Ireland Trip

Got back from Ireland yesterday. The first stop was the Irish Parachute Centre about 45 miles west of Dublin. Met some great people, Mr and Mrs H who looked after me so well in Clonbullogue. Vinney who showed me round the parachute centre and Coley the CCI. They have some very good facilities and some great jump ships (Aircraft), they have a Pilatus Porter, a Cessna 182, and they are putting the finishing touches to a 206 turbine. The centre has been running since 1956 and they are well established in the local area. Unfortunately the weather did not play ball. I was hoping to jump on Saturday morning, but is was raining and the cloud base was too low. Apparently it cleared about an hour after I left - that's skydiving. I will make a big effort to go back there, spoke to a lot of regulars and they seem a great bunch.

Now to Northern Ireland, John McCourt a friend of mine picked me up from Londonderry Airport. John had it all thought out and within an hour and a half I was at 13,500 doing a two way skydive with Stephen one of the club members. The parachute centre in Northern Ireland is called Wild Geese and is located between Belfast and Londonderry, again it too has great facilities. The main aircraft is a Cessna Caravan turbine and Cessna 206 used for students. As with the South the staff and club members could not have been more helpful, Maggie the CCI and Judith who runs manifest made sure I got onto lifts and generally sorted me out. On Sunday I had two more jumps and the pilot was Alex Brand (who works for Loganair - Loganair kindly donated the flights). Each of these jumps was from 13,000 feet and John jumped with me on the last one and took some fantastic photographs. Provided I can master some of the technology you should be able to see some of these attached. I was told in advance that I would be impressed with the set up in Ireland. If you are a Skydiver, go there you will not be disappointed.

Finally, thanks to Sharon and John for looking after me so well, they made me feel very much at home.

So 3 jumps 39,500 ft so far, just 960,500 to a 1,000,000 jh 15/4