used to be big into scuba diving for many years, in particulary technical diving. I graduated from Open circuit trimix in the early years diving to closed circuit diving. looking back i think the stupidest/most dangerous thing ive done in my life was a solo dive to 117m on CCR or a 105m cave dive.
But having seem many things 1st hand over the years of diving (especialy the deep stuff) and also having experianced some myself. I cant believe some of the stuff i once did. Makes my blood run cold thinking about it. Hence why i no longer tech dive anymore, and just dive recreational stuff on holiday now.
Respect chapster, having dived and having to quit for health reasons, I’ll say that a 117m solo is pretty fuggin stoooooooooooooopid. But hat’s off for getting back and telling the story. 😆
Does it have to be deliberate? Mine was probably leaving a plastic petrol can sat in front of a space heater, luckily I heard it gassing out before it popped but the can had already blown up like a balloon and started to crack. Not my finest hour.
The scary thing looking back, is that i (and so did the guys i dived with) that this type of diving was our norm. Even when we lost freinds or folk we knew due to diving, or we suffered decompresion bends on deep dive trips we all considerd this as something that came with the territory of diving deep wrecks/caves. Loads of risk just to look at some rusty metal on the seabed. Not for me anymore
Not at all, Northwind. You’ve reminded me of another where my motorbike ran out of fuel on the A-6 from Madrid, another biker stopped and gave me a lift to the nearest petrol station, Collado Villalba, and we filled a (n officially recognised) plastic bag with fuel. Unfortunately on the way back to my bike the bag touched the exhaust pipe and……
Mine was accidental too and involves a lot of alcohol, a leaky oil burning lamp, my jeans and the back of my mate’s car. I still shudder when I recall it.
My second most dangerous act involves a handgun found at a mate’s house that I assumed to be a fake. It wasn’t and it had a live round in the chamber.
To put it into perspective, my bro is a very unassuming guy, not overtly courageous. He took his North Sea survival test a while back and escaped from a submerged inverted helicopter dunked into freezing water. He passed the test with flying colours. He also cannot swim. That’s the bravest thing I’ve ever seen.
Probably a few silly driving incidents when I was younger, trying to find out what the cornering limits were on Renault 5’s / PUG 205’s.
Most recently prob just riding my bike – it was quite scary when I got it wrong on my own, coming round realising I’d broken ribs and collar bone badly and wondering if the shards I could see almost sticking out of the front of my shoulder had severed any arteries.
Oh thinking about it, I fought quite a few rounds of full contact tkd at world level. Interestingly, the worst injuries I had were broken digits / ankles and a torn hamstring. Maybe I was better at martial arts than biking 🙂
I’ve done that Sunken heli thing too. I didn’t enjoy it at all. I thought it was massively over rated and would need to be paid vast sums to repeat it. Pitch **** black it was so you don’t know which way is up!
While slightly drunk I jumped off a boat off the coast of IoW. Mates had tied a piece of rope to the back of the boat, and I grabbed the very end of it before I was left behind. Was a sailing boat too, and I’m not a brilliant swimmer. Don’t think I could’ve held out for long enough for them to turn around and pick me out. Took in way too much water, and lost all strength, couldn’t even begin to pull myself along the rope (was about 30m long). At one point I was holding on with just one hand when my other hand slipped off. Probably the closest I’ve been to dying.
Eventually one of my mates (who is a tank) dragged me through the water and onto the boat, where I threw up a couple of pints of sea water and passed out. Still had a “wtf was I thinking” moment for months afterwards every time I thought about it.
Ducked under a rope off-piste in chamonix.Found myself in 4ft of powder above a 200m cliff,100m below the lift station.Took 45 minutes of crawling on my belly waiting for the inevitable avalanche to reach the safety of some trees….where I promptly cried like a baby with relief.
Paddled out in triple overhead surf in an incoming tide….by the time I’d made it out back the whole bay was closing out.Paddled out and round the headland in 5m swells and a lot of moving water to get in at a sheltered cove.
Tried to walk back to tableview from downtown capetown….at night,through the docks.Got chased by about a dozen blokes across 8 lanes of motorway traffic till a random car pulled up and saved me from something i don’t like to think of too much.
Soloed a HVS (I was only leading E1 at the time)that had the most polished,rounded,sandy run out you can imagine….decided if I was to fall,it’d be climbing up-not climbing down.Threw up when I got to the top.
I’m older an more sensible these days….though not much smarter.
Fired an 8″ mortar firework off the black…not really dangerous as such (if would have been if it hadn’t lifted!) but what a buzz…got blown off my feet as it went up. Still get a smile thinking about it but everyone else who I knew that was involved in fireworks thought it was madness – I knew it was safe (or as safe as having an unexploded mortar next to you could be – it was in it’s tube and I didn’t have any part of me higher than the edge of the tube, but as it was dark, no-one else saw it so think I was standing looking down the tube or something!).
I think it depends…whilst doing whatever it is you are doing, it’s unlikely that you think how dangerous it is…so there are probably lots of stuff people have done that just doesn’t register to them as dangerous…
The scariest thing was going pillion on a mates Suzuki Hayabusa and he opened it up – I ride lots but hate going pillion.
Most dangerous – in a former career a few scenarios where in retrospect it was fairly dangerous, went through a door once to knick some peopele, with no protective equipment at all, and one of the guys was washing kitchen knives in the sink – that was a close one 🙂
I’ve thrown myself out of a perfectly good aeroplane a few times. I’m a bit of an adrenaline junkie but I try to stick to ‘risky’ rather than ‘stupid’.
Pointed a gun at my sister and pulled the trigger.
Was staying with family friends in LA, who kept guns. Had been looking at a Colt Navy revolver like this one:
Cocked it and couldn’t get the hammer back down so pulled the trigger. In the split second between pulling the trigger and the hammer going down the realisation that it could be loaded hit me, have never had the sinking stomach feeling as bad as that.
Still makes me feel weird thinking about it, was about a foot from my sisters face when I pulled the trigger and it wouldn’t have left much behind.
i actually enjoyed the chopper survival thing when i did it – despite taking an involuntary panic attack for some reason ….
id probably say going running round the outskirts of a west african town at night. or walking back from the pub on my jack jones in the same WA town. or the time me an my mate were going to the shops in the hilux and he got lost and we ended up in a dead end in some slums and people just appeared all around – was like a zombie scene. Had a gun pointed at me at a military checkpoint by a guinean shouting empressa empressa …. no idea what he was saying at the time – and our vehicle pass had expired apparently. Turns out he was asking who we worked for – my spanish is limited. the gun became a whole lot less scary when realised it had more chance of blowing him up than me – it was sellotaped together.
Cocked it and couldn’t get the hammer back down so pulled the trigger. In the split second between pulling the trigger and the hammer going down the realisation that it could be loaded hit me, have never had the sinking stomach feeling as bad as that.
I was going to say standing on a slab of snow that started to move above an 800m drop then I remembered going to Barbarella’s night club in Brum in the late 70s.