How I nearly broke my back on my first parachute jump
I was 18 and living away from home for the first time. I hadn’t got a flat in the next town, or even moved to the Big City. I lived in Cuba.
As if my mum wasn’t already worried enough about me moving to a country run by socialist guerrilla fighters, at the university where I now worked as an English teacher, I discovered a parachuting club.
Naturally, as a thrill-seeking teenager with nothing holding me back, I signed up straight away.
There was just one catch. I had to learn everything in Spanish.
I knew some of the language and had done enough to scrape an A-level in it. But almost everything I’d learned was useless when it came to understanding Cuban Spanish, which is spoken like everywhere else in the world, but without any of the consonants.
But I was determined to jump. So I attended class twice a week and with the help of my dictionary and a lot of patient hand gestures from my instructor, 6 weeks later I was ready to jump.
On the morning of the jump I was confident. I knew all the instructions:
How to steer
How to approach the landing spot
What to do in the event my main chute didn’t open
What to do if my chute opened and the cords were tangled
You name it, I knew it.
The flight up and the jump itself was a whole range of emotions. But shortly after exiting the plane, I successfully deployed my chute and started my descent.
That’s when I realised something was wrong.
The jump instructions I’d learned and been tested on were for a different parachute! I thought I could manoeuvre mine and steer it in a spiral round to the landing zone, the way you see display teams doing it at big sporting events. What I actually had was a chute that drifted with the wind. The only controls I had were brakes. I’d totally missed something in class.
But worse was yet to come.
As I hadn’t used my breaks to control my descent, I was drifting away from the landing zone and heading for, what I realised with horror, was a field of sugar cane.
If I didn’t do anything, I was in real sh*t, likely to end my days being impaled on a forest of 6 foot cane poles.
In my panic, I pulled hard on the brakes, which of course made me drop from the sky like a stone.
I crashed into the field with a huge thud, landing badly on my lower back and smashing my teeth together.
As if that wasn’t humiliating enough, I was then dragged across the field by the parachute which seemed determined to keep on going.
The ground team joined me soon afterwards, helped me up and checked I was alright. I was embarrassed and in pain, with a bad back and bloodshot eyes. But I’d survived my first jump.
PS. later that day I did my second jump. This photo was taken just before that jump, I think, in an attempt to cheer me up after a miserable morning. That's not my usual enthusiastic smile!