This past weekend was the second meet of the 2014 FLCPA season.  Fourty competitors arrived from around the world and across the US to compete.  This meet brought Fifteen amateur and twenty-five pro competitors to Skydive City in Z-Hills.  Many competitors began arriving a week or two ahead of time for some winter training in sunny Florida.  By Friday morning the PD & Mirage tents were up pondside and most competitors did 4-7 practice jumps on friday.

The weather was wonderful on Saturday reaching 80 degrees. 7:30 AM came pretty early(and dark too) when competitors arrived for the morning safety briefing.   We began with the Speed event after the briefing concluded and exit orders were finalized.  Times getting down into the 2.4 second range were seen.  After a short course change we continued into the distance event with a quartering tail wind from the southeast.  Congratulations to Gage Galle from the PD Factory Team who set a new Florida state distance record at 139.20 meters.

The coach for this meet was Ian Bobo from the PD Factory Team.  Ian set up his white board near the end of the course and was handing out tips and tricks as quickly as he could to each competitor.

We had an injury on touchdown by French competitor David Maleze who was having a great meet.  Unfortunately a rough landing caused a fracture on his lower leg.  Here’s to a quick recovery for David.

The late afternoon brought changing conditions for the zone accuracy event.  There’s a reason this event is known as the great equalizer!  There were certainly a lot of place changes in these last two rounds, except for the top spot which was strongly held by Curt Bartholomew throughout the meet.   At the end of the day, Curt was standing in first place, Greg Windmiller from the US Army Golden Knights was in second, and Julien Guiho was in third.

Big thanks to our judges, skydive city, our sponsors PD & Mirage, and all our volunteers who helped make this meet happen.  We couldn’t have done it without you.

The 3rd meet of the 2014 season will be April 5-6 in Raeford North Carolina.  See you there!