I did a really amazing thing today! My first skydiving experience at Wisconsin Skydiving Center in Jefferson. With the operative word being first, as I plan to do this again. However, I am not sure I’ll get as lucky again to have the perfect weather for it as we did today. Even the instructors said it was a skydiver’s dream day with the warmer temps, breezy and lower level puffy clouds.
It was my friend Barb's wishes to do this for her 75th birthday and she gathered a group of us. I was very apprehensive at first as I am afraid of heights, but when she mentioned it would be done tandem with the instructor in charge, I said “yes”.
We had a group of seven and I can’t help but think that I wasn’t the only one with Tom McComb on my mind today since he was supposed to be with us, but lost his battle to addiction a little more than a week ago.
After our tutorial and video they called Terry and I first to go for the day. I sure liked being first for the day! My instructor/tandem employee was (Mad) Max and he was superb, and for my video photographer, Kaitlyn, who was also superb! They both made my first jump so memorable and helped put my mind at ease.
I have to admit though, I was full on scared to jump out of that plane, and I wasn’t expecting to go head first out of it either, but I guess that is why they call it a dive. Haha!
The free fall went by so quickly. I think they said you’re going around 120 mph and it sure felt like it was only a minute before Max pulled our parachute. Then we flew up and floated around through the puffy clouds. I took control of the chute for a little bit, but then Max had to get us back to the airport. I kept saying it was so beautiful and apologized to Max for repeating myself, but he said I was just saying what he was thinking.
I am so glad that I decided to get the video for this as I wasn’t going to until our initial instructor said people regret it when they don’t get it on their first dive. And, he would have been spot on about that!
Now we need to talk Barb into doing this every year for her birthday!
If you’d like to watch the awesome video Kaitlyn put together of it, click here.
