Seriously. I love to swoop. And I especially I love to swoop ponds.
swoopnoun
Definition of swoop 1: an act or instance of swooping2: a single concentrated and quickly effective effortwas done in one swoop—often used with fellsolved everything at one fell swoop
Skydiving has evolved a lot over the last 34 years of my jumping career. (Wait, 34 years? What the hell? When did I get old?) Anyway, Back in my day when the earth was still cooling and dinosaurs romed the earth us cavemen used parachutes to, you know, get down safely so we could go jump again. Then some bright boy came up with the idea of going fast close to the ground. And everything changed. No longer satisfied with landing softly some of us had to go fast too. Really fast!
Of course whenever you invent a new sport there are growing pains. We lost a lot of young men trying to figure out how go fast under experimental parachutes. Notice I didn’t say how to go fast safely, that came later. First we wanted to go fast. And go fast we did, with the reckless abandon and certain invincibility of youth. Thankfully we got tired of doing ash dives for our friends and figured out how to go fast safely. Well, more safely anyway.
Training and new techniques helped us be safe and new parachute technology allowed us to go faster than we ever thought possible. As the parachutes got smaller we went faster. My first parachute was 200 square feet and was considered crazy small and dangerous. Now I jump a 79 square foot canopy and am thinking about getting one a little smaller. I was just watching a video of someone jumping a 39 square foot rig. Crazy.
Want more fun? Just add water!
Ok, that video didn’t have much to do with the water but it was the world record distance swoop I think. If you want to see great crashes go to the Youtube.
I’ll leave you with this picture of me bandit swooping a local golf course pond. If I can find the picture I’ll tell the story of how I got the nickname “water boy.”
