I just received this information from Kevin (He was as quick to respond to my email as he was between each jump (6-8 minutes if you didn’t read my last post 
), so, now I really hope you’ll let him know how grateful your are for his jumps.
Caleb, here’s additional information I’ve been sending out:
The day started at 5:45am with the minimum 2000 foot ceiling. We were on 5 minute turn pace for each jump right away, completing 22 jumps by about 8am when the weather got worse. We then intermittently picked up 10 more jumps by 2pm. At that point I knew if the weather didn’t clear soon we were 50/50 on reaching the goal.
The weather did turn. And we executed 68 jumps in a row, the 100th being at 8:30pm with a formation load of 15 skydivers from full altitude (13,000 feet), we formed the number 100 in freefall. I landed last and got “pied” by my fellow skydivers (whip cream pie in your face when you do something significant like your 1000th jump, a tradition in skydiving).
A quick side note:
Weather makes skydivers do stupid things. And that happened to me. Our intermittent jumps during low ceiling periods caused me (us) to make some bad decisions. I (we) got away with it but it was sheer luck. Jumping from too low of an altitude with very little time for an out is a bad idea. I won’t write what we did here for obvious reasons.
The media was very kind to us. We were the beneficiary of a slow news day, an exciting, visual event, and a good story. Here’s a partial list:
KARE 11 Saturday morning in studio
Channel 5 Twin Cities Live in studio
Paul Harvey radio national
CNN national TV and radio (just came across the TV and radio, wow)
Fox News Twin Cities, Chicago, Houston and Milwaukee – live feed interviews on-site via $5000 satellite hook up they paid for for 4 hours
WCCO Radio
Channel 4 TV onsite live interviews
KARE 11 on site live interviews
Pioneer Press
Chicago Tribune
AM 1500 KSTP with Tom Mitschke (twice, last week and the day of)
Monday morning the Comcast national station will have me on a show – Big Idea, Small Town, live TV
Numerous other publications and Internet outlets have picked it up.
We raised the $45K we wanted to raise and we increased awareness for Parkinson’s Disease.
Thanks to our EO Chapter for their support, just amazing what a good group of people can do. I’m lucky to be a member.
Good photos here (credit to Daniel Rens, you have permission to use): http://aeternaphotography.com/100perfect/
