I’m not new to scepticism when it comes to the ‘insane’ things I wanna do (perceived as such by THEM … I think all my ideas are perfectly sane!).
THEY thought I was out of my mind when I wanted to cycle 500 kilometres in 5 days around the UAE for charity. THEY also thought I was off my rocker when I decided to climb 52 stories of the Emirates Towers a few months ago for the MSF vertical Marathon.
I did both. With a smile. A smirk even.
And yet THEY doubted that I would really have the balls to skydive. Me? A puny little thing? Plummet myself from a plane? Of my own free will? I must have TOTALLY lost the plot.
Maybe I have. And all the more glad I am for having done so :)
The idea was hatched by Luni at the Vertical Marathon. A bunch of us from work had done the 52 floors together. Red-faced and a little out of breath, over the celebratory breakfast, we thought we should do something together again. Something a little bit more … erm … ballsy. The ladies bowed out and I was left with Luni and three guys agreeing to come along for the ride.
We planned and plotted for weeks and somehow the plan always fell through at the last minute. Someone was out of town. Someone was moving house. Someone for somereasonortheother. Last week though, we all threw in the towel and decided it’s now or never. Luni, ironically, despite being the Hatcher of Da Plan, would not be able to make it. Apparently, they have a maximum weight limit for tandem jumps and Luni being a bit of a Big Girl teetered on the wrong side of the limit. :(
Now before you get images in your head of BPC happily parachuting along, let me set the record straight: we were to go for a tandem jump, which is defined as a way to “allow the curious potential student to experience, first-hand, the thrills of skydiving without the stress of AFF or SL progression”. Or, in other words, it’s “for the adventurous spirit who cannot adequately meet the physical or proficiency requirements (and) by relying on Tandem Master's skills, they will still be able to experience the thrill of skydiving”.
Quite simply, you are strapped to the front of the tandem instructor who does all the hard work and you just enjoy the view. And the experience.
So off BPC went, all smiles to the UmmAl Quwain Aeroclub, not paying heed to the naysayers (‘What if your parachute won’t open?’, ‘What if your appendix explodes from the pull of gravity,’ and so on). The only thing that gutted me was the fear in Arfiman’s eyes: there was no way in Hell he was doing it, and he couldn’t quite understand why I was. Being the darling he is though, even though he neither understood nor whole-heartedly approved, he came along to cheer me on.
The hour-long drive to the Aeroclub was quite an adventure in itself, what with all the wrong turns and back-tracking. Once we got there, The Signing of The Forms was not very confidence inspiring. Not for me … I was on such a high just at the thought of the dive that a pack of rabid dogs would not have been able to change my mind. It was Arfiman who wasn’t too happy with me signing a bunch of papers with references to not suing anyone for anything going wrong – death or injury.
We had booked a jump for 12 o clock and due to various delays, it was actually 4 before we got into our jumpsuits. (Don’t even get me started on the shouting match I had with the Admin to get us that slot instead of the 6 o clock one they were gonna put us in!). Now that I’ve jumped once though, and am a bit more familiar with the etiquette and constraints of a DropZone, I think my shouting was slightly excessive. (Let me add on Arfiman’s behalf, my shouting almost always is! LOL)
Okay, so I claim to be real gutsy and all, but even I was surprised at my nerves of steel. Not for a nanosecond did I feel any emotion except for extreme excitement.
As my photos will show you, I was all teeth all the way. Right from the on-ground training to the actual toss out the plane. Some credit does go to my tandem instructor, JJ, whose name I did not find out till I signed the logbook at the end of the day. My bad. He did tell me off a bit for not knowing his name despite having loudly proclaimed my time with him as ‘the best three minutes of my life’. Kudos to Arfiman for being probably the only DH in the whole world that will tolerate his wife saying so to another man in his presence. LOL.
As a guy packed my future in a backpack (read: parachute), I was dressed up in my oversized red jumpsuit by JJ and my videographer/photgrapher Steve. They had to fold the sleeves and legs up quite a bit and it was still all over the place. I envied the boys with their tall frames looking all sexy in their snug-fitting jumpsuits while I looked like a little 12 year-old playing at a grown up game! Well, at least my suit matched my manicure ;)
Adrenaline already pounding in my ears, I only half-listened, half-zoned-out as JJ drilled me on the positions I needed to assume during the freefall and landing. Clambering into the tiny aircraft, I waved my Arfiman off into the distance and up went the plane.
I had been warned that the climb would take about half an hour and Steve and JJ might catch a few Zs (which they did). It was totally surreal looking at Umm Al Quwain growing tinier and tinier under us and knowing that THIS is what I would be jumping into.
We reached about 10,000 ft. in what seemed to be a lot shorter than half an hour (but actually was a full 30 minutes) and a freefalling jumper riding with us just slid open the door and dived headfirst into the open blue. My jaw popped wide I saw him turn into a tiny dot and then I could feel JJ strapping my harness onto his. He recounted the instructions he had already given me on the ground as well as right before take off, but for all I knew, he could have been naming Dwarves. He pushes me towards the open door of the aircraft and I looked down to see for the first time that view without the security of a glass window built into a solid wall that would keep me from falling out: it was the ground 10,000 ft below me and the only thing keeping me up was my butt on the floor of the plane. My legs hooked under the open door and JJ behind me, I swear I realized what it must be like to be in Heaven. I was still amazed at my own self … there was not a nervous hair on my body. Then JJ rocked me back and forth, one two three and out we go!
We fell out of the plane and there we were - actually freefalling. Free falling from 10,000 feet at 200kph - the most surreal experience imaginable. It sounds ridiculous, but it wasn’t frightening at all. All I could think was ‘wow’. The ground was so far away that hitting it didn’t seem like a tangible threat.
DropZone.com says that “Freefall sounds scarier than it is. In reality you barely have a sensation of "falling" while skydiving. All you feel is the excitement of the air rushing past you. And, because there's nothing up there for your brain to use as a reference point to tell you that you're falling, it will feel more like you're lying on a column of air, floating.”
And that’s just what I felt like. I was going down at about 200 kph – a speed I have never yet reached whilst driving my own car – and yet, I felt like I was floating. Everything’s happening so fast - the air’s rushing in your face and you want to take in the view but you have to remember to smile at the camera and enjoy being spun around. You keep forgetting to breathe and you think it’s absolutely insane that you’re up there, just flying through the air... and then all of a sudden, the parachute opens.
I will quote DropZone.com again (because they say it so much better than I ever can!): “Upon opening your parachute it'll feel like you're being pulled upwards. You're not going up. You're just decelerating pretty quickly and that causes the sensation.”
I saw Steve (who was till now floating/freefalling alongside us and filming me) freefall into the distance and that’s when it first hit me how fast we had been freefalling. Wow!
Once the parachute opened, it turned instantly from crazy, air-rushing-around-you, hysterical experience to total serenity. After the rustle of the parachute opening up, there was absolute quiet. Not a sound except for the wind howling ever so slightly. And that in itself was a crazy, crazy few minutes.
There I am, strapped in front of this guy, a couple of thousand feet in the air. I can see the teeny, tiny world underneath me and we strike up a conversation about what JJ does for a living. He tells me that he is a risk analyst during the week and skydiving is his passion so he does tandems on weekend. I ask him if it pays much. Not really, he tells me. It barely covers his expenses. But he loves the sport and he get free jumps, so hey, it’s a fair deal. We enjoy a few moments of quiet too, taking in the gorgeous views of Umm Al Quwain’s mangroves on one side and the deserts on the other. He lets me steer the chute a bit, but when I try and steer us towards the beach (‘because it looks like a much nicer place to land than the airstrip!’) he politely snatches the grips and steers us back towards the landing strip … which is now looming larger and larger under our feet. That tiny speck of green becomes the size of my palm, then the size of my living room couch and before I know it, I have to bend my knees and pull my feet up to prepare for the landing.
As we land, I forget that I am still strapped to JJ and just want to plop down on the grass and savour the best experience of my life. Sadly, I am told to ‘stand up now’. JJ unhooks me and I thank him. And then I run into the arms of awaiting Arfiman, who still looks shell-shocked – like he can’t believe I just did that and am back.
What do I feel post-jump? It’s been almost three days now and I can still feel the adrenaline pumping through my veins.
I wikipediaed it, and turns out, it might not even really be adrenaline: “the medical view is that the rush or high associated with the activity is not due to adrenaline being released as a response to fear, but due to increased levels of dopamine, endorphins and serotonin because of the high level of physical exertion.”
Hmm, physical exertion there was none. But giving it the benefit of the doubt, and assuming it was adrenaline, I can safely call myself an "adrenaline junkie".
As Bob Drury, a paraglider pilot says, "We do these things not to escape life, but to prevent life escaping us".
I seriously can’t wait to double my dive count! Hell, I'm even entertaining thoughts of doing the whole Accelerated Free Fall course and become a certified solo jumper! :)
Check out the pix at
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=8406&l=893c1&id=597207250 and
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=8524&l=e4fcf&id=597207250
