Hey everybody! I'm alive! Here's a couple of pics from my jump. The first one is my favorite. I also got a DVD of the jump, and I might try ripping it and putting that up here as well, but we'll see.
Don and I arrived at noon for the jump. We spent the first hour signing a bunch of documents saying that skydiving is dangerous, and it's not their fault that we are stupid enough to try it. There was also a video explaining the dangers to us, hosted by a guy who looked like ZZ Top but in a suit. We were then videotaped signing the last line of a document. My favorite clause in the document was the one that said that we realize that skydiving is of no value to the public. After all the initialing and signing, we headed out to an area with a bunch of picnic tables and awaited our instructions. We waited for quite a while. In the meantime, we watched jumpers coming in for landings every few minutes. We also watched as some people practiced doing formations on wheeled boards.
We finally met up with our tandem jumpers and videographers. My jumper was Lou and my videographer were Doug, both were excellent. We went to a room to get suited up. We had the option of wearing a jumpsuit over our clothes, but as it was wicked hot, we declined. We strapped on a harness, a padded helmet, and some goggles. Then, as we waited for the plane to come get us, we went through the jump procedure with our jumper. It couldn't have been more simple, and yet, because of the nervousness accompanying this adventure, it was difficult to follow simple instructions. The plane arrived, and after gassing up, we boarded. The plane fit maybe around 16 people, and it was a tight fit. The seating was two bench seats along each side of the plane. We tandem jumpers were towards the front of the plane and would go after all of the single jumpers. The roughest part of the whole experience for me was between about 5,000 and 7,000 feet, I started to get a little queasy, because the small plane was experiencing a little turbulence. After that, everything happened pretty fast. We got strapped up to our jumpers and headed towards the door at about 12,500 feet, sliding down the bench seat. We got in position to jump, and I really didn't even have to jump. I just kind of rolled out with Lou's momentum. Thus began the freefall.
It was pretty amazing being out there in the open air with that view. It's hard to be scared at this point, because there's so much to take in and you've got a cameraman in your face. While you know that you are falling rather quickly if you think about, you don't really notice it, because the ground isn't getting bigger in any kind of rapid way at this point. I suppose it would be between 1,000 ft and 0 ft, but not up higher. Plus, you aren't falling next to something stationary that shows you your relative speed. One tense moment in the process is pulling the rip cord and waiting for the parachute to unfold and catch you. Now, I was supposed to be the one pulling the rip cord at 6,000 feet, but before I knew it had been pulled, the parachute jerked us to a much slower pace. Apparently, we were pretty far away from our drop zone, so Lou pulled a little early to give us plenty of time to make it back. I was surprised at how uncomfortable the rest of the ride down was. The harness goes around your legs, and the loops seemed to be cutting off the circulation. We spun around and such in the air a few times, checking out the awesome view, and then we came in for a landing that was very smooth.
While it was fun, I probably won't be doing much skydiving any time in the near future. There are other hobbies that I'd rather devote my time and money to, like getting my pilot's license. But I'm happy to say that I've finally crossed something off of my spy training list.