The Lost Media travel bug went on a big adventure with me today. We traveled down to the Gold Coast Skydivers drop zone in Lumberton, Mississippi and jumped out of a perfectly good airplane a couple of times. I kept the travel bug safe (well, relatively safe) in a pouch strapped to my skydiving rig. We boarded the DZ's Twin Otter jump plane, climbed to almost 15,000 feet, and bailed out. Freefall lasted over a minute and on one of the jumps we got up to 165 mph straight down. Somewhere around 3,000 feet or 2,500 feet we deployed the parachute and then enjoyed a 5-minute ride back to a soft landing at the DZ. Then we repacked the chute and went again.
The first jump Lost Media and I participated in was a "fly-around" or "do-si-do" jump. Three of us exited the plane holding on to each other's arm grips (round, stuffed tubes of fabric sewn onto the arms of our jump suits for "handles" to hold onto), making a chain of three skydivers. Once we got stable, we took turns letting go and flying around the other two jumpers to re-dock, or re-grip, on the other end of the chain. We did that nine times before it was time to fly away from each other to find some empty air space to deploy our chutes.
The second jump was a high-speed jump called a "rodeo". In this jump, a lady skydiver exited the plane on my back, holding on to my rig. In freefall, she sat up and rode me like a horse for a little while. With the weight of two people, but only the surface area of one giving wind resistance, the freefall speed gets pretty fast. My computerized altimiter read 165 mph top speed for the jump. After that, I got on her back for a little while, then we did a "shredder", where we get a firm grasp on each other's skydive rigs and then spin each other as hard and fast as we can until the centrepital forces tear us apart, sending us spinning across the sky. Finally, we flew back together and docked on each other once more before time to deploy our chutes.
Now this TB has experienced the thrill and beauty of flight and knows why the birds sing. I'll upload some pictures of Lost Media's day at the drop zone and also burn them onto the disc.
Blue skies!
Model Citizen - Zero Discipline