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I've only done two skydives, but if I win the lottery I'd love to do more.
I've been tempted to do a course, but they cost the earth, and to be honest I think I'd get bored of it eventually. Not as quickly as I'd get bored of working in MacDonald's you understand - it's just you only get 45 seconds of freefall… ahh crap, who am I kidding? Sure it's be a great laff to do it some more.
You can find out more about the jumps below, the first one was years ago so I don't have any photos, but the second one has some great photos and video of the action.
Some airport in Kent
My first skydive was years ago when I was 16. Managed to raise about £500 for charity too, which was nice.
The experience wasn't as scary as I would have expected - you're just so high up that your mind fizzles. You cant really believe that you're about to throw yourself out of a perfectly good working aircraft at 12,000ft.
An extra bit of excitement was that the company I was falling with was in the midst of getting sued - just the week before some woman had done a static line jump (from a lower height with a round parachute that you can't control - like the WWII ones) and landed on a helicopter taking off. There's gags-a-plenty I could make about that, but imagine slowly drifting towards the ground to see helicopter blades spinning below you… and having no way to avoid them. The instructors reckoned she had about 20 seconds of awareness of her impending fate before she was frappéd.
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Photo and Video |
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The photos are below, but I've also got an amazing video of the incident.
I'd love to take the credit for this excellent video, as it's really well made, but I have to give props to the amazing cameraman who did all the cool editing as he was falling through the air at over 100mph!
This very good video (with a great soundtrack I might add), is 6½ minutes long, so please choose between:
 High quality [25 MB]
Low quality [13 MB]
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Vertical Descent - Glenorchy, New Zealand
If you're ever in the south island of NZ and feel like you wanna
throw yourself out of a plane over unbelievably gorgeous scenery,
strapped to a mad Kiwi, then get over to the Vertical Descent crew.
When working in the hostel I had to sell all manner
of activities, but I would happily champion this company over all
others as all of the crew were just wonderful people. These guys
do this job day in, day out, and yet still seem to love their jobs
and really make the experience one to remember. Oh, and their PR
woman is a hottie, which always helps.
Below are photos from my jump - the scenery round
there is stunning, you can see why LOTR was filmed there.
Click on any of the thumbnails to enlarge the photo.
Getting ready.
Confidence (k n f -d ns)n.
The
feeling you have before you
fully understand the situation.
Down there?
Aaaiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeee!!
4 legs, 4 arms, 1 parachute, no sanity.
Woot!
Superman!
2 for the price of 1.
A mild bit of Photoshop trickery to show off the scenery.
My Tamigotchi needs feeding!
I'm alive!
This man saved my life, and introduced me to really
baggy pants.
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