I suppose that my love of being outdoors came from the Cubs and Scouts. Camping, hiking and messing about with ropes seems to be what I ended up doing.
I started skydiving in 1975, while I was in my first year at university. Fortunately, there was a sport parachuting club at the university which not only provided transport to the airfield near Hereford, but also heavily subsidised the cost of parachute jumps. I did a couple of static line jumps and I was hooked. Glenys started skydiving a few months after she met me in 1976. All of our weekends and holidays for the next fifteen years were spent on airfields.
I became fanatical about four-way sequential competition and the majority of my 2,500 skydives were either training or competing on four-way teams. I was on the British four-way team at the World Championships from 1983 to 1987. Glenys has done over 1,000 skydives and was on the eight-way British team in 1984.
We finally gave up in 1989, when our second son, Craig, was born - airfields are not a good place to bring up children. The loss of skydiving put a huge gap in our social lives and, after trying a few other activities, we turned to sailing. Starting with an old Laser, we progressed onto yachts and soon gave up our jobs to go sailing for four years on Glencora.
In 1996, having returned back to the UK, we threw ourselves into new careers and renovating a rather run down house. We tried rock climbing, but found that our children were bored waiting for Dad to thrash his way up an easy route. I dabbled in golf (yawn!). Glenys started to run marathons. We went skiing in the winter. Craig and I went gliding. We tried dinghy racing, but our sons didn't like that either. We focused on our careers and extending our house.
Then in 2005, Glenys and I ran a half marathon in Ireland and, while we were there, we walked up a small 700 metre high mountain called Binn Ghorm. We had a great time. For some strange reason, I then decided that I'd like to climb the Matterhorn for my 50th birthday and, after a short climbing course, mountaineering took over our lives. I started to go off for a week of Ice Climbing every winter. Glenys didn't fancy this so she started going on horse riding holidays while I was away. We also tried our hand at ski mountaineering, sea kayaking and kite surfing.
All this came to an end when we bought Alba in 2011, although we do try to go hiking, diving and horse-riding whenever we can.