped out of a helicopter (or even being on one!)
• First time I had jumped from 2,800 feet (I usually jump from around 13,000 feet!)
• First time I had jumped onto a beach
• First time anyone in history has skydived on six continents in six days!
• First time many people had heard of 3 million orphans in South Africa!

Everything went well! We didn’t miss a flight. We didn’t have any really bad weather.

We made every pick up and every connection. It was a logistical nightmare organizing such a trip that took us to 6 continents, 9 countries, and 14 flights adding up to 92 hours in flying time in just 7 days!

We had an amazing experience and met some amazing people, really amazing.

…

Thanks everybody for your support!

God bless

Martin Downs

More info…

http://www.project0.org.za/content/view/15/24/

Videos…



 

LSD

Albert Hoffman died on Tuesday morning. RIP dude.

Forwarded from Lauren:

My name is Lauren Demme and my gear bag that has all of my skydiving gear in it has disappeared. It is black with purple pinstripes from the Sunshine Factory, and it has Lauren embroidered on it in purple. My green helmet bag with a Deland Embroidery on it is attached. In it is my rig which was my high school graduation present, my liquid sky suit which was college graduation, my mom’s helmet, and many other items that have great sentimental value as well as crucial pieces to my sanity!!!

If you could take the 5 minutes to forward this e-mail onto your skydiving friends any riggers you may know I would greatly appreciate it.

Everyone in the skydiving community is trying to do the same thing, and most of us barely have money to do so…it could be just an accident and someone picked it up by mistake. I don’t care…I just want it back!!! It really won’t take that long… To everyone that passes this on and Riggers that keep an eye out I want to you to know how grateful I am for your help. Seriously, thank you.

Lauren

Please contact The Skydiver Network, or Extreme Sports Cafe, directly with any info.

Gear Details:

Vector 3 Micron
UPT V310 s/n: 37690 DOM: 05/01
It is teal yellow and silver and has GRAD 2001 embroidered on the left mudflap and Skyhook as well.

Cypres
s/n: 50E0E7675CC8 2200 DOM: 07/98

Sapphire 2 119
s/n: 94315181 DOM: 04/06
that is teal bottom skin, yellow ribs and silver top skin

PD 143 Reserve
PD 143R s/n: 25881 DOM: 09/01

Liquid Sky Freefly Suit
One of a kind freefly suit, designed with teal, yellow and grey with bubbles that begin at the feet and swirl around the body.

Silver Z1 Freefly Helmet with a White ProDytter
There is a Gold Skydive Venezuela sticker on the back of my helmet.

Silver Altimaster 3
Lauren is engraved on the side.

Goggles, Gloves, additional clothing are all in there as well.

Thanks for all your help.

’nuff said… Learn to Skydive. Learn to Kitesurf. Or cheat and use your iPhone to stay online!

The world-famous Red Arrows have been banned from appearing at the 2012 London Olympics because they are deemed ‘too British’.

Organisers of the event say that the Arrows military background might be ‘offensive’ to other countries taking part in the Games. The display team have performed at more than 4000 events worldwide, but the Department of Culture, Media and Sport have deemed the display team ‘too militaristically British’. Red Arrows pilots were said to be ‘outraged’, as they had hoped to put on a truly world class display for the Games, something which had never been seen before. Being axed from a British-based event for being ‘too British’ is an insult - the Arrows are a symbol of Britain.

The Red Arrows have been excellent ambassadors for British overseas trade, as they display their British-built Hawk aircraft all over the world.

The Arrows performed a short flypast in 2005 when the winning bid was announced, but their flypast at the Games was to have been truly spectacular.

It is to be hoped that common sense prevails

If you disagree with this decision, sign the online petition. Please.

This is the current response from the PM’s office, where they deny the allegation. But remember it’s the Organizers who are trying to ban the Red Arrows. Not the PMs office. Apathy in these matters will often mean that these kind of stupid decisions go forward.. So please sign the petition.

PM’s Office response..

This allegation is not true. The Government has not banned the Red Arrows from the London 2012 Olympic Games. The organising committee of London 2012 will decide what to include in the Opening Ceremony and other celebrations - but with almost five years to go, decisions are yet to be made on what these will look like.

And of course the Red Arrows played a memorable role in the celebrations for 2012, when they flew over Trafalgar Square to mark London winning the Games.