MoxieLifestyle.net

The Summer after my Senior year of high school my parents planned a trip to Jamaica for my sister, her boyfriend, and I with another family that we were all friends with.

Our first day there we wake up at 10:00am and some of the girls get in a cab to go shopping, and the rest of us pile into a cab to go to a famous local bar, Rick’s Cafe. Rick’s was rated one of the worlds Top 5 Bars at the time of my visit (as of this writing it has slipped to somewhere in the top 10). We get there around 10:30am and the place is deserted, there is no one there but us and the employees. The bar is two stories tall and right on the ocean. I hear some shouts, look up to my left and see a man flying through the air off a tree into the ocean below.

I go over to ledge to see what happened to this guy and he is climbing out of the water onto a platform below. It turns out that Rick’s Cafe is famous for it’s Cliff Diving. They have three platforms, a small 10 foot one (that the diver crawled up onto after his tree dive), a 40 foot jump, and a 60+ foot jump from a tree that only the staff divers are allowed to attempt.

To give you an idea of what this looks like, here is a picture taken from the 40 foot jump.

Immediately I decide that I have to do the 40 foot jump. I hand my daiquiri to my friend and saunter up to the platform. I look down and I immediately freeze. The adrenaline rush of watching the pro diver wears off and reality sets in.

Am I really about to jump 40 feet into the water below me? Yes, yes I am. I back up and take two big steps and leap off into the air. It seems like it is lasting an eternity and it’s bliss. All my concerns melt away, it’s exhilarating. I snap back to reality and try to position my body to enter the water. I fail.

I used to BMX, skate (board and blades) and I was a lacrosse goalie in high school for four years and have had cups broken by 90mph+ shots. I think it’s safe to say I have experience a wide spectrum of pain when it comes to the family jewels, but nothing could have prepared me for what happened next. I hit the water feet first but unfortunately my legs aren’t closed tightly enough. Water racks my balls with more force and pain than anything I have ever experienced in my life. The water literally came straight up the middle pushing a ball to each side of my sac, stretching it to it’s limits.

The platform I jumped from.

I float to the surface and claw my way up the ladder and out of the water, falling face first onto the cement. I’m in so much pain I can barely stand but after a couple of seconds wears off and I work my way back up to the bar area. Applause breaks out from my friends, family, and staff. I am a hero, all sense of pain disappears and I bask in the glory of diving off the cliff.

I am explaining the pain to my friend Mike when a local Jamaican comes up to me with a brown paper bag.

-”Yo mon, this will help!”
“What? What is it?”
-”It be shrooms, mon.”
“Uhh, thanks but I’ll pass.”
-”No problem mon, here have a sample.”

And the guy palmed me a little baggie of shrooms in a handshake. I sat there in disbelief not because I had just been handed free shrooms, but because he was now passing out samples to everyone in my group, including two 12 year old and 14 old girls who were with my parents friends.

My sister Heather and her friend Sharon arrive from shopping and I tell them of my triumph over the 40 foot jump, conveniently forgetting to mention anything painful. They go down and jump off the small 10 foot jump a couple times and then deem themselves prepared to jump off the 40 foot cliff.

Sharon goes first. She hesitates a bit and lands straight on her ass. My sister Heather goes next and she jumps and hesitates a little as well. She lands on her side. Ouch, and I thought I was in pain.

My sister about to get destroyed

They both climb up later and are on the verge of tears. My sister is bruised purple all the way from her ass down to her knee. Sharon can’t sit on anything and a trip to a local hospital and an x-ray later and she has a broken coccyx’s. That’s right she hit the water so hard that she BROKE her ass. Luckily both of them got some pretty killer pain meds and made it through the whole trip.

The aftermath of my sisters fall

Even after seeing them get hurt I went off the jump two more times (correctly this time). It was the most fun I had had in a long time.

The whole point of this story isn’t to brag about my awesome trip to Jamaica, but also to show you that sometimes you have to take risks. Sometimes it works out, and sometimes you break your ass, but the pain is always temporary. Heather and Sharon tell their stories all the time and get a lot of laughs, it’s a story of a life time. You just have to push through that initial fear.

This whole trip was a blast. Read PART 2 of my Jamaican trip which covers zip lining through a Jamaican rain forest.