This past weekend on Saturday 13th of February Steve Gregor and Brent Findlay successfully completed 120 skydives each simultaneously in a single day, smashing a 22-year-old NZ record in the process.

The Hundred Jump Project was first attempted in 2018 but was cancelled due to dangerous Canterbury weather conditions. This time around the project was moved to Skydive Abel Tasman where Motueka proved why it’s the sunshine capital of New Zealand providing absolutely perfect conditions for the record attempt.

The first load took off right on sunrise at 6:35am and utilising a perfectly orchestrated and rehearsed jump/swap rigs/repeat method the pair achieved an average of one jump every 5.5 minutes for nearly 12 hours non-stop. At approximately 4pm Steve and Brent landed from their 101st jumps of the day, officially breaking the current record of 100 which has stood unchallenged since 1999. Gregor comments ‘There’s a reason that record has remained unbroken for nearly 22 years…because logistically it’s nearly impossible to pull off and even if everything lines up perfectly you still have to physically do the 100+ jumps which even in perfect conditions is torturous’.

The CHCH based duo didn’t stop there though and continued to jump non-stop for another 2 hours to solidify their place in the record books, eventually ending the day on a total of 120 jumps each.

The day wasn’t without its heart stopping moments. Both Brent and Steve had to deploy their reserve parachutes on separate occasions after their main parachutes failed to open correctly ‘It was really no big deal. If we had been doing the jumps under normal conditions from normal heights we likely would have had time to fix those problems, but we trust our gear 100% so we simply cutaway our main parachutes to deploy our reserves, landed in the same spot as all the other jumps, put on our next parachutes and continued as normal’.

Gregor and Findlay credited the large team of over 50 volunteers who made the event possible by performing the untold number of ground-duties necessary.

So far over $8,500 has been raised for the Mental Health Foundation of NZ but the team expect that number to continue to rise as word of their success gets out. ‘We have to remember the whole point of this was to put mental health at the forefront of peoples minds. Together we have shown that it is OK to be vulnerable. Since being so public about my mental health battles I’ve been getting countless messages from people sharing their experiences with mental health. Everybody has a story and we are helping to normalise telling it’ says Gregor, who says depression nearly took his life 5 years ago.

More information can be found at www.hundredjumpproject.com

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