Jumpers bare it all for a cause
The seventh annual nude bungee jump at WildPlay draws visitors from around the world
Ben Ingram, The Daily NewsPublished: Monday, February 25, 2013
Is it a bird, or a plane? Nope. It's a naked man bungee jumping.
The seventh annual nude bungee jump took place last weekend at the WildPlay Elements park in Nanaimo. Jumpers stripped bare to raise money for the B.C.
Schizophrenia Society by leaping in the buff from a 42-metre-high bridge.
A wide variety of people took the 42-metre naked plunge from the bridge at WildPlay Elements park in Nanaimo on Saturday and Sunday. The jumpers paid $35 for the liberating experience to help raise money for the B.C. Shizophrenia Society.
Ben Ingram/Daily News
The event has increased its reach in recent years and staff at the park say they now throw as many as 15 nude jumpers per hour from the bridge when the annual jump kicks off the park's season. Those who took the leap this year came from all over the world, from locales like Germany, Russia and Australia.
WildPlay marketing director Heather Watters has noticed a unique emotional bond that dozens of naked people standing on a bridge seem to make with one another.
"Everything is sort of stripped down; there's no shyness about it," she said. "It's an amazing thing to see everybody overcome a personal goal, (jumping) off the bridge but doing it in a way that's really about something else."
For 60-year-old Michael Ward, the goal was to scare himself and push his own personal limits.
The man raised over $700 in pledges for BCSS on his own as people in the community rallied behind his pledge to jump from the bridge in full body-paint.
Ward covered every inch of his body in metallic silver paint before he took the leap.
But there's more to Ward's story than simply the shiny paint that reflected sunlight off his naughty bits as he jumped from the bridge on Saturday. He's dying of cancer.
"What do you do? You just keep on going, you don't give up," he said. "I do have a terminal illness, so this is a personal thing for me to do. That, and I'm also scared like hell of heights."
Jumpers like 36-year-old Laura Dalsin of Victoria had little time to think about their shame as they walked out on a platform that jutted from the bridge, 42 metres above the Nanaimo River. Dalsin's heart was pounding, she said, and the closer she got to the edge, the more fearful she became.
Nevertheless, when a jump co-ordinator sounded off the "1,2,3 - jump!" she did just that and soon became something of a naked, screaming pendulum that dangled over the river.
"My husband's schizophrenic, so I like to help them out whenever I can," she said of her reason to take her third naked jump from the bridge. "It was just as scary as the first time."