2007 H2O Boogie

What is Water Boogie? Just take a regular old late summer weekend at the lake, a lake that happens to have an airport and campground/LZ at it's edge, and add in two Cessna 182s with jump doors, a couple of big boats, 250 gallons of aviation gasoline, 2 kegs of beer, a few potato cannons, some mid size pyrotechnic devices, and the Skydive New Mexico club, and you have Water Boogie 2007 at Conchas Lake, New Mexico.

Some of my personal highlights of the event were chilling on Thursday night with the other early birds (we actually did get the worm, but that's another story) , Chloe's first tandem, my first water jump, a 3000 foot hop and pop with fellow geezers Ken Mascarenas and Deadwood under Sunday morning's low overcast (jump #299 for me), and a Saturday night feast and party that went on long into wee hours of the morning.

Above: Lee Norris makes a sunrise pass over the Water Boogie campground/LZ in his vintage Cessna 170

Above: Rudi Krenz prepares for one of the two water jumps he made during the boogie. Rudi has made over 60 water jumps in his 40 + year, multi thousand jump parachuting career. Rudi likes to jump his vintage round canopy, "The Blue Max" for his H2O "landings". In this photo Big John, Bob Martin and I make fun of Rudi's water jumping boots. On Saturday night Rudi received an award from James Englund and the club in recognition of his years of being a great contributor to the club and the sport of skydiving.

Most jumpers land in the open space in the middle of the campground, but a few also make jumps into the lake. You wouldn't want to use your sport rig for a water landing, because it's pretty hard on the gear, so everyone uses older, but still servicable gear. The hardcore water jumpers use old round parachutes and chest mounted reserves. I jumped a more modern system that Deadwood lent me; a Vector 2 with a "mystery main" that eventually revealed itself to be a Cruislite 220. I felt pretty nervous about jumping the "mystery main" until I found out Rich was jumping a "death rig" complete with "Death Rig: Do Not Jump!" printed on a label just above the cut away handle. The "death rig" held an Acutron 2000 ("the canopy of the future today!" according to Rich) that lived up to it's name by landing him dead center on the floating target. BTW, the "mystery main" opened soft and on heading, and gave me a nice ride all the way down to a smooth splash down right next to the rescue boats.

In the photo above, Rich watches Chloe arch and check altitude before pulling the ripcord, meanwhile, I continue my never ending search for a pull up cord

Above: One of our natural born stick and rudder experts sets up for a low pass in the jumpship. You might have to click on the picture to enlarge it because they are so freaking low that they are partially obscured by the weeds

Below: That's me and Chloe posing with Tandem Master Rich Deadwood before we jumped

Even our dog Timber got some airtime