"My 300th
Skysurf" or "When Good Skysurfs Go Bad"
by Douva
There's
an old joke in skydiving that goes, "What's the difference between a fairy
tale and a skydiving story? Fairy tales all start, 'Once upon a time,'
but skydiving stories all start, 'No shit, there I was, thought I was going to
die.'" So here's my "No shit, there I was" story:
It's
the last training jump of the day. Jason (my teammate) and I are working
on ending the routine with some close-up head down stuff. We've finished
the routine, so I'm just geeking the camera and singing along with my MP3
player. Suddenly the front tip of my board catches his burble (the vacuum
of air behind a falling object), and I roll forward into a standing
position. As I do this, he catches my board's burble and falls onto my
board. He sticks out his hand to protect himself from hitting the board
and accidentally snags the cutaway cable to my back foot binding.
And that, my friends, is where the fun began.
If you look closely, you can see my right hand grabbing the board cutaway handle at the top of my right leg.
Fortunately
Betsy (my board) and I are both okay. Betsy's accuracy was a little
better than mine. I was looking for her and landed in a field where
I assumed she'd landed, and she actually made a soft landing at the edge
of the drop zone landing area. In fact, the only damage was to my
skysurfing pants. I had so much adrenaline pumping when I pulled the
board cutaway handle that I pulled the rapid link right through the buttonhole
the cable runs through and caused a small tear.
I
realized this evening when I was logging my jumps that this was my
300th skysurf (my 921st skydive). In 300 skysurfs, this is my
first real board chop (not counting my second skysurf which was on a homemade
board with improperly installed bindings that popped loose). If you look
closely at the frame grab below, you can just make out the snag in the lower
left corner. Obviously this wasn't Jason's fault; it was just one of
those freak occurrences. I think he and I both met our weekly
adrenaline quota on this jump.
The snag