Today's Special - Safety at $2.00 a Pound!

I don't know why I have not blogged about it before, but I went sky diving several years back. If you ever get a chance to jump out of a perfectly good airplane - DO IT!

I had to do a tandem dive since I was on vacation and did not have time for weeks of training in how to risk my life. I needed the fast food equivalent death defiance. Enter your friendly tandem diving instructor.

This was a husband and wife operation down in the Florida Keys that sat up a computer, a video camera, some sort of sound system, a tiny, tiny, tiny little plane, and several slightly used parachutes to make a buck. I only got to meet the wife and one of their good friends who was helping out this week. The husband was recuperating with a broken leg that had absolutely nothing to do with sky diving. What? They promised it had nothing to do with sky diving.

Filling out the form, I noticed that the weight limit was 180 pounds which is exactly what I should have weighed for my height. Instead, I weighed 200 pounds. I am unfortunately honest enough that I put down my real weight and was fully prepared to not get to dive that day.

But a funny thing. I never knew this before, but apparently, if you pay an extra forty dollars, all of the physics that dictate a 180 pound customer as the edge of a safe dive, are altered throughout the universe so that a 200 pound customer is completely safe. Who knew you could change the fundamental laws of nature at 2 bucks a pound?

One quick safety course later and we were up in the small plane. The safety course? Wear your flimsy plastic goggles or your eyes will tear up and you won't see anything and make sure you arch your body so that you do a back flip coming out of the plane. Why a back flip? I never asked. But apparently if I failed to execute it properly, I could have killed all of us.

We got in the plane, got the instructor (who has the parachute) hooked into the harness I was wearing and up we went. The wife (of the husband and wife operation) jumped out first with a camera on her helmet. And then I had to place my foot on the step just outside the door of the plane.

Now this had been a normal size step when we were on the ground. A rather large step as I remember it on the ground. Another thing I never knew about physics is that at altitude, random things like steps shrink to less than a third of their original size - why were things like this not covered while I was in high school?

I tried to get my foot down on the step but the prop wash caught my sandal - yeah I went sky diving in mandels! - and it snatched my leg back towards the back of the plane. I shouted something urbane and intelligent involving fecal matter.

I was able to compose myself and get my foot on the step and then it was a count of three, a back flip, and I was flying! Worth every penny and then some. Absolutely amazing. There is no feeling of falling at all. You actually feel like you are flying. Freedom. I keep trying to come up with ways to describe it and "Freedom" is the only word that keeps flaring in my mind. And I smile when I think of it too.

Then you pull the chute and you finally have the sensation of falling but falling softly. I have almost no interest in the slow motion sight seeing that comes after the chute deploys. Give me free fall any day.