A Scary Skydiving Story

Skydivers are adrenaline junkies by definition. But this past weekend I got more than my required dose of adrenaline.

On Friday, MB and I did three jumps together at the dropzone in Joliette (Voltige). On our second jump, the pilot of the plane put the "jump" light on too late, so we ended up exiting the plane really far from the dropzone. Luckily, once we opened our parachutes and realized we wouldn't make it back to the designated landing area, we saw that there were a bunch of farmer's fields around that we could land in.

I decided to go for a large sandpit in the middle of the forest since it seemed closest to the dropzone. Looking back, I know that probably wasn't the best choice, but once I had picked it, I went with it. As I steered toward the sand pit, I looked over and saw MB heading in the same direction, but he was over the forest.

I landed fine, despite a bit of turbulence. I just got a bunch of sand in my stuff. But when I got up, I couldn't see MB anymore, he wasn’t in the sandpit with me. My first thought was that he'd tried to make it over the forest and onto the dropzone, and ended up in the trees!!

So I grabbed my parachute any which way and went tearing through the forest, not even caring that there were raspberry bushes tearing at my jumpsuit (and possibly my parachute!). Finally, I made it back to the dropzone, a bit disheveled and out of breath. No one knew where MB was. They weren't even sure if anyone was out looking for him! So I started panicking more and more, imagining him with a broken leg, in pain, alone in the forest. I felt frantic and helpless... and everyone was acting like it was no big deal. Arghh!!

Finally, as I'm taking my gear off and preparing to go into the forest looking for him myself, I saw him show up in the back of a pickup truck - he had decided to turn around and land back in a field near a road with another guy, and the dropzone owner went and picked them up. His landing went fine, he was ok, but I had just about worried myself sick thinking about him being hurt. Great experience for a first-time off-site landing...

THEN, as if that wasn't enough emotion for one weekend, we had another adventure on the Sunday. We came back to Gatineau and decided to go do a jump with our neighbours (the other “skydiving couple”). The jump (a 5-way/5-person formation jump) went well. We separated ( moving away from each other in freefall) and all opened our parachutes.

Once my ‘chute was open and I was sitting in my harness, before doing anything else, I looked around for the four other canopies, to see where everyone else was. One, two, three... and then I saw MB below me, spinning... and spinning... that's when I realized he wasn't just spinning for the fun of it. He was out of control, struggling to untwist his lines and stop the spinning. Line twists are a relatively common malfunction, and usually easy enough to fix - it's like when you're on a swing, and you spin the swing around and the two chains get wrapped up. All you have to do is spin the other way to unwrap them.

But Matt can't get out of these ones, because the canopy is spinning him in the direction opposite that he needs to spin to untwist the lines. I start hyperventilating. I'm going oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. I look at my altimeter: I’m at about 1500 feet above the ground. He’s below me, and losing altitude fast because of the spinning. All I can think about is, I’m going to watch my boyfriend die right before me. I'm thinking that I shouldn’t watch. But I can’t peel my eyes away.

Finally, just when I think he's about to hit the ground, he pulls on his emergency handles and out pops his reserve parachute. (He was actually at about 1000 feet when he cut away his spinning parachute, but it looked a lot lower from my vantage point.) Wayyyy too close for comfort.

Once I saw his reserve parachute open safely, I focused on controlling my breathing and landing my own parachute. I don’t even remember flying back to the dropzone. As soon as my feet touched the ground and I lowered my canopy I exploded into tears (you know, the loud, wheezing sobs you can’t stop).

I was debating not telling anyone he had a malfunction (I'm definitely not telling my parents) because I don’t want anyone to worry too much about us. Skydiving is a high-risk activity, granted, but I’ve always felt that it’s a very calculated risk. In fact, everything worked just the way it was supposed to in this incident: MB did the emergency procedure correctly, and that's exactly what the reserve parachute is there for.

I just wish he'd had his first malfunction sometime I wasn't there and didn't have to watch that, all those thoughts of losing him going through my head.

What a weekend.