On Oct 10th, 1993 a group of friends tried skydiving for the first time with the 'Falling Illini' skydiving club at the University of Illinois.  We drove from Champaign-Urbana to Frankfort, Indiana for our first jump. We chose to do our first jump as a static line jump as opposed to a tandem jump.  This meant that we were jumping alone after doing 5 hours of ground training where they showed us everything that could possibly go wrong.  

The amazing thing about a static line jump is how you exit the plane (which was at 3500 feet).  You don't actually get to jump out of the plane or sit right on the ledge and fall out.  Instead, you have to sit right next to the open door and then swivel sideways and drop your feet out the door onto a foot peg.  At that point you need to reach out and grab the strut that goes from the body of the plane up to the underside of the wing.  So, now you have your feet and hands outside the plane but your butt still inside.  Then you need to stand up and get your butt outside of the plane too.  Keep in mind that we're still going 90-100 mile an hour.  You still can't jump yet.  Next, you have to start working your hands up the strut toward the bottom side of the wing.  Eventually, your hands are so far up that you can't stand on the foot peg anymore.  At that point, you are actually just holding on by your hands and your legs are flying back in the breeze.  You still can't let go.  You still have to keep moving your hands up the strut until your head is just below the wing.  Only at that point can you arch your back and let go.  It was pretty intimidating learning about how the exit was done during the 5 hours of ground training.

Given the static line nature of the jump I did not get to free-fall.  However, the drift down was really amazing.  Perfect silence.  It was very peaceful.  We had rectangular parachutes that could be easily maneuvered so we could control the direction and location of our descent.  I did not bring a camera so I don't have any pictures but I am posting my jump log.