My Skydiving Footage
Before I was ever serious about poker, I was a pretty avid skydiver. In the summer of 2004, I made my first jump and was immediately hooked. I spent that fall grinding online poker games to have enough money to travel to Florida over winter break where I could go through an Advanced Freefall (AFF) certification course to be a licensed skydiver. In the two years that followed, I traveled around to a fair amount of various skydiving “boogies” as they call them (basically just means “gathering”) and completed a total of 151 jumps before I started prioritizing other things.
A few months ago, I finally got around to having a VHS tape with a bunch of footage of jumps I did converted to DVD. Last night, I spent a few hours editing the footage into a YouTube-ready presentation. It worked out perfectly because when I selected all of the footage I wanted to include it amounted to exactly 10 minutes on the dot, the maximum length for a YouTube video.
It’s worth keeping in mind that while 151 jumps might seem like a lot, it’s basically nothing in the world of skydiving. So this is all pretty much n00b donk amateur footage and nothing nearly as cool as stuff like this being performed by guys who have made literally thousands of skydives over the course of several years. I included some commentary below the video. Most of the footage was shot in the air over Goshen, Indiana unless otherwise specified.
0:00 – Exiting a balloon at Rantoul, Illinois from my perspective. It’s a surreal experience since normally you’re exiting to a ton of noise. Leaving a balloon is all quiet until you pick up velocity.
0:19 – A tricky thing about jumping from a balloon is that you’re exiting wherever the wind happens to have blown you rather than safely over the airport. It creates an added challenge and element of danger. Here I’m setting up for a landing in an elementary school playground and it wasn’t the smoothest landing.
0:56 – My 100th jump. Out of a big Russian helicopter in the air over Rantoul, Illinois. Had to oblige the group in front of me’s request to snap a photo of them before they exited. My friend Scott is on video and gets a nice shot of the helicopter when he deploys.
1:40 – What they call a “hop-n-pop” where you exit at low altitude and deploy rather soon after. I did some backflips on the exit.
2:08 – If you look carefully you can see I had line twists on that deployment. That technically falls into the category of a skydiving malfunction but it is generally very benign and happens every so often. You just have to twist your way out of it.
2:50 – A three-way exit that I cut off pretty quickly since the guy on video was pretty heavy and sunk like a stone rendering him unable to keep us in the frame for the rest of the jump.
3:19 – I don’t know what this was. I guess a buddy and I decided to have a little fun on the ride up and make a video pretending it was my first jump. Clearly, I’m not a very good actor. I exited in the classic n00b fetal position, a big no-no for proper skydiving form.
3:55 – This was what is known as a “tracking jump”. When you put your arms down to your side rather than holding them out in front of you, the change in weight distribution propels you horizontally across the sky. It’s as close to flying as a human can get without wearing a wingsuit.
4:27 – Two-way exit again cut off because of heavy cameraman. Seated in the pink shirt is my friend’s girlfriend who rode up to altitude with us to watch us exit. That experience alone is pretty hairy since most people have never ridden in a plane so small let alone be seated 3 inches away from an open door at 10,000 feet.
5:03 – This was a pretty good jump with me on camera filming the heavy dude. He hesitated on exit but managed to fall fast enough to catch up with me for a dock before we had to break off and deploy.
6:30: – This is me on video filming a tandem jump. What you see at the beginning of the jump was the closest I came to any type of serious catastrophe in skydiving.
7:25 – Tandems deploy very high for safety reasons so the videographer can usually take a long enough delay to keep their deployment in the frame before having to deploy himself. I was pretty proud of the effort for it being the first (and only) time I videoed a tandem; staying with them and keeping everything in frame like that is pretty challenging when you have as little experience as I did. The girl doing the tandem opted not to pay to have it videoed so I was videoing it sans-pressure to just practice. After the dropzone owner saw the footage he was mad at me for giving it to her for free since he said it was high-quality enough that they could have charged her for it.
7:30 – So this is a slo-mo replay of the exit on the tandem jump. What you’ll notice happens is that the tandem’s “drogue”, which is designed to slow down the heavy package to a more sane rate of freefall, hits me on deployment. It was an “oh shit” moment at the time that ended up being no big deal. I just made a bad exit since I wasn’t experienced or prepared enough to know how to properly exit a Cessna with a tandem and ended up in a really bad location for the drogue deployment: right above them. Fortunately, I didn’t get tangled in the line or panic and collide with them (which can happen when you’re right above someone due to the dead air their freefall creates above them). Having a guy with only 100-some jumps video a tandem was a pretty “wild west” move that a bigger dropzone would never in a million years allow. But we had fun in Goshen since it was a pretty small crew and sometimes little liberties got taken here or there.
8:26 – Two-way jump with my friend Keri. Poor girl was always getting hit on by everyone since she was decently cute and more or less the only female around. Interesting side note is that she was raised Amish but decided jumping out of planes was a little more fun than practicing the Amish lifestyle.
9:30 – Keri hits a perfect landing on the gravel pit. I opt for my own shadow instead.
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Nice video. Makes me want to go sky diving again. I only went once (tandem) and I was completely amazed at how much control I had once the shoot opened. I felt like I could easily hit a target if I had to.
-d
thank you for sharing that. Very,very cool!