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      Any extreme athlete awaits anxiously to get their chance to "do the dew."  I was stoked when I finally got my chance with this commercial. This was a big one, so the audition process took a long time. It involved two snowboarders, two BASE jumpers, and two skysurfers. Each pair was a guy and a girl. Added to that, the shooting was in Switzerland. I knew this one was going to be a blast.

    The concept was to have a girl snowboard off of one cliff and a guy snowboard off of an opposite cliff, then they would fly together on their boards while performing a strip-tease. It was broken down so that everybody had specific jobs to focus on. I was skysurfing with my good friend Tanya Garcia, who is an excellent skysurfer. When we got to the shooting location the first day, we were blown away. It was the most beautiful place I've ever been. Plus it was a BASE jumping playground with all sorts of sheer cliffs. We took a look at our jump aircraft, which was a small helicopter called a Lama. Tanya and I both immediately knew it was going to be a problem for both of us to jump out of this heli with our boards. It was too small. The Swiss pilots seemed to have a solution right away. They grabbed a long section of hardwood and placed it in the cockpit of the heli so that it stuck out both sides of the chopper. Essentially they created two planks that Tanya and I could sit on for the ride up to altitude. We thought this was a wonderful idea until our first jump.

    Immediately after takeoff for our first skydive, Tanya and I were blasted with cold air. As we climbed it turned to freezing. Then it became absolutely unbearable. It was November in the Swiss alps. We should have known better. The rotor blast was yanking at my board, which was hanging over the edge of the plank. My frozen ankles were tweaking to the point of pain. I was completely miserable and I know Tanya was totally hating life. By the time we got to altitude neither one of us could think straight. Joe Jennings was with us to fly camera and his snot had turned to ice. It looked like a cartoon. But I was not laughing. None of us even said a word. It was so damn loud in that chopper with the doors off that we wouldn't have been able to hear each other anyway. Our first jump turned out like I expected. It was crap. We had to sit down with the director and figure out a better plan. We decided that if only one of us went up at a time with Joe, we could sit further back in the cockpit and it would climb to altitude faster. We tried this for a few jumps, taking turns. It worked alright to get some simple shots. Tanya and I would joke with each other on the ground about who's turn it was in the torture chamber. Eventually the director needed us to go up together again. This is when things turned bad.

    The next jump we did was one that I will never forget in my whole life. It scared the hell out of me. All three of us went up to altitude and then made our jump, frozen. Nothing really great happened as far as shots go. Then it was time to pull. Tanya was supposed to pull first. She reached back for her pilot chute and couldn't pull it. Her hand was too frozen. She tried and tried while Joe and I watched. Then she managed to get the pilot chute out, but not far enough to catch clean wind. It went down between her ankles and then inflated and got tangled on her body. Tanya got flipped upside down and went into a spin. I have never seen anything so frightening. I realized by now that Joe had already pulled and I was getting very low. I watched Tanya struggle, wishing I could help her, but then I had to pull. I pulled so low that my automatic activation device fired my reserve parachute so I had two parachutes out. I still had no idea what had happened to Tanya, but I feared the worst. I dealt with my malfunction successfully and landed to find out that Tanya's automatic activation device had saved her life. Then I found out that we had both missed hitting tram cables by mere feet. I don't think I have ever been that emotionally torn up.

    When the director heard the details of the jump, he pulled the plug and decided to send us back to the States where we could finish our shooting in warm weather. It was a good call. We finished the jumps, got much better footage, and it turned out to be a great commercial after all.