The Atlantic School of Skydiving is located in Waterville in the Annapolis Valley, a nice hour's drive outside of Halifax. If you go, be prepared to wait: I was scheduled to jump at 3 pm and finally got to at around 5:30. I really should have brought my book, or a board game, to keep me occupied while I waited with nervous excitement! Then, finally, they got me into my sexy skydiving outfit - which made me feel like I was about to climb into a fighter jet with Tom Cruise, Top Gun style!
Then we crammed ourselves into the teeny tiny Cessna - a pilot, wearing a chute of his own which made me a tad nervous; two instructors; me; and a 13-year-old kid who was going with the other instructor. It took about 20 minutes to climb in a big slow circle up to 10,000 feet. From there you can see the whole Valley (the North "Mountain" looks like a little ripple), the Bay of Fundy and the New Brunswick coast, Chester Basin and even Halifax.
Once we got to the proper spot and I had been tightly strapped to my good buddy Kenny, they opened the door right next to me and told me to stick my leg out and brace my foot on the platform above the wheel. That was the scariest part of the whole thing! Once I was arranged, Kenny counted 1, 2, and on three he pushed me head first out of the plane! I let out a good scream as we tumbled for a few seconds, with my viewplane consisting of sky-land-sky-land-sky-land before we levelled out for the rest of the freefall. Freefall is a strange feeling. You can tell you're moving very fast (220 kph apparently!) and the wind is rushing by you (and it's cold!), but you don't feel like you're falling as such because the ground is still so far below you. It's more like floating in a wind tunnel. After perhaps 30 seconds of this, he pulled the chute and we began the slower, gentler part of our descent. He pulled the cords and spun us around a few times so I could see the 360 degree view, and we zigzagged down toward the ground, where I watched the tiny specks of people getting bigger and bigger, before we gently landed in exactly the right spot in the field between the two runway strips. I'm pretty sure the grin on my face reached from ear to ear as I walked back toward Trevor.
I highly recommend the tandem jump here. For one thing, with a tandem jump you can get video since the instructor straps a camera to his wrist. But more importantly, knowing I wasn't responsible for pulling the chute, or navigating the landing, made me feel much safer and much less nervous!
Now if only THEY'd pay ME to do it again!! But I will be doing it again.
