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Heritage Bank Customer Specializes in Bucket-List Thrills
Geoffrey “Jeff” Farrington’s skydiving skills have earned him movie roles for stunts—appearing in “Operation Dumbo Drop,”
“Air Force One,” and “Tears of the Sun”—and experiences around the world, but one of his biggest thrills is seeing the excitement of customers when they complete their first jump with his team at Skydive Kapowsin.
“When tandems took off, it just allowed us to bring skydiving to the masses,” Farrington said of tandem jumping that attaches a professional skydiver to firsttime jumpers. “It’s just exciting, on a day-to-day basis, having somebody come in after making their jump and they’re so excited and having fun.”
Fun is the name of the game. Safety, of course, comes first and is the foundation on which thrills occur.
Farrington, who turns 76 in August, his wife, Jessie, and their two grown children, Andy Farrington and Keri Bell, are co-owners of Skydive Kapowsin, which is located in Shelton, Washington, about 25 miles north-northwest of Olympia. They’re all pilots and parachutists.
It was Jessie who got Jeff hooked on skydiving, a skill Jessie learned from her father, a World War II fighter pilot who flew for and jumped with a skydiving club in the mid-1960s at Thun Field, now known as Pierce County Airport-Thun Field, about 17 miles south of downtown Tacoma. When Jessie and Jeff met at White Pass Ski Area in 1971 and Jessie’s conversation turned to skydiving, Jeff expressed interest in trying it. Jessie was his instructor and he made his first plunge in 1971. He was hooked.
Later married, the couple saw a business opportunity as skydiving began to gain popularity. They bought 200 acres in Kapowsin, a few miles south of Thun Field and developed a residential airpark, Kapowsin Field, which gave them a place to do business and fuel their love of the sport. They founded Kapowsin Air Sports in 1979. As business took off and the couple needed more space, they sold that property and moved the business to Shelton in 2006. Skydive Kapowsin leases property from the Port of Shelton and has two hangars on the site to
accommodate the business and five airplanes.
Its fleet includes a Cessna 182 that carries four passengers, a Pilatus PC-6 Porter that carries about eight passengers, two Cessna Grand Caravans that carry 15 to 17 people and a De Havilland Canada Super Twin Otter that can carry 22 people. Asked if he owns all the planes, Farrington joked, “me and Heritage Bank.”
While Skydive Kapowsin attracts customers from all over the world, most of them originate from an area roughly stretching from Bellingham, Washington, to Portland, Oregon, he said.
Its programs include tandems for beginners; a seven-level program to learn to skydive, with the first jump including two instructors holding the customer’s parachute harness during freefall and ensuring proper parachute deployment before allowing the customer to make a solo descent guided from the ground by an instructor using a radio; and flight packages for experienced jumpers. Jumps occur from elevations of roughly 8,000 to 18,000 feet, depending on experience, weather and other factors.
The company also offers video and photo packages to capture the special moments.
A banking relationship takes flight
Farrington and Donna Moir, a commercial banking officer for Heritage Bank, sit together on the Economic Development Council of Mason County. Moir, over time, sought banking business from Farrington and when Heritage offered what he called a “very attractive” fixedrate loan to buy a plane, Farrington became a customer about three years ago. The bank’s role helping buy the airplane was turbulence free.
“I bought an airplane from Cessna directly and got a good deal on it because I had the funding in place and ready to go,” Farrington said of going to Cessna’s factory in Wichita, Kansas.
Skydive Kapowsin also has a business account at the bank. Farrington likes the personal attention he gets from his local Heritage branch in Shelton.
“I like being able to walk into the branch without an appointment and the manager will fit me in,” he said.
The business did tap Heritage early in the pandemic for Paycheck Protection Program funding when no one knew where the economy was headed.
“We closed for three months right at the start,” Farrington said.
When summer came, the business limited the number of people in its planes, did social distancing and enjoyed a brisk business as people flocked to outdoor activities as a safe recreation option.
The hangar door in the summer is also open most of the time, and with a door opening measuring 70 feet wide by 20 feet high, it’s like being outside, he said.
“People just wanted something to do, so they came out and skydived,” he said.
Asked what insight he might have for other businesses considering Heritage Bank, Farrington said he recommends people to Heritage all the time. Referring to someone he knows working on a local business project, Farrington emphasized the proximity and friendliness of the local branch.
A family passion shared with others
Skydive Kapowsin is a family affair, and skydiving has led Farrington, Jessie and Andy to movie jobs. Farrington was actor Danny Glover’s stunt double in “Operation Dumbo Drop” because Farrington could jump with a round parachute and was a master parachute rigger. (Parachutes are rectangular today, “but we call then square,” Farrington said, noting they improve maneuverability and lead to softer landings.) In the movie, he was part of a scene throwing a make-believe, parachute-equipped Dumbo out of an airplane over Thailand.
In “Air Force One” and “Tears of the Sun,” Farrington served in stunts representing military jumpers. One stunt, for “Air Force One,” involved jumping at night onto a sloped roof of a Cleveland church.
“We were excited to say that this is a one-and-done stunt,” he recalled of the challenging landing.
He hasn’t had any close calls in his roughly 10,000 jumps, other than a broken ankle when he was still using round parachutes. Things are so much easier now with the new rectangular chutes.
“Jumping out of an airplane is inherently dangerous, of course, but we’ve made it such that, to tell you the truth, it really isn’t; it’s a controlled risk,” he said. It may seem counterintuitive, but you don’t get that rollercoaster, sinking-stomach feeling in a jump, he said.
“(During) free fall, you average about 120 mph, but it doesn’t really feel like you’re falling,” Farrington said. “It feels like you’re floating on air. If you forget your goggles, then you notice it…and when you get a little older like me, your skin flaps a little bit,” he added with a laugh. He acknowledges that people jumping for the first time are nervous. But when they see customers in the hangar laughing, giggling and excited after jumping, they calm down pretty quickly, he said.
“Our instructors do a good job of walking them through what they’re going to do and how they’re going to do it, and people ask them, ‘How many jumps do you have?’ I would say our instructors average 3,000 jumps—and they’re excited, too.”
Most instructors, parachute riggers and pilots are part-time contractors with Skydive Kapowsin. Their numbers swell to about 30 to 40 during the busy summer season, with about 10 during offseason. Many travel to other skydive businesses in the Sun Belt in winter. The company’s chief pilot and mechanic is a firefighter who works at Skydive Kapowsin when he’s not on fire duty.
Farrington’s son, Andy, 40, has the most jumps in the family, an estimated 30,000, and, like his father, is a master parachute rigger.
Andy is also a member of the Red Bull Air Force unit, doing skydives, B.A.S.E. jumps and wingsuit flying. Red Bull’s website lists him as the unit’s youngest member and notes that he won the Pro Swooping Tour, captured the Red Bull Championship in 2003 and won first place in accuracy and second place overall at the canopy piloting world championships.
Fun fact, according to the Red Bull site: Andy had about 100 jumps in utero with his mother, Jessie, “riding tandem, so to speak.” The site adds, “Maybe that explains why he’s such a natural in the sky.” He did his first tandem jump at age 12 and first solo jump at 16.
Not to be outdone, sister Keri has more than 13,000 jumps and is a member of a women’s jump team, Highlight Pro Skydiving Team. The team’s mission, according to its website: to inspire women and girls to live bold, brave lives of their own design.
A Seattle Times story in 2021 called her one of the most recognizable women in skydiving. In the Times story, team co-founder Melanie Curtis, called Bell “an absolute legend in the sport of skydiving.” Added Curtis, “She is literally one of the most experienced skydivers in the community. She’s phenomenal.”
Skydiving is big among other family members, too.
Farrington notes that with nieces, nephews and others, there can be 10 family members in a plane on any given day. With the ease and safety of tandem jumping, more people have added skydiving to their bucket list, and Skydive Kapowsin takes care to accommodate each customer’s needs, Farrington said.
When a 94-year-old woman wanted to jump a couple years ago, staff wheeled her to the plane in her wheelchair, lifted her into the aircraft, and Keri took her on a tandem jump.
“It’s just that type of thing,” he said. “Her kids felt comfortable, she felt comfortable, we went out to the landing area and picked her up in her wheelchair and brought her back to the hangar.”
Several days before Farrington spoke for this story, Skydive Kapowsin took a man for his first jump on his 80th birthday.
“They’re excited that something they’ve wanted to do, they’ve talked about doing for a long time, and at some point somebody says, ‘Well, it’s time to do it,’ and they come out and do it,” Farrington said.
