I got my birthday gift yesterday… A tandem parachute jump from 4.000 meters high!
The moment were the « WTF am I doing here? » thought is the loudest, is this one:

At this moment I’ve got my ass in the air and Fabien, the guy who jumped with me, was about to stick my head to his shoulder (so that I don’t hit him I suppose) and jump! After that we did a complete roll, which mean I saw the ground/the plane/the ground, and stabilized towards the ground, fell during one minute (which means we’re going down at about 150 kph), and then Fabien opened the parachute, and we got surrounded by an enourmous silence… The rest of the fly was really nice, I « piloted » the parachute a bit -pull left to go left, right to go right- and we entered a little cloud before landing.

More photos here on my slow server, and video here on a fast one (61MB). Both the photos and the film were taken by Dominique Charbouillot, the club’s videoman who tried really hard to get my face on tape although I had a hard time looking somewhere else than towards the ground ;-)

Fabien was really nice and reassuring too, thanks to him!

The effect is hard to describe, but the fear doesn’t last long, in fact it was gone the moment we stabilized face towards the ground. Really great gift, thanks Clo, Yann, Betty, Elise, Nicolas, and the four Forgue from Gagnac ! :-)