From September 1986 until April 1995 all my spare time and money were concentrated on leaping from any aircraft, any where at any time. I have surprisingly few photographs of the whole experience, but what I have, I have now scanned in and stuffed into a Flickr set.
And of course, yes I did use my beloved “flickr” routine to insert this image! As ever, clicking on the image will open up a new tab or window displaying the full album.
I have to say that nowadays I certainly do not look as slim, fit or as hairy as I did in this photograph. Sigh. Which of course is one of the reasons I no longer do this sort of thing.
It all started when a friend’s father died of cancer – a charity fund-raising jump (umm, Cancer Research, as I recall) was organised and arranged to take place at RAF Colerne, just outside Bath – the home, at the time, of the Royal Corps of Transport’s Display Team, the Silver Stars (more commonly known as the Salivery Stars and for a time, the Cabbage Patch Dolls – this after Jeff Chandler, the Team Leader, purchased a set of camouflaged containers from Parachutes de France)
Anyway, my personal life at the time was a complete mess, I was definitely not enjoying myself and all in all, generally not finding much to laugh about. So jumping out of a ‘plane seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do – after all, nothing in my life was likely to get much worse. Possibly not the best reason for taking up an adrenaline sport, but there you go, it was my reason.
I was hooked from the very start – a few training sessions and I was more than ready. On the big day, nervous but never scared, I leapt from the Cessna like a good ‘un. Actually, I have always claimed to be more scared of Jeff than the jump – when he yelled Go! you went! – Jeff became one of my few long-time friends.
Follow up jumps were easy to decide upon – after all, as Jeff said, “You’ve paid for the training, now each jump is just ‘cost to altitude’” – so the economics of continuing were quite reasonable. And so a hobby began. And indeed, it consumed every spare moment and penny I could raise.
I quickly learned to pack my own parachute and like most sport parachutists, much preferred to jump a rig I had packed myself. I even repacked my reserve parachute, something normally left to a Rigger to do.
The photographs in the Flickr album really only show my early skydiving career – When I had achieved 200 jumps and fully qualified skydiver status, I moved into what I had, from day one, wanted to do – CRW (Canopy Relative Work) – mostly as part of a 4-man team, we leapt and immediately deployed our canopies and started to collide with each other in the hope of making as many different patterns as we could before breaking off and landing. Deemed to be more dangerous than freefall, mostly because an opened parachute tends not to appreciate being hauled around by other people very much – the result is often a canopy that collapses itself up and refuses to play any more – necessitating a rather hurried cutaway and a reserve ride in order to land safely – two of my three reserve rides were due to over-aggressive CRW work (the third was down to a sloppy deployment of the pilot chute so that it burbled behind me rather than inflating). For some reason, I have no photographs of my latter CRW days at all. I guess I was too busy trying to become competent at it to take time out to pose!
In the end, a number of factors combined to make me call it a day. I had achieved all I had set out to achieve – a decent level of experience at CRW – and the available progression paths left to me were not that attractive – Instructor, Rigger, Photographer or Semi-Pro Competitor – or the least attractive of all, a 100% Drop Zone Bum! My career in IT was finally starting to pay dividends in pay and responsibility and my life was gradually getting back on track (what’s worse, a failed marriage or the bitter divorce that follows?) and I was looking at other interests – Motorcycles for starters – a great big 1994 1200cc Triumph Daytona became my consuming passion for a while. All in all, I was somewhat bored with parachuting – not a good attitude for any adrenaline-based sport and I could often think of other things I’d rather be doing.
For a time, I held my very own Private Pilots Licence and found pleasure in flying around the countryside. However, this was significantly more expensive that skydiving and when a professional contract with a aviation-related company called Avbrief was not honoured, the sour taste it left in my mouth meant I couldn’t enjoy flying again.
So nowadays, living in France, with two dogs, a second wife (“have you met my current wife?”) and a big heavy BMW motor cycle, I’m perfectly happy for the time being. Life moves on however and who knows what I’ll be doing in a few more years time (I do hope that there is an implied “we” in there!)
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