In our headline story, we showed you the tragedy that befell the Belize boogie skydiving excursion as veteran parachutist Chad Zellinski plummeted 13,000 feet to his death in the seas east of San Pedro Town. But as organizer Rich Grimm said, such are the perils of skydiving. But what about the pleasures of it? Since the excursion began on February 11th, Grimm and his 120 skydivers from 10 different nations have completed 600 incident free jumps. One of those jumps was made by a first timer, our San Pedro Sun colleague Ron Sniffin, who battled his fear to show us what it's like from way up top. Here's Ron's story, completed a few days before the Zellinski tragedy.
Rich Grimm,
"This is a place that's just wonderful, there's so many other things to do for the jumpers. We have people that are scuba diving, snorkeling, and we have people that came from Poland, Japan, Canada, the United States, there's two jumpers here in Belize that are skydiving with us. What it is that its snowing like crazy up in the north and we can come here and everyone can get their skydive in and have a great time."
Ron Sniffin,
"What am I going to be doing in a couple minutes?"
Rich Grimm,
"Well we offer tandem skydivers to firs time jumpers and I have a staff of guys here who are world renowned sky divers, they all have ten to fifteen thousand skydives, they all do it professionally for a live in and you can make a tandem jump. We charge US$225 for the jump and then you can get video stills for US$110."
To See Ron Take The Jump of His Life Watch Our_ Video On-Demand.
And as we note din the first story, even with the Zellinski death, boogie Belize will continue, probably starting with a memorial jump tomorrow morning. The excursion ends next week Monday.
