Originally posted by Sandman
Speaking of... anyone hear from Santa lately?
Still lurking around, not posting much
. Finding it hard to get time to it.
Wrag said:
Was told to avoid Skydiving.
I'm one of those people that would more then likely wait a little longer each jump before pulling the cord.
Well technically speaking, there aren't many chords out there for you to pull
. Your automatic activation device might do your job for ya though and if you survive that, I hope yer tough enough to survive the flaming from other jumpers that's sure to come
I get your point. There are a bunch of people with the same nature in the sport - before BASE jumping became popular there was a lot of 'em. I just remind habitual low pullers that they can't beat the record - only a tie is possible. Having said that, I've been lower than I wanted to a few times. It happens and it doesn't take much. Loss of altitude awareness or outside circumstances (someone below/above you) can result in a low pull. It *is* however, better than a no-pull.
Have to say; skydiving is inherently dangerous and statistically speaking more dangerous than going by car or motorcycle. The current statistics show that one out of every thousand skydivers die per year.
There's a long list of things that can kill you that non skydivers tend not to know - freefall collisions, turbulent air at landing, canopy collision, freefall into canopy collision, low hook turn, low turn, collisions with other flying objects, failure to properly handling emergency procedures,
successfully handling emergency procedures and so on and so on.
In the beginning I was telling everyone how safe the sport is. Nowadays I tellum how dangerous it is.
Skydiving is incredibly rewarding. It's not just about the adrenaline, but it's actually a sport. There are many technical aspects of both freefall and canopy piloting to master that it takes a good deal of time to get good at. In for instance the discipline I'm participating in (Freefly), getting halfway decent in the basics will take somewhere between 500-1000 jumps. And then then
real work begins.
If you stay in the sport, it'll take whatever innocence and pretenses you have about life and rip them to small little pieces. Both good and bad. And if you want to *stay* in the sport, you gotta learn to deal with serious injuries and death. It's likely you're gonna see some ugly ****. Your outlook and priorities in life may change (mine did). There's both good and bad in that.
But, you get to do cool stuff:
Notice the colours on my jumpsuit? (I'm the guy in headdown, other guy is Jakob, my sisters boyfriend and my best friend)
