Skydiving

Hi,

Another of my favorite past adventures is skydiving. I was fortunate enough to do this twice, both as tandem jumps. This means that there is an instructor with you when you jump. Most of the experts will tell you that they highly recommend two tandem jumps before going solo. It also means that you will only need a two-hour class instead of 8 hours if you bypass this recommendation.

The reason why I jumped in the first place was because of two colleagues of mine from a record store chain that I worked for called Music Plus. Their names were Yvonne and Katja. We had a regional meeting one day at the house of our supervisor, Stacey. I happened to bring a video tape of a bunjee jump that I had done in Las Vegas about one month earlier. They saw that and said that they had decided to try something like that but they wanted to skydive instead. They asked if I wanted to go and I said, to paraphrase, "hell, yeah"!

Anyway, we jumped this time at a place called Perris Valley Skydiving and decided to go again at the same place a few months later. The second time, we had a total of about twelve people who all saw our videos and just had to try it. It is the biggest adrenaline rush ever. For those looking for a way to experience flying in the safest, most amazing way ever, I recommend it. Some I know think that it is crazy but you have far better odds of getting in a car accident, according to the statistics, than getting hurt skydiving. Believe it or not, the hardest or scariest part about skydiving is not the actual falling from the sky once you jump but the plane ride up to two miles above the Earth! I continually second-guessed my asinine decision to jump headlong out of an airplane, parachute or not. Once you finally jump, it is great.

My second jump, a few months later, my tandem partner was a professional. He told me that he had over 2,400 jumps and that he parachuted into the main stadium at the Opening Ceremonies of the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics! I was feeling pretty safe at that point. He suggested that since I had jumped once before that we try an advance maneuver jumping out of the plane, if I was up to it. The trick was that upon exiting the plane, we would roll over and look back up at the plane as others jumped. It was a pretty cool move except for one thing...I lost my right contact just as we flipped over, even WITH goggles! It was a "one-eyed" descent but was much more enjoyable than my first jump.

I uploaded my first jump to You Tube so check it out! It is weird to see me, circa 1992. I was all hair and a skinny 180 lbs! Dig the 'stache, too! (Theme to "Shaft" playing in the background).



K