Sky dived!

This Sunday, on June 28th, I sky dived with a bunch of friends in Florida. Quite an experience. From the moment we decided to go sky diving, as always, there wasn't much going within me. It has been the case of late with me, may be the last few years. If I am about to do something special/out-of-ordinary, people ask me "are you excited" and when I look at it, not really, I'm just as always, may be a little intrigued... Well, we had an appointment at 12:30, but it got extended to 3:30.

As we were waiting I could see some of them pretty nervous, some changing from confident-looks to a-bit-scared-looks. Finally our turn came and it was only when I was on the plane up that a little thought was running, just to look at the ground from the open plane was something! When my turn came, I moved along with my tandem instructor "TK" and we moved in a squatted position to the open door. Before jumping out, I had a look at the ground below... took a deep breath and as I was aware of the breath, I uttered "Shiva" and out we dived 13500 ft from above sea level!

For the first 2-3 seconds I didn't know what was happening as we fell off the plane and the wind was hitting the face in full flow and I got in to the position with belly pushed out and arms out-stretched and eyes wide open. I could see the ground approaching at a crazy speed... woahhhhhhhh..... And my instructor was giving signals that we were doing safe and ok and was pointing to the altimeter from time to time... We also did a few rotations during the free fall... My eyes were watering a moment due to the speed and at one point, I realized my mouth was open and how the instructor had advised to inhale through the nose rather than the mouth. As I closed my mouth, I could be aware of the breath in that crazy moment and I was pleased about that :D... And then we had a lucky day as we could move into the clouds. When you dive in to the cloud, you really know how fast you are traveling. And inside the cloud, it's cool, very cool, like a really air conditioned space... By this moment, we had reached the 6000 ft mark and my instructor was signaling for the parachute to be opened and around 5500 ft I pulled the lever to open up the parachute... And then we did a few other things like rotating, suspension, accelerating and moving around in the parachute before finally landing.

Quite an experience, and highly recommended for everyone! A must do, at-least once in a lifetime!