The Ultimate In Water Sports - Cliff Diving
December 4th, 2008

Those extreme athletes who enjoy cliff diving will be the first ones to tell you to beware of the risks involved and to take this sport seriously. The risks are real and some can be life threatening in nature. Cliff diving is not a sport to enter into lightly and with each turn, the diver knows it could always be their last. Cliff divers exceed 60 miles per hour in less than three seconds. Regardless of the flips and turns they do before entering the water when it is time to plunge, they do so feet first hoping to avoid head and neck injury. When they are entering the water feet, first they are doing so with the bodies perfectly still and rigid. Anything else could cause life-threatening injuries if not death. To understand the seriousness of this, consider what would happen if the diver were to fall at the wrong time or judge incorrectly their landing. It would be equivalent to falling from a four-story building, head first; you are not going to recover from that type of fall.

Cliff divers love Acapulco and the La Quebrada cliffs. When the spectator's view the distance the divers make from the cliffs, it looks as if there is a very narrow finger of the ocean that comes in to where the cliff divers take their plunge. In this city, they have been diving off cliffs for more than fifty years. It is an amazing extreme sport to stand upon the cliffs and look down at a very thin slip of water that has a cliff on one side, sharp rocks on the other, and commit to dive into the middle.

Jamaica is another favorite place for cliff divers who enjoy the limestone cliffs of Negril's West End. The only charge that applies for these extreme sports enthusiasts is adrenaline. There is a café for spectators, located 40-feet to 70-feet on the edge of the cliff.

California has some great places that draw cliff divers.

Gibralter Dam in the Los Padres National Forest has a great place to cliff dive. Divers have their choice from 40-feet to 85-feet to dive from with various hazards attached if they so chose.

Box Canyon has cliffs that range from 15-feet to 65-feet with varying degrees of difficulty and is beautiful. There is also a 90-foot jump but the area to run in order to get a good jump is covered with brush.

Santa Paula Canyon Falls also known as the Punch Bowls that extreme cliff divers flock too. The jumps here range from 10-feet to 80-feet. This area is a complex of three waterfalls. These bowls are located in a very narrow canyon that rests in a sandstone gorge.

Hawaii hosted the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Tour Final where the finalists performed their magic jumping from 82-foot cliffs into a beautiful ocean below. The cliff diving sport in Hawaii dates back to the 1770s.

Monte-Carlo provided an opportunity for those who visit as well as live there to see the 16 best cliff divers of the world. They held a competition for the first time in more than 300 years of cliff diving history. The cliff divers who are the best of the best have a personality that is very charismatic and who put their lives on the line with every jump, flip, and aerobatic maneuver they create.

A professional among cliff divers, Dustin Webster, has been doing this sport for more than twenty years. Now if you are wondering exactly how high extreme cliff divers dive from consider the highest Olympic level and times it by three and you then have the distance that cliff divers jump from. Once a diver begins their jump, they have two seconds to perform any stunts they have designed. In that two-second window, the divers feel emotions that are on the opposite ends of the spectrum from excitement to fear to relief that they are still alive. Concentration and perfect calculation of the dive is a priority or the diver could receive a fatal if not life threatening injury. To understand truly how extreme this sport is there are no more 150 professional cliff divers in the world

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