Into the blue

Local skydiving team wins national championship

By Tracy Ouellette

Editor

Local-based skydiving team Slotswitch won gold in two-way canopy formation skydiving at the U.S. Parachute Association National Parachuting Championships that concluded June 25 at Skydive Paraclete XP in Raeford, N.C.

The team operates out of Skydive Milwaukee in East Troy and is comprised of members John Bechtel, of Waterford, an account director for Oracle Corp. with 1,600 skydives; Bob Felt, of Madison, with more than 4,800 jumps; and Brian Martin of Grayslake, Ill., a software engineer for Discover Financial Services with 4,000 jumps.

Bechtel, 45, said he started skydiving in college and jumped for about two years.

“I only got in about 38 jumps before I stopped,” he said. “I had no money being a poor college kid and we moved several times and I sort of fell out of the sport.”

He said when he found himself back in the area in the early 2000s he became interested in jumping again.

“I picked it back up in 2003 when I was living in Wales,” he said. “I joined the Sky Knights in East Troy.”

Bechtel said he met teammate Brian Martin at Skydive Milwaukee in East Troy, which is home to the Sky Knights Sport Parachute Club.

“Brian had been jumping at Sky Knights and working there as a tandem instructor for quite some time,” Bechtel said. “I met up with him in late 2004 and we heard about this thing called canopy formation, and without any training or knowledge of what we were doing, we decided to find out what this was all about and give it a shot.”

He said they later met some experienced skydivers, who knew what they were doing and got some advice and the proper parachutes for the type of skydiving they were attempting to do.

“We put together a team in 2010,” Bechtel said. “It wasn’t a serious team by any means, the U.S. Nationals were in Chicago that year and we said, ‘Let’s put a team together and see how we do.’

“We actually did fairly well and we’ve been doing it ever since, this is our sixth year of competing together.”

In the competition, canopy formation skydiving teams of two skydivers deploy their parachutes immediately after jumping from the plane and build formations as quickly as possible while holding onto each other’s canopies.

In Slotswitch, Martin and Bechtel create the formations while Felt videotapes them.

The two-way sequential skydive the group competes in requires the divers to rotate through a series of five formations that are chosen in a random draw the night before the competition, Bechtel explained.

“You’ve got 30 seconds from the time the first person leaves the plane to put together that very first formation and after that 30 seconds you have one minute to rotate through the five formations,” he said.

To do this, the skydivers deploy their parachutes about two seconds after leaving the airplane. It can be dangerous, Bechtel said, but they do about 100 to 120 practice jumps a year and make sure they focus on keeping everyone safe.

Bechtel said this year’s national competition was a bit tougher than previous years because he had injured himself just before the championships.

“The week before we went to nationals I crushed my hand in a log splitter,” he said. “So this year was extremely challenging for me, so it was all the more exciting that we could do this, this year.”

He hasn’t jumped since nationals, as his hand needs time to heal, but he expects to be back in the sky practicing before the end of summer.

About Skydive Milwaukee

Skydive Milwaukee and Sky Knights Sport Parachute Club are based out of East Troy and can be found about a half mile east of the East Troy Municipal Airport’s main entrance.

Hours of operation are: Monday, noon to sunset, office hours only; Tuesday through Friday, noon to sunset; Saturday and Sunday, 7 a.m. to sunset.

They offer tandem skydive jumps, learn to skydive lesson, and can accommodate experienced jumpers.

For more information, visit www.skydivemilwaukee.com.