Grey Thumper wrote:How exactly did this new hobby go over with the Missus? "Hon, this whole motorcycle thing is starting to feel a bit too safe, so . . . "
She isn't too thrilled about it. Occasionally I hear muttering about raising 4 kids by herself...
The problem is really the appearance of risk vs the actuality of risk. I research everything I do to death. In the case of motorcycling, even factoring out barhopping, riding on Friday and Saturday nights I found that the risks in motorcycling are higher than driving a car. Just not astronomically so - as it may appear to people outside the hobby. I'm absorbing the risk mentally, and with higher life insurance. Insurance doesn't replace me, but at least it can temporarily address the financial burden.
With Skydiving, it is different. The perception of the risk is far higher than the actuality. There are risks and when bad things happen, like with motorcycling they tend to be of the fatal variety. What happens in skydiving are two major factors: People's innate fear of the activity (similar to most people's reaction to giant spiders or snakes) combines with the relative rarity of fatalities and their publication in the media to reinforce the idea that skydiving is high-risk. An activity only undertaken by people with a death wish.
Of course there is a common theme that motorcycling suffers from the same problems. It seems everyone has a horror story about a fatality or their first attempt to ride and falling over and being scared, etc. Then the relative infrequency of fatalities means that for every motorcycle fatality there is a news article - while the 4 or 5 times as many fatalities in cars/light trucks/etc go relatively ignored except under exceptional circumstances (i.e. entire family killed in accident, drunk mother in accident with 5 kids in the car - some of which died).
Even so, I want to jump again - at least to the point where I can perform a solo dive. With the tandem I'm left feeling that I was a passenger rather than a diver.
Statistically, between 16 and 30 people have died skydiving every year for the past three years. That's with 300,000+ skydivers performing over 3,000,000 dives.
