FLYER
Written by Chloee Blair
Despite 1,600 skydives and more than 160 BASE jumps, some jiu jitsu, scuba diving and rock climbing under his belt, and just casually running a couple 5Ks a week - John probably wouldn’t call himself cool.
“I’m very much a recluse,” he admits when we sit down for a beer. “I’ll go skydiving. I’ll take my dog to the park. And I’ve always been social in those situations. But I’ve never been like - I’m going to go to a bar and meet someone tonight. I’m not like that. I don’t know why. I just don’t have the genes for it, I guess,” and he laughs.
But the 35-year-old - a St. Augustinian since he was a teen and systems analyst with Northrop Grumman - has done some cool shit. Although he swears it’s not all for the adrenaline, his hobbies are soaked in it.
“I’m a weekend warrior,” John says, saying his jump stats don’t compare to those of hardcore jumpers, some of whom give up their jobs to dive full-time. “I’m not going to have that lifestyle. On a busy weekend, after three or four days of jumping, I’m ready to chill out for a few days.”
“It is cool to jump in different places…but I don’t care, the sky is the sky to me. Air is air,” John says, mentioning he’s done about 90 percent of his dives out of Palatka, usually in a little 4-seater Cessna 182.
That said, he’s jumped out of - and off of - all kinds of things: a helicopter, hot air ballon, cliffs, mountains, bridges all over Florida, the Southeast and, recently, a two-week BASE jumping excursion with friends in Europe.
When pressed to come up with his worst jump, he can’t really think of one.
“Typically if you’re in danger, when you land, you’re happy,” John says. “If you really enjoy skydiving, you probably don’t pull too many negatives out of it. Also, I haven’t broken any bones. I’ve been very lucky.”
He mentions that cutting away his chute sucks.
“Imagine you’re under a swing that’s twisted but you’re also diving and you have G-forces applied and you’re spinning around and you look up and your canopy is even with the horizon, which tells you that you’re diving straight down and you look up at the twists and the twists aren’t coming undone,” John explains. “If you don’t do anything you’re going to hit the ground at probably 60 miles per hour, so you pull a cable that releases the main parachute and deploys the reserve.”
He says within 100 feet, he’s under a new chute.
“I’ve had canopies in the past where I’m scared to pull my parachute out and deploy it. I’m like ‘here we go,’ fucking terrified I’m going to cut this thing away and lose all my money,” he says.
However, John has no problem naming exactly what he loves most about skydiving.
‘My favorite jumps are where I’m so filled up in my soul, where I’m jumping with the people I love – my friends – and it’s a sunset jump,” John says. “It’s always so beautiful. You have the orange sky, and you’re flying up there and it’s a little chilly and you’re freezing a little bit. It’s always the last jump of the day, so you’re not thinking about, ‘oh, hurry and pack up again.’ You land and you’re shutting off immediately. You’re not worried about anything else for the day. I landed with such a beautiful jump with my friends. Life is good.”
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