Skydive Utah......Almost

Today after work my father-in-law took me out to Tooele to go skydiving.  I was extremely nervous, anxious, and excited!  My stomach had been in knots all day just thinking about it.    When we got there I had to watch this movie that basically teaches you what you'll have to do/warns you about the dangers of the sport.  I was pretty much ok with everything until the guy on the movie said that when it was your turn to jump, you have to scoot to the door and put your toes over the edge of the plane!!!  That's when I started freaking out!  They said that if you didn't do that, then the guy you are strapped to who jumps with you will totally bash his shins on the plane when you jump out.  No pressure, huh?  Anyway, while I was doing this, Dan was getting ready to go up for a jump.  I ended up finishing the movie and filling out my paperwork in time to see him take off and jump out.  Here is a picture of the plane that you jump from.

So I basically just hung out and waited until it was my turn to go in the plane.  I watched Dan's group jump out of the plane and then open their chutes.  I noticed that one guy was doing all these crazy flips and stuff, and was just kind of turning out of control.  Next thing I know, another chute deploys from the same guy and the other chute goes floating away.  He had cut away his main chute and had to pull out his reserve.  At this point in the day, I was REALLY freaking out!  This was my first jump and some guy just had to pull his reserve?!?!?! NOT OK!!!  So the staff guy hops in the van and drive out to go pick up the broken chute.  Meanwhile, we all want to know who it was that had to pull the reserve.  I'll give you one guess..........

Yep! It was Dan!  Holy Crap I couldn't believe it.  What had happened was one of the toggles that you use to steer the chute somehow got pulled up too high for him to reach when he deployed his canopy.  So he only had one toggle to steer with, which caused him to turn in circles......basically his canopy was off balance.  At this point he was already at 2500 feet.  (you jump from 14000 feet)  Needless to say, he was too close to the ground to mess with it anymore, so he just pulled his reserve to be safe.  Everything ended up OK in the end, and it sure made for one heck of a story! :) (These are pictures of his empty bag with just the reserve chute still attached)

About 20 minutes later it was my turn to get harnessed up and ready to go.  Here, the instructor is just going over what to do when you exit the plane.  Do I look nervous?! :)

Heck No!  By this time I was just anxious to get up in the air.  I had seen enough people go before me to realize that it would just be an awesome experience.  Here I am all ready to go, we were just waiting for the plane to come back from the previous jump.

Unfortunately, I never got my turn.  The weather started acting up right then and there were a bunch of gray clouds in the sky.  The wind was picking up, and they decided that the conditions just weren't good enough to continue jumping.  I was SOOOO BUMMED!!!  I guess it was kind of good though because the group before us ended up not being able to jump at 14000 feet.  They only jumped at about 9000 feet, so they missed out on a lot of the free fall.  Then their ride down was a lot bumpier than I guess it should have been.  Once the plane touched down again, they called it quits for the day.  So, I was really bummed that I didn't get to jump, but I'm at least glad that my jump wasn't cut short due to weather.  After that Dan and I went to a little restaurant called Virg's.  The food was soooo good!  It was just this little hole in the wall place but oh so good!  It was really fun just hanging out with Dan and being able to share such a fun day together!

On the way home, we had a mishap.  Dan had his snowmobile in the back of his truck because he had just picked it up from the shop from getting fixed.  We were just driving along on the freeway and all of the sudden we heard this really loud bang.  It sounded like a gunshot it was so loud.  We looked back and this is what we saw.  The end of the snowmobile had hit the window a little too hard going over a bump and shattered the whole thing.  What an adventurous day! Never a dull moment with us Georges!  Thanks, Dan, for such a fun day! I had a blast!!