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Today, I stepped out of an airplane and 15,000 feet and it was incredible. I completed my first accelerated freefall (AFF) skydive at Adventure Center Skydiving in Hollister. I’d been waiting to do this for over a month. I went with my friend Gary who got me in the spirit. He's been taking skydiving classes there for a few months. I actually took the skydiving training class back in December, but unfortunately the weather did not cooperate I was unable to make my first jump that day. Two weeks later I went back and the weather again wasn't good either. You have to have clear skies from the ground up to 15,000 feet. On the bright side, I got to hang out with a lot of skydivers, and they're an interesting group of people. Today, finally, the skies were clear enough to do it!

I am actually more struck by the experience now that it is over than when I was falling through 10,000 feet. You freefall for about 60 seconds but to me honestly it seemed like about 10 seconds. Time really flies when you're hurtling towards Earth at 120 mph. I wasn't nervous, and I didn't have a lot of time to worry if I was going to be anyway. As I said earlier, I'd been training to do this for over a month so I think that helped also. I just took in the experience as best I could and tried to remain as relaxed as possible.

I will not forget how my instructor opened the skydiving class: “The purpose of this class is to teach you how to save your life. I will not teach you how to skydive. You will learn that later.� The class consists of four to five hours of training on everything they can possibly go wrong. Then I got to review the course twice each time I went back. You step out of the aircraft with two instructors holding on to either side of you. They don't leave you until your parachute deploys and you are ripped out of their hands. Thankfully, absolutely everything went perfectly and I didn't have to use any of the emergency procedures I learned. The only thing that went wrong during my jump was that wasn't wearing any gloves and my hands were frozen by the windchill by the time I landed. My instructor said I made an awesome landing.

The team at Adventure Center Skydiving in Hollister was really great, and if you are in Northern California and want to try skydiving I think it's a great place to learn. Now I have to decide if I'm ready to go back for jump number two.