Taking to the sky

Sara Leccese thought jumping out of a plane was the best way to celebrate her 24th birthday.

She and her best friend Pamela Warford flew through the sky Saturday with Adventure Skydiving. The Manitoba-based company has visited the city for more than a decade to offer thrill seekers a chance to skydive.

Leccese had always wanted to go skydiving and finally found the chance to do so.

“It’s on my bucket list so I wanted to get it down,” she said. “It’s amazing and absolutely incredible. If anyone wants to be able to fly that’s the closest you’re ever going to get. I honestly thought I was a bird.”

The scariest part for Leccese was trying to breathe as she fell back down towards Earth. She said she thought the scariest part would have been the actual jumping part but the professional took that fear away with a simple push out of the plane.

“I didn’t have a choice,” she said. “I thought the landing was going to hurt but it didn’t.”

The next item on her bucket list is going bungee jumping in Australia, she said.

Warford said she didn’t want her friend to skydive on her own and decided to come along. She agreed that Leccese must be a good friend if she was willing to jump out of a plane for her.

“She said ‘let’s go skydiving’ and I came over right after with my credit card and signed up,” she said. “It took 20 minutes.”

Warford thought the scariest part of the jump was when the parachute opened. She added that she would jump at the opportunity to go again.

Tim Eason, one of the owners of Adventure Skydiving, said they like to go to places like Thunder Bay that don’t offer skydiving and offer the opportunity. Although Eason has been skydiving for years, he said the activity hasn’t caught on with too many Canadians.

“A lot of people don’t realize that skydiving is possible,” he said. “They think it can only be done on TV with stuntmen. In skydiving we don’t take risks we manage them. There will always be an element of risk because it is skydiving but we’re not jumping out and hope that everything works out. We do everything we can to make it safe.”

Eason believes offering tandem skydiving, where a rookie participant is strapped to a professional, helps to open up the activity to new people.

Given that the city has had a lot of rain this summer, Eason added that they could extend their stay if the weather is poor.

Anyone looking for more information on Adventure Skydiving can visit its website.