Skydive for charity

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At 16 you haven't really done anything in life but I knew I wanted to do a skydive from a very young age, the youngest legal age to skydive in the UK is 16 so I thought what better way to celebrate then to skydive, I looked into how to book a skydive and found that I could raise money for the National Deaf Children's Society at the same time.

Sponsorship raised, date of the jump booked and I got up early to go to Headcorn, I chose the wrong time of year to do it, it was October when I eventually got around to booking it and when I got there I waited for a few hours only to be told the weather was too bad and we wouldn't be able to jump today. I went back a week later and the sky was clear, I wasn't the first to go up so my nerves got a substantial amount of time to build up.

Before we boarded we got asked who wants to jump first “I do” I said, as we got into the small plane I was last in as I was going to be first out, the plane circled as it built up height, for some reason they couldn’t put the door on until it reached 3000 feet as we circled I felt myself slipping towards the door, I had never been so scared in all of my life. When we reached 10,000 feet and they opened the door I remember looking down and way down below I could see the clouds, was I crazy what was I doing!

I had to sit on the edge of the plane with my arms crossed, my head up and my feet kicking the bottom of the plane and then we rocked forward and began to drop. You know that feeling when you’re on top of a really tall building and someone pushes you and your back tenses up, imagine that times a million and that is what I felt when I started to fall. Eventually the guy I was attached to pulled the cord and opened the parachute, it was so quiet and peaceful up in the sky, he gave me the cords and told me how to turn, “if you pull that down and the other side up we’ll turn really fast, I bet you stop before I tell you to stop” I love a challenge. I pulled the cord down as far as I could and let the other one stay in the air, we began to spiral around, I looked up at the parachute and saw the ground above our heads, “you win” I said as I let the cord up again.

Although we were the first out of the plane we were the last to land, as we came in to land I couldn’t lift my feet high enough and so as my feet touched the floor, I took a tumble forward with the instructor tumbling on top of me, not the best landing but still that was the most amazing experience of my life.

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