My First UK Skydive

Skydive #93 Hinton Airfield, Northamptonshire England May 11th 2008

I guess the funny thing about this video is that I’m both proud and embarrassed about it at the same time.

Proud because there are only a handful of people in the world who can do what I’m doing in this video. OK, maybe not a handful but a couple thousand people tops, in a world of 6.6 billion it seems like a handful. I’ll have you know that a lot of experienced skydivers never learn how to sitfly, it’s a pretty cool little skill I’m acquiring.

But embarrassed because I’m a joke compared to an experienced freeflyer, I drift here and there, slip in and out of the sitfly position, I move backwards when I mean to more forwards, I have all the skill of a first time skier navigating the bunny hill.

But pride wins out in the end, so I’m posting it. It wasn’t my best jump but someday I’ll be able to look back at myself ‘way back when’ and reminisce about how far I’ve come. Skydiving is nice like that, it’s always teaching you little lessons that apply to terra firma. This jump has reminded me that the journey really is everything, every time you jump out of a plane you invariably reach the ground; the destination is always the same, from novice to expert, from east to west, birth to death, but the journey, the journey makes all the difference.

By the way, I can do cool flips and stuff like that too…