Well it was all quite exiting really..

1st the Tandem, go up in a Shorts Skyvan, see all jumpers except 5 and my tandem master go out.
Dude tells me to hook myself up to his harnas, and pull hard on the straps, harder!
then the harnas snapped..:eek:

The other 4 see it, in start to yell "dude, dude, can't jump, your harnas broke"
I'm like, no **** sherlocks..

My tandem master tells me, i'll jump down, you go sit in that chair and buckle up


Made me think, huh, we sat on the floor when we came up?

As the 5 last ones jump, copilot yels, they're off, and the Shorts went down like a Mofo....
I was a skinny dude then, the belt was to loose, i was Zero G till they pulled out .. Awesome

get down, new harnas, right back up again, and jumped.



Then i wanted a solo, so i did the instruction... sunday morning, but weather was chit... couldn't jump for 3 weeks.. 3 weeks later, they go, you remember everything, i jokingly say, yea sure, i think i gotta pull this cord here, right?

Go up, hang out the back of the Skyvan... jumpmaster outside, one iside
out, in outWeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Had forgotten a tiny little detail, was supposed to throw my legs back, not dive headfirst ..

tumbled over a few times, they pulled me straight...do some exercises, dry pulls on the cord.

Jumpmaster does the sign, i pull the cord
301
302
303
Parachute?

NOPE Nothing.

Mind races back to the instruction course
2500 feet, no chute = 10 secs and your name is splat
remembered about sticky pilot chutes, and tried to look back, which made me rotate, which made the chute open up.


Now at this point those 2 jumpmasters are byebye. And that Radio in my helmet is still doing nothing. I look up to my canopy and i see a pretty good twist.. 4-5 times or so...

And i gotta remember back to that course 3 weeks again.. make the decision to ride the chute or cuttaway and pull reserve... I didn't like that last option enough, so started to kick my legs arround and pull the cords...after about 10 secs they started to come loose, 10 secs later i had a good canopy and started looking down.

Just at that time the radio starts to crackle.. left, right, pull more right, guiding me to a decent LZ

about 200 feet to go, the darn radio starts to die out, which kinda sucked cause left was houses, right was trees, and in front of me i see barbed wire..
i cleared the wire, but the ground rush caught me , flared way to soon and the landing was not what you cal smooth with a cool walk in the end...


It was an awesome experience, and i wanted to continue
But the realitiy in Belgium is that it's expensive
And wasn not organized (15 years ago, maybe now it's better, dunno), with volunteer jumpmasters ,and there wern't enough of them , so you always had to wait the queue from morning till noon for each jump

so with the weather lack of jumpmasters after my first solo, it took me 2 weeks of sitting in the club bar (not drinking beer) and i gave up on it..

Wow, that's a hell of an experience. I suspect it made your jumps quite a bit more exciting than the normal training. I suspect things are a bit different these days.

Maybe you should go back for another round, even if it isn't to get certified.

I'de love to, but been having a bad lower back that's been bugging me for over a year now..
It's not to bad, but it's not good either... and i doubt that skydiving is going to help in that respect..