What is the scariest thing you have ever Done

the Guru

What is the scariest thing you have ever Done by the way of adventure and extreme sports. ??????????????

Enygma

Scariest thing I've done intentionally was abseil down a cliff. I hate heights, I really really hate heights. Wasn't really *that* scary though.

Scariest moment though was my first time out in what I'd call big surf (6 foot + faces).
I was the first guy outside and I just remember sitting there watching this huge wall of water coming at me. If this thing hits me I'm screwed. I waited and watched some of the more experienced guys taking their waves. Eventually I saw my wave, turned and paddled as hard as I could. The swell lifted me up until there was a vertical drop right in front of me, one more paddle and I'd be going over the edge. No way! Not this time! How the hell do people survive that kind of a drop?
So I waited and watched.
Eventually a medium sized set came through and I was ready, this time I was gonna go for it. No holding back, paddle, paddle, paddle, spray my eyes I can't see, keep paddling, the spray clears, holy sh!t, one last push! stand up! Wow! This is AMAZING!
Slam!
I land right where the wave lands and it pushes me right to the bottom. I can't see a thing, and I don't know which way is up. Maybe I've got my eyes closed I don't know. Suddnely I'm pulled back up again, momentary weightless, slammed back down again. I'm being churned around like a shirt in a washing machine. Now I know why they call it "The washing machine". And I thought a wipeout on a 3 foot wave was bad. My head hits something, my leg it's something, my arms are all over the place. Damn, I need to breath! What am I gonna do? Find the bottom and push up. That's crazy I don't even know where my legs are!
I'm still being thrown around by the power of the wave, it's all whitewater, there's so much air in there that you don't float and you can't swim. Besides it's all moving so much that even if you could float you wouldn't have a hope of swimming. I remember that the best thing to do is relax, but that's impossible, I've never had a wipeout this bad and I really need to breath now. All of a sudden things get a little brighter, and I'm no longer being thrown around the bottom of the ocean. My legs touch something, I push. Breathe! Air!
I really thought that was it for me! I thought I was never gonna come up. I was probably only down for about 10 seconds at the most but it felt like an eternity.
I went up to the car, got a drink of water and took a little rest. This is *not* going to get me down, I head back out and take three more on the head before finally taking the drop and making it. It's a left and I'm a regular footer so I grab the rail and hold on, just try to make it to the end of the section. Nothing fancy just make it out. And I did.
At least three or four times that day I thought I was about to die, but driving home, there was no way you were gonna wipe the smile off my face!



Damn, I wanna go surfing now

Kali

Originally posted by Enygma
Scariest thing I've done intentionally was abseil down a cliff.

Aye.. same as myself.. although it was face-first and a ~120ft cliff in wales.. was the first time i went face-first and I was so goddamn slow going down it cos all you can see is these ppl way below you looking up, and trying to get every step right so i didnt splat my face against the cliff

Illkillya

I've done a fair bit of abseiling and the likes and was never really scared by that kind of thing... except once.

I was out looking for a good place to go fishing, and I saw a patch on the cliff that looked like chalk. Of course, I wanted to check if it was really like chalk so I climbed along the rockface a long way, with a very big drop below me into the ocean (probably rocks first though), not really thinking until I turned a corner in the cliff face and had no footholds anymore. Then I realised what I was doing and a bit of panic set in

Cork Skate

The most scary thing i have ever done was not skating, I abseiled the cliffes of Moore, 620 ft high and i nearly burnt through my gloves, really scary (but cool)

TacT

One weekend in Sligo when the waves were absolutely huge I was the only soul crazy enough to get into the water with my bodyboard. A local surfer tried to stop me but I was a little too keen and sure of myself so he let me go. I rode one wave and it was the best wave I've ever had the chance to be beaten to shore with
After which the rip decided to drag me about 600m's down the shoreline. I remember looking up and watching the car where my mates were parked instantly vanishing to the right of my view, it was without a doubt the scariest day of my life, it took me about 30mins to get back to shore with my fins :eek:

offroadannie

jumping out of a plane at 12000 feet (with a parachute fortunately, and a major height phobia unfortunately)

competing in dirt bikes for years and never been as scared on the bikes as i was sitting on that plane waiting to go out - glad i did it though, never to be repeated ...

the Guru

The scariest thing i have ever done is canoeing on the Liffey more to the point doing a eskimo role //// Lets set the scene i am a big guy and getting stuck in a Boat and drowning upside down in a pool of p**s is not my idea of fun

Evil Phil

the scariest thing I´ve even done was picking up a spider. Sad I know but its true.


I really really hate spiders.

DrizztIE

Originally posted by offroadannie
jumping out of a plane at 12000 feet (with a parachute fortunately, and a major height phobia unfortunately)

competing in dirt bikes for years and never been as scared on the bikes as i was sitting on that plane waiting to go out - glad i did it though, never to be repeated ...

Fcuking cool... where did ya do that? Can't wait to that sometime... tbh

DrizztIE

Originally posted by Evil Phil
the scariest thing I´ve even done was picking up a spider. Sad I know but its true.


I really really hate spiders.

I had a similiar experience but it was with a the (exo-skeleton) dead skin of a taurantula... from Australia... I was nervous as hell... even though it was the taurantula's (exo-skeleton) dead skin.

Weird eh?

offroadannie

hey DrizztIE - jumped out of the plane in new zealand over the 'remarkable mountains' which was very apt as it was quite remarkable that i did it!!

another really scary thing i did (not by choice though) when i was in thailand was waking up in the middle of the night with a HUGE cockroach in my hair - didn't sleep a wink the following 2 nights

i really really hate cockroaches!!

Evil Phil

Originally posted by offroadannie
hey DrizztIE - jumped out of the plane in new zealand over the 'remarkable mountains' which was very apt as it was quite remarkable that i did it!!

another really scary thing i did (not by choice though) when i was in thailand was waking up in the middle of the night with a HUGE cockroach in my hair - didn't sleep a wink the following 2 nights

i really really hate cockroaches!!

She screamed the place down too

offroadannie

but luckily my very brave brother who really really hates spiders came to the rescue

pickarooney

Kloofing. Not sure if anyone's done it, but it's a South African sport where you walk around a set of gorges (about 20km) intermittently jumping off cliffs of increasing heights. By the time we got to the last jump, there were just two of us left, myself and a German bloke who had been taking turns to jump first for the last few cliffs. The final jump was 17 metres up, with a one metre outward fall, which got the old adrenaline flowing each time we looked out. The two of us made a pact that if one of us went, the other would too. In fairness, macho pride wouldn't have had it any other way regardless We decided to go, walked
up to the edge, then chickened out. This happened again twice, and I turned to walk the long walk of wussiness down the side of the cliff, when I heard this enormous splash. He was gone. The swine! On my own now, I walked to the edge, knowing what I had to do. Soooo high. All I could thing of was missing the angle of the jump and getting caught on a branch on the way down. I walked away. On the third attempt, I psyched myself all the way up and just strode boldly forward. At the last nanosecond I tried to chicken out, but momentum had already taken be beyond the point of no return, with the result that I began my inelegant plummet at completely the wrong angle. The flat, hard surface of the lake screamed towards me as my stomach made a valiant effort to abandon ship through my skull and I hit the water at a forty-five degree angle, taking the brunt of the impact on my throat. When I resurfaced, I looked over to see a crowd of vaguely familiar looking people, mouths agape, and made to singal that I was okay. My arm thought differently though, and an inaudible squeak escaped my battered larynx as I slipped again beneath the surface. I was dragged to shore by two pairs of arms, whereupon confusion set in. I appeared to be wet, and surrounded by strangers in some strange place. A girl I was pretty sure I knew from somewhere was asking me questions that made no sense and touching me in an overly familiar way. I couldn't understand why I was wet, or who these people were, or why they apepared to be concerned. I started to laugh, but my throat erupted in a flame of pain. Something odd was up. I realised I wasn't getting the full picture. I knew I was in Thailand, and I was pretty sure the chick was my girlfriend, but this story she kept telling me about having jumped off a cliff didn't make any sense. Why on earth would I have jumped off a cliff?
It took about an hour for my memory to come back to normal or near normal, and I didn't suffer any long-term effects, but it freaked the bejesus out of me, and I was convinced I would never wake up if I fell asleep that night.

I reckon I'd do it again though

DeVore

Going off a big jump in Livigno , much bigger then I had anticipated. Scared the **** out of me the first time heheh
(then I couldnt stop doing it).

Cycling accross Europe led to a few times when I was pretty sure I wouldnt be going home in one piece.

DeV.

Chaos-Engine

Up the North camping in fermanagh back during the first ceize-fire in 94. We were total nutteres back then being all of 14... Met some nice chicks with plenty of drugs and had a great laugh of a weekend...
One night we are walking along a back country road in the pitch dark. We are all wearing black and I got a ballaclava on my head. Richie decideds that we(fecked off your heads) should flag cars down with our torchs... So we do it to the next car... It screechs to a halt and 3 HUGE(we were young and free-staters) men climb out of the car... We RUN for our own little behinds and don't look back. Leaving Richie with maglite in hand and 3 scary ass northers whom we convinced ourselfs were UDA men...
After 30 mins have passed and Richie still hasn't come back to the tents I decided to go back and look for him(assuming he ran).

I can't find him nor the nordies... The others just don't believe me that he is gone but as time passes the paranoia kicks in
"maybe they took him and they are going to cap him??"

Anyway.. Next day the RUC arrive w/ richie and interagate us all and rightly give us the once over. Including many treats of beatings...

Oh god we were such idiots..

That is probably ONE of the most stupidest and dangerous things I have ever done...

Samba

Well on Summer holidays there was a great part of the coast line which was all rocky terrain.

At one part there was an underwater cave which you could swim in to and then find this massive air bubble (great fun).

Cave was about 15-20 Meters Deep.

I was young and foolish at the time but it was the day after a very nasty storm, so needless to say Visibility was 0.

I thought feck it im not going to let this weather stop me, so in I went with my mask (i could always find the bubble just by feeling the roof of the cave) I arrived at the bubble surfaced only to be pretty freaked out by the fact that it was pitch black(usually you can see the daylight from the entrance).

at this stage i was already panicking and i was in there for 3 mins, m8s were starting to get very worried.

So i decided to swim out and try find the exit, i swam for 5m's when bang, my head hits the side of the Cave PANIC ATTACK.

A million thoughts flashed through my mind at that stage such as did i swim to the wrong end? i had no sense of direction.

So stupidly i decide to head the other way which was in fact not the entrance at all but the end of the cave.

At this stage i was running out of breath and i was starting to see blackness around my eyes.

As i turned to swim in to the wrong end i saw a ray of light about 1 mm in width.

I swam for it with such ****** joy! i was nearly blue in the face when i surfaced, what really freaked me out was that when i looked up at the sky I noticed that there was a pinhole of blue in the over cast sky, which was where that ray of light came from.

tuille

Caving, and being stuck in rising water

Gordon

In my more youthful days when a mate of mine stole a couple of tapes from an open windowed car in Athens, Greece. We were caught by some locals and treated... nicely, until the cops came. They showed us the "cell" we were to stay in for the weekend and kept promising to beat us up with the big stick they were hitting very loudly against their table with. it was scary at the time...

As for sports, the general - absailing face first, rolling canoes and getting dragged out of a beach by off-shore winds when windsurfing, and going down waaaay too steep slopes in waaaaay too little visibility.

Adrenaline's a gas isn't it?!

jaggeh

50m Climb up a quarry Face then jumping into the lake below from the top.

shark fishing when i was in florida (and 11 years old)

jumping off the roof of my house and not killing myself

Wookie

Jumping of a sea cliff...



It's the one in the forground... I have to admit I wouldn't do it again.

The cliff is just up the road from Ailladie (rockclimbing spot in Clare)

Having said that spider's and stuff... No Way!

daveg

I do a lot of scubadiving and had a few scary experiences. I remember one of our early dives we went down to about 35 meters. It was all dark and grey and you couldn't see the surface. I remember thinking if anything happens here I'm flcked.

Another time my (so called) buddy was diving beside me waving his arms about. He caught my mouthpiece and pulled it out of my mouth breaking the seal. I was routing for my backup which I couldn't find (all the time running out of air in my lungs). In the end I grabbed his backup... pretty scary though.

Also diving in the Florida Keys and having a 6 foot reef tip shark smim underneath me... that was cool.