The Dave Chronicles: Skydiving part 1

It was about one month before I went to Dubai that I made the snap decision to put down a deposit for skydiving. The idea had popped into my head after I saw a music video of an artist who skydived with the same company. The video clip made it very intriguing and if I was ever going to skydive in my lifetime, that setting seemed ideal. I was 50% sure I was going to think about actually doing it and figured it was worth risking the loss of the deposit if I didn’t. The one thing I made sure of was not to tell anyone that I was planning on skydiving. It would have been a massacre had I spread the word and chickened out. It seems my closest friends wait impatiently for those opportunities to hassle and I would do the same to them.

For certain reasons I only mentioned it to one person on the night before I was scheduled to willingly jump out of a plane. The conversation that followed was almost enough to convince me not to do it. I woke up early the next morning, after a mostly sleepless night, with a few graphic dreams of how it could all go wrong. It took a while to convince myself to show up at the building still thinking that I would have time to back out later if I wanted to.

When I arrived I first met a brother and sister group from Kuwait. The guy looked as nervous as I felt but the girl was cool as ice. Because she was acting so calm I assumed the guy was jumping and she was there for support. She informed me though that she was jumping as well and it was all her idea since she wanted to do it before she turned 20…..20!.

My next thought - ’Wellllll shit, now I have to do this.’

The brother and I took turns pacing around the room trying to calm the nerves.


Jordi putting on my harness

When the time came to get my jumping partner, they paired me up with a tall, lanky Belgian named Jordi. He was friendly enough but sported a rather dry and dark sense of humour that I usually would appreciate but not when it was aimed at me in my vulnerable time. The first thing he felt he had to tell me was that the plane we were jumping out of was the backup and not as good as the normal one. ‘Sometimes it doesn’t work very well…It’s as flimsy as a paper plane.’ Damn Belgians. I also had a personal camerawoman from South Africa and she was a bit more sensitive. She was equipped with a two cameras attached to her helmet, one for video and one for hi-def pics.

Jordi hooked me up in my harness and then walked away, left me standing in the middle of the room for about five minutes. There was no direction, I had no idea what to do. I figured he had to take care of something important and my priority was to nonchalantly make the proper adjustments in the crucial areas where the harness was encroaching. I thought about the upwards pull that was going to come when the chute finally opened and I had to make sure future generations of Kruzers could still be a possibility. When my Jordi finally came back he was having a good chuckle at me for the show I’d unknowingly been putting on in the middle of the room. He said he wanted to see how long I would stand there looking like a fool. Damn Belgians. He has no idea, I would have stayed there much longer.

This whole time while he was razzing me I tried to come up with witty comebacks or play it cool but I just couldn’t think of anything. My mind was racing but I had no thoughts the whole time I was there.

Next was to discuss the safety operations of the jump. I figured this would be a 1-2 hour presentation but 5 minutes later Jordi slapped me on the back and said ‘let’s go jump out of a plane’. So we loaded up in the plane with the 4-5 tandem jumpers and we took off for what I found out was going to be 13,000ft over top of The Palm of Dubai.