“Ready to go?”
“Hey! Yeah! Uh…pretty much…sure…do I have to?”
In the whole process, there were only two moments when I felt really acutely scared. The first came just as we took off, there was kind of a feeling of “Oh man, this is real! Crap!”
Oddly, this was not the second moment. Minutes after we took off, my tandem partner nodded off for a nap. I asked, “Um, is that normal?” and the cameraman and the other guy jumping with us were like, “Well, you know, he had a really late night partying last night, so it’s kind of understandable.”
As you can probably tell from the photo, “he had a really late night” is not what you ideally want to hear about the guy responsible for pulling the ripcord for your parachute. On the other hand, I was fairly confident that exiting the airplane would wake him up a bit.
Rio de Janiero is an incredibly beautiful city. It took us about 25 minutes to reach our jump altitude of 11,000 feet (I think normally they do 10,000 feet, but mine was the final jump of the day), and we were treated to a spectacular panorama circling the city.
This was the second terrifying moment: when they opened the door and said it was time to get out.
I’m glad you made it down alright! haha
Not going to lie, your face as you’re falling backwards out of the plane is, priceless. (: