Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base had some unwelcome boots
on the ground Sunday when two skydivers missed the nearby St. Marys
Airport.
Not only that, their papers were not in order, said Jay Stanford, chairman of the St. Marys Airport Authority.
Stanford said he answered the phone at the airport Sunday to hear the Navy say it had two jumpers in custody.
“They said one was a naturalized citizen and one was not a U.S. citizen and [didn’t have] a passport,” Stanford said Monday.
Cathy Kloess, owner of The Jumping Place, a skydiving
business that operates from the St. Marys Airport, said the skydivers
landed on a baseball diamond on the base.
Once her business provided adequate identity for the two jumpers, base security released them.
“They definitely don’t want people landing on their military installation,’’ Kloess said. “They were very stern with us.”
But with an “act of God,’’ like the strong wind that blew the skydivers off target, the Navy was understanding, Kloess said.
“The object is to get people on the ground safely,” even if it means landing on the high security base, she said.
The skydivers didn’t know the fields were on Kings Bay and, in fact, thought they were in St. Marys, Kloess said.
That may be because the most recent aerial photo she
has of the base shows trees where the baseball fields are now located.
“We’ve definitely got to update our photos,” she said.
Some of the airspace above Kings Bay is prohibited,
meaning no planes or skydivers are allowed, but Kloess said that jumpers
were more than a mile from it.
Stanford said the Airport Authority will make its own inquiry and see what the Navy’s position is on such incidents.
The Jumping Place is just back into the air over St. Marys after months of wrangling over a permit with the Airport Authority. One of the provisions of the permit is establishing a landing zone on the airport.
On her website, Kloess called the sub base landing an “isolated incident.”
It is at least the third time in three years, however, that skydivers have missed the airport.
A woman suffered head and neck injuries in March 2011
when she was blown off course and hit power lines and landed on Georgia
40. A year earlier, a Sarasota woman died after she also was blown off
target and landed in woods at a subdivision.
Kloess estimates that as many as 6,000 people visit St. Marys each year because of The Jumping Place.
The site is popular, she said, because of the views of St. Marys, the ocean and Cumberland Island.
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