Page 35 - Panama City Living Magazine

ing license at Skydive Panama City. Scuba diving was his preferred adrenaline-laden sport until he started skydiving. “I’ve pretty much done it all, and skydiving is the most exciting thing ever, but I’ll always be looking for the next thing,” he said.
Sean Coots, simply referred to as “Coots,” is a “TI,” a tandem in- structor, and his good friend Travis Alexander, an active Army he- licopter pilot and instructor, have known each other since 2013. Both are known to push the envelope in the skydiving sport when they solo-jump. Simply talking with these two will speed up one’s heart rate as they describe the more technical aspects of skydiving and the more daring sides of the sport that thrills them. Sean says of his first jump, “It was super awesome ... once you get used to it, you enjoy it; it’s just a different sense of enjoyment. I don’t con- sider myself an adrenaline junkie—I just like an ongoing challenge,
and I like to go fast! Here, a hundred and twenty miles per hour is a slow day,” he says with a laugh. With almost 2,300 jumps under his belt, he admits, on rare occasions something can go wrong that gets his blood moving. He recalls a time, the only time, when he had a problem with his canopy and was forced to resort to his backup. Even this he describes as “excitement” rather than adrenaline.
There is skydiving and then there is “swooping,” I learn from Travis and Sean. Swooping is a vein of skydiving in which smaller canopies are used and maneuvered in skillful, radical ways that cause a fast and in- tense drop in altitude and increase in speed. “The smaller the canopy, the higher the speed,” says Travis, who tells me he has been injured while swooping. In fact, this is where many injuries occur as limits are pushed. Travis goes on to tell me about something called Relative Work, or XRW, when several skydivers coordinate formations while freefalling.
Coming back to the hangar after a jump
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