Why Dan now jumps with two TimeOuts that beep every thousand feet. This isn't one of my funny stories. As a matter of fact, it still gives me the sweats just thinking about it. My stomach is squirming while I write this. Well, that might be the Mexican food I had for lunch. :-) As so many of my stories begin, I was kicking around on the DZ, bored with making 25 second delay solo jumps. A buddy of mine, Jay, asked if I wanted to go up and do some two-way fun stuff. I thought this was a good idea and we started getting ready. Jay was an AFF instructor, had actually been my reserve-side on my first AFF jump. We had jumped together a number of times and so we were pretty comfortable together. Oh sure there were jokes. Jay is blind in one eye. So, between the two of us we only had one good eye. :-) A little more background here. I was still a college student at the time. Very little money at hand. I had purchased my own gear by then but couldn't afford any extras like two Dytters, an AAD, two-way radios, or any of that good stuff. Jay and I were a little too confident in ourselves. Like I said, we had jumped together before so there wasn't the long pre-jump discussion of hand signals and so forth. You can probably see where this is going. We talked about the jump. Simple stuff, two-way and then just alternating 180s. Just to see how well I was getting on with staying in my column of air and turning smooth 180s. You know the kind of jump I'm talking about. Two-way, I turn 180 and Jay picks up the cat on me. I turn back for the two-way and then Jay turns 180 and I pick up the cat on him. Back and forth back and forth. Not terribly exciting but at least I was going to get in the air with another person for a change. We go up. We jump. We turn lots and lots of 180s. We're having a good time. Then there seems to be a pause in the flow. Jay puts his hand over the back of mine. I'm confused. The normal pull sign is an open palm with spread fingers against my open palm. The hand over the back of my hand is the "next maneuver" sign. Since we had been turning all through the skydive without the "next maneuver" sign I didn't understand why Jay was giving that sign to me now. Everything seemed to be going fine. I hadn't heard my one and only Dytter yet. I've never failed to hear it in the 60 or so jumps up to that point. But jay was still acting strangely. After he had given me the "next maneuver" hand signal, I expected him to turn 180 for the cat. I didn't feel the burble from his legs. He then smacked my left hand hard. I started thinking that something was wrong. He was acting weird, it seemed that we had been in free fall for a long time, and I swear that I consciously noticed that the temperature had gotten noticeably warmer. I figured it was about time to err on the side of caution. So I waved off and dumped. If I was dumping high, well so what. I just hoped that Jay wouldn't be pissed about me dumping out on him. My canopy wasn't quite fully inflated when I hear Jay, flying straight at me, and yelling "RIGHT TURN! RIGHT TURN! RIGHT TURN!". I slam into a turn and come around what I think is about 90 degrees. My radio man begins yelling over the radio, "DAN! YOU'RE OFF THE DZ. LISTEN TO JAY! LISTEN TO JAY!". He sounded paniced. I almost chuckled. I'd landed off DZ before. I knew this could be bad, but it probably wouldn't be too bad. Jay is on my right now and yelling for me to turn left. I do. A couple more seconds pass and his voice is now below me yelling "FLARE! FLARE! FLARE!". My hands are beginning to shake while I type this. I managed to get the toggles down to about three quarters when I hit the ground going down wind and down hill. I was moving fast and immediately went flat out onto my chest and skidded for about 10 yards. I was fine but was shaking with terror. The realization of what had just happened hit me like a freight train and I thought I would throw up. Jay had yelled flare approximately 30 seconds after I was under a full canopy. I had begun my wave off somewhere under a thousand feet. I pulled and was in the saddle somewhere between 500 and 600 feet. Jay had been trying to tell me to pull and was going for my reserve when he saw me wave off. He had then talked me down, canopy to canopy, into a postage stamp of a clearing in the trees. Had I not have waved off right then, and Jay had gone for my reserve, he probably would have saved me but may not have had time to get his reserve out. I still get a bit nauseous thinking about it. I owe Jay a lot. Although, I told him and everyone else on the DZ that no one should ever follow me down that low again. If I'm still in free fall below two grand I'm on my own. I've made the requisite changes in my gear since then. Two Dytters for a while. Now I've got two TimeOuts that beep every thousand feet in addition to their break-off setting. I've got a Cypres, and I always go over the hand signals with whoever is on a dive with me. Yeah sure, we joke about it once in a while. Jay teases me about having ice water in my veins for doing a nice leisurely wave off at 1000 feet. SHEESH! Had I known I was at 1000 feet I would have been doing a not so leisurely bladder voiding. It definitely scared me. Scared the people on the ground even more as they watched us in free fall below a grand. Luckily, it was an experience I was able to learn from, rather than others having to learn from it as a fatal mistake. I have learned from it and I take every jump very seriously now. Unfortunately, no jump that I make is ever "just another jump". A number of people and pieces of equipment have to work properly in order for me to have a safe and fun skydive. It does take a bit of the fun out of it, but overall jumping is still very much worth it. I hope that others can learn from this as well. This incident, as well as several of my other skydiving mishaps, have been the result of several errors. No one of those errors was solely responsible for the mishap. The combination of a number of small errors lead up to the final situation. They say the devil is in the details and whoever "they" are, they're not kidding.