Mile high club

12 000 feet from the ground, 40 seconds of freefall and a five-minute parachute ride – numbers to live your life by

“What’s been your best jump to date?” I ask experienced skydiver and PR Manager for the Rustenburg SkyDiving Club, Mike Rumble.

His answer? “The next one.”

That’s the thing about skydiving, as I was about to find out. There’s just something about jumping out of a plane at 12 000 feet that gives one’s life perspective and forces an appreciation of the everyday. Which probably explains why Rumble greets us with a cheerful “Happy Saturday” the minute we

traverse the dusty road into the Rustenburg SkyDiving Club one crisp weekend morning.

“Doesn’t everyone dream of flying around up above and in the clouds?” Rumble asks. “Skydiving and parachuting are incredibly diverse sports. There’s always something new to try and things to practice and improve on. The personal rewards are great, and it is huge amounts of fun jumping out of aircraft with outgoing friends from all walks of life.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me rewind to the beginning of the story – to how myself and two friends (Jeremy Carlsson and Grahame Finnemore) turned a casual conversation over a glass of wine into a weekend adventure that none of us will ever forget.

It’s one thing threatening to go skydiving in false bravado while in the company of good friends (and good wine), but walking towards the silver silhouette of the Atlas Angel that was about to take us up thousands of feet into the air really brought the concept home and made what we were doing seem like sheer madness.

Put it down to whatever you like. We’d committed to doing this for reasons far and wide and we were adamant that none of us was going home without an overdose of adrenalin in our veins. At this point I must say coming to terms with what we were about to do was helped immensely by the highly qualified, professional guys we were entrusting our lives to.

Almost all of them have “day jobs”, but there’s a passion for their weekly weekend dates with the sky that the rest of us can only envy. My tandem master Gerrit Lambert kept joking that this was his first tandem jump, but in my stressed state I quickly brushed his comment aside.

Later that day I learned that I was indeed his very first inexperienced tandem jumper (as a paying member of the general public), but nothing in his calm demeanour and reassuring ways would have given this away. Especially not when my legs were dangling from the plane and his confident “ready, set, go”

signalled my hasty departure from the big silver Angel in the sky.

If there has to be a “scariest” part about the entire thing, it would be

that part – dangling your legs outside of the plane, waiting to be pushed over the edge. But once you’re out, there’s no space for fear; the rush of air blowing

past your cheeks and a breathtaking view of the Magaliesberg are dominating our senses and, well, rocking your world.

Before you know it, the parachute opens, your world rights itself and time seems to slow down. In a matter of seconds you go from effectively dropping to your death to gleefully gliding towards the ground. The descent to the drop zone is peaceful, silent and a complete epiphany. There’s really nothing on earth quite like it.

So what exactly is left to be said? All that comes to mind is, “same time next week?”

This article first appeared in CitiVibe in The Citizen on Tuesday 8 June 2010.

Visit www.skydiverustenburg.co.za or phone 079-345-7058 for more information.