Friday, September 2, 2011

Not The Smartest Thing i've Ever Done

It's October 1991 and I'm on my honeymoon in Negril, Jamaica. Beautiful weather. beautiful beach and 10 days of just a wonderful time with my new bride. Due to safety(Jamaica isn't the safest country in the world), we basically just stayed at our resort. Though, one day the cabana boy(He looked like Scottie Pippen's Jamaican twin brother) who took me water skiing everyday told me about a place my wife and I had to go. Rick's Cafe up in the mountains. This place was known for it's beautiful sunsets and cliff diving. We take a 20 minute cab ride and arrive there with about 100 other tourists and regulars. The sunset is about 2 hours away so we belly up to the bar and get some drinks. As we're relaxing with the other patrons there seems to a bit of a commotion going on. It looks like the cliff diving show is about to begin. Now, I'd had seen cliff diving shows before in Mexico so I figured it was similar. Some underage peasant boys in Speedos doing dives from really high cliffs into about 6 feet of water. Love that stuff. To our surprise this wasn't a show at all. It was just a cliff by the bar that anyone could jump or dive off of. There were little Jamaican kids jumping off and a few men. I look at my wife and say "I've gotta try this!" She says, " I don't think just anyone is allowed to jump off that cliff." all of a sudden a patron( a pasty chunky fellow from the United States) goes to the cliff and jumps in. I said " Oh yeah? I'm doing it!" So I remove my t shirt, shoes and socks. I'm standing at the edge of the cliff in just my shorts. My wife is about 100 feet below with our camera.(Man, too bad Flip Cameras weren't around then!). People are cheering me on to do this. I look over the cliff and figure its about 75 feet to the bottom. One slight problem. About 10-20 feet below the top of the cliff, the cliff juts out about 10 feet. So not only am I jumping off a 75 foot cliff but i have to actually take a running start to clear the portion of the cliff sticking out. I take a deep breath and start my run. I get to the edge and make my leap. It seems like I'm in the air for minutes (actually about 4 seconds) and I'm realizing "Geez, this is really high up!" I hit the water and immediately think to myself "Yes, I've just broken both my feet!" I didn't break anything luckily but the splash I made had a diameter of about 10 feet. ( My mother-in-law later commented after seeing the picture of the splash "Oh look, Danny is in a hot tub.") I popped back up to cheers from the crowd. My new wife just looked at me and said "If I knew you were going to do this, I would have bought a hell of a lot of life insurance on you"

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