Project Work: Sebastian Alvarez

A lot of the time, a project jump like this takes a lot more work beforehand than people think. Even when skydivers know it is more complicated than just some practice jumps, the amount of time and effort to deal with all the moving parts can be surprising. 

For something in a unique location, getting the permits can be tough. We do a lot of meetings about feasibility, and quite a lot you have to scale back what you are trying to communicate, so before you get even close to the real challenges of the project, you start by explaining the most basic things about how skydiving works to people who have no previous knowledge. For example, the location people were initially super concerned that if I had to cut away, my parachute could entangle in the foil mechanism that generates the wave. Things like that can be hard to get past even when you explain that with preparation and experience, you can make suitable predictions and eliminate the risk. Sometimes the meetings and requests process can take months – with the aviation people, the government, the police and everyone you need to get permission from.

At the start, I didn’t have a timeline. To achieve what I was aiming for I needed to bring together three main elements – skydiving with surfboard, then swooping with it, and then successfully catching the wave. I grew up surfing, so was confident with that part when I got there, but I had zero experience with the other stuff, so I had to learn sky surfing from scratch.

The way to get projects like this done is to break it down into manageable pieces and just keep moving forward, so when you do get the green light to move to the next step you are ready to do so. If there is a secret, it is to always be one step ahead – so you are never late when they ask you for something. 

At the very beginning, I found skysurfing to be perhaps easier than I thought it would be – jumping with a skateboard-sized thing. That changes really quickly though. I tried a wakeboard and got really unstable, so stepped back and trained more, working up through long, thin skysurf boards before various others such as gradually bigger wakesurf and wakeboard sizes. I needed to be comfortable flying and swooping with a surfboard, and while for a surfboard it is relatively small, it is bigger and more difficult to control properly than even the biggest skysurf designs. 

We were originally aiming to do this in California, but with no timeline, I was training all over the world. I enjoy a lot the part of the project where I get to learn something new, and for two years I was getting the hang of skysurfing, travelling everywhere with my different boards – in South America, Europe, and here in Dubai. 

I have a lot of swooping experience and I understand the theory, but again things were totally different. Swooping with a board that big creates a high level of drag, which if not managed correctly can create a steeper dive which can quickly become dangerous. When starting to figure out the timing, I learned that being too high meant probably missing the wave, while being a little low was where a small margin existed. Bringing these things together made this part another challenge that needed to be carefully trained. It was the opposite of what we teach a lot with parachutes, that being a little high is safer. I had to force myself to be low. 

The most important bit is that I needed to catch the wave, so this is the nerdy part. The waves don’t just keep coming like in the ocean, the machine that generates them is activated by an engineer and it takes 50 seconds – 30 for the big foil part to get moving and another 20 for it to properly create a wave. I knew this a long time in advance, so I would always train with the same canopy (67) and the same turn (450). I tried always to keep my setup the same, and 2200ft was when I would call over the radio to trigger the wave process. An important variable was the temperature. We discovered that as it got warmer it would affect the timing which would cause me to miss. For every five degrees of temperature, I needed to adjust the start altitude by a hundred feet.

The last part was to comfortable with catching the wave. I grew up by the beach and come from a surfing family, but also, surfing is hard. Like with skydiving you need to be current so that was part of my training schedule. Connected to the timing, we needed to find the best angle – too shallow and I would lose too much energy on the way in, while too steep would make a difficult turn. 45 degrees was about right but this was still from the front which was new to me. We trained it by towing in with a jet ski a bunch of times until we were happy with it.

With everything ready we had two days, one for practice and one for filming. On the practice day we got it on the second jump, and were pretty stoked with that. With this many things to get right, it is all about the training and the homework. I spent a lot of time looking at GPS data and practice videos to bring it together, and even then it was difficult to nail it. I would get two in a row, and be super happy, but then miss two in a row. This is just how it goes. Day two was filming with all the fancy cameras and drones and everything, and we got what we had worked for.      

I would like to thank CYPRES for helping me out, who were super stoked to offer support. The water at the wave was deep and I would be wet enough that we would have to take everything out after each go – to dry out properly and clean and check. I have three containers so we could do this, and having the correct gear helped a lot. CYPRES was one of the first that I approached, and they just trusted me and came on board straight away.