Skydive at Sacramento

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Skydiving was something that I wanted to do for a long time now. The first thing that I did when I reached Sunnyvale, CA for my internship was to find a good offer for a tandem skydive or AFF whichever I got. A lot of my friends were also excited about skydiving. So we finally bought a good 99$ skydive offer from google offers. Booked the next available date with Sky Dive Sacramento. Since we were 12 people, we got the slot only on 28th of July. I made the booking waay back in May 2012.

Okay, so the day of the dive - I reached San Jose airport at 5:40am in the morning. We took the rental cars and headed towards Sacramento CA. A couple of days earlier I got the slots confirmed. Even after a lot of requests, I did not get a slot for an AFF. So it was Tandem only. We reached the hanger at 1404 Flightline drive, Lincon at 9:45am. 10am was our slot. 4 out of the 12 people were still on the way. They came in by about 10:15am and we started our briefing. We had to sign a couple of waiver forms. Once done with that, we paid the extra money for video/photography and also upgraded the jump height from a 9000 feet to a 13000 feet dive (costed 125$ for the photography and 20$ for the upgrade).

At 1120 hrs, Rajath, Sangeetha and I were the first onces to strap up and go for the jump. After some ground instructions, and a couple of photo shoots, we were in the twin engine 12 seater plane. I was excited about the jump. Finally I was going to actually do it. Not SOLO (AFF) but nonetheless skydiving. We, the first wave of jumpers reached 13.4k feet in about 10 minutes. All of us attached to our tandem jumpers were now ready to take the leap of adventure out of the plane. The other two leapt out and it was my turn to jump..

My camera man first went out of the plane was ready to jump. We (me attached to my tandem instructor) approaced the aircraft exit. The camera man was off, and then we were off. It was a great feeling. The air blowing hard on the face, it was truly an amazing experience. I posed a lot for the video and camera, had my instructor do a couple of turns and then the parachute was deployed succesfully without needing to deploy the reserve! Hehe. Thats really good. My instructor then allowed me to steer the parachute down to about a 1000 feet after which he took the control back. We landed safely and took a short bus ride to get back to the hanger.

The debrief was pretty brief. I got my video and pics dvd very sooon. Thanks to the wonderful photo master who worked very quickly and she also put it on the 42" LCD for me to have a look. After waiting for the others to finish, we left Skydive sacramento by about 4pm. We went to mount Diablo for the sunset and returned home.

Next TODO: SOLO :-)

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