Skydiving in Oahu

A few guys had came up to me on the ship a couple of weeks before pulling into Hawaii and asked if I wanted to go skydiving with them. I figured this as good as time as any to do sssomething that I kept telling myself I was going to do if I ever got the chance.

We woke up and drove up to Dillinger Airfield on the Northwest part of Oahu. We signed the 5 page waiver and watched a small video on what was going to happen. After that we met the professional that was going to be jumping with us.

My guy, Mike, went over his set of instructions pretty fast about what to do as soon as we jump then we loaded up and went to get into our plane.

We loaded up on to the plane and then took off. The climb was pretty quick and I can't even remember now what was going through my head as we climbed up. I remember it being very cold and I loved the view my guy was nice enough to point out several markers along the coast that he said I should go visit. The weather was perfect, there were some clouds but they seemed to open up right at the perfect time because we could see straight down to the ocean below.



We then leveled off and my buddy Dave was the first to go. He and his partner got up and walked to the door and in an instant they were gone. Next was my turn. There was about a 2 second period there when I saw him fall out the plane that I said to myself, "What the heck am I doing?" But kept walking towards the door. I got one last set of instructions from Mike and then our camera man jumped and then so did we. Well not so much jumped but pushed, all the professionals were very pushy but I figured that was so we didn't get second thoughts or at least act on them.

The first thing I noticed was my ears didn't pop like they should have so I had this splitting headache all the way down. I managed a couple smiles for the camerman and then just admired the free fall as the coast line kept getting closer and closer. After about a minute Mike opened the parachut and suprisingly the jerk wasn't as bad as I would have thought. We coasted down all the mean while I'm doing everything to pop my ears and listen to what Mike is saying. I got to steer the chute for a little bit as he showed me some basic maneuvers with the chute.

Finally it was time to land and he told me we were going to try a 'running landing'. As we were coming into the landing zone he told me start running and I did only as I hit the ground I realized I didn't know how to run with a 170 pound guy on my back so we took two steps and crashed, my knees taking the brunt of the blow. We get up shake the grass off and start walking back and I notice everybody else is landing straight down and wonder to myself why couldn't we have done that?

Other than the landing and the ear popping thing I had a blast and was glad that I chose to do it. Hawaii was definitly a good place to do it. I'm pretty sure given the chance to go again I will.