Skydiving

For the past four weeks I have been booked in to go skydiving. But each time I call them up they tell me that the weather is no good and we have to postpone it til the next weekend. It has been hard trying to plan our weekends around it, and I had been getting excited and then disappointed when it didn't happen.

This weekend the weather man was telling us it was going to be 23 and sunny. I was excited, and trying not to get my hopes up. I called him before we left and he said it was good to go and to call him an hour before we left! lol I told him that since it took us two hours to get there that we were going to be leaving straight away!

The skydiving centre is at Lilydale. Heading out east there was a sky full of cloud. Doubts were starting to creep in and we were already thinking of back up plans of heading to Healville Santuary. But we turned up on time and found out that they were a couple of hours behind schedule. We headed to a park for a nice picnic lunch.

I got some practice at skydiving by being very daring and going down the slide!

After lunch we headed back and I got my lesson on what I need to do when we jump. So much to remember!Left foot out first, then right, then drop down. Head back, arms crossed across chest, hips forward and legs back trying to hit the tandem guy in the butt!
Then when he taps me on the shoulder I hold my arms out and it is time to pull the cord!
We got geared up - some sexy parachute pants (which funnily enough matched my tshirt!) and the very important harness. The next step was to try and fit in that tiny plane! There were three jumpers, so six people squished in the back of the plane. There aren't any seats back there... basically I was sitting on my partner's lap and the guy in front of me was sitting on my feet!
The plane ride up took ages. I was sitting right at the door, so we had the best view. We could see the city, and the bay.

I was the first out of the plane, jumping at 6,000 feet. The others were jumping at 10,000. I wonder what it was like for them to see me jump first!

I got my feet out, then all of a sudden we were falling. I don't really remember much about that except we did a lot of tumbling and turning before we got face down. That was pretty scary, I thought maybe I didn't have my feet back enough or something. Turns out there were 8 twists in the parachute so we were twisting as it was untwisting!

Then we had the moment when the parachute opened. That was the worst bit. All of a sudden there is a huge jerk and you get pulled upwards. The harness felt like it was strangling me around the chest. Once that settled down it was actually quite relaxing. It felt like we were just flying like a bird.

All too soon we were making our way downwards and heading toward a little golf buggy which had Kel videoing me from.

I kept my legs up while we landed, and we had a nice skid down on our bums onto the grass with the parachute falling behind us.

It was awesome, but over so quickly. And it was well worth the wait to have that beautiful weather!