The type of parachute he was using was called a Ram-Air-Canopy. It was several generations more advanced than the round parachutes soldiers had used in World War II. Through the use of steering lines and stiff panels on the rear of the parachute, it could be navigated to drop a person on a dime. He had no trouble lining himself up with the boat.

But then he ran into two sets of problems.

One he had control over. The other he didn’t.

In training, he had been taught to turn into any kind of wind at five hundred feet. Skydiving facilities usually had a bright red inflatable bag that showed which way the wind was blowing. Turning into the wind gave a natural brake action. Of course he had known ahead of time he would not have the luxury of such a bag while trying to land on the boat. But he had hoped to get some sense of the direction and strength of the wind before he neared the boat.

As he started his final approach, he realized the wind was directly at his back, which was the worst possible scenario. It would force him to compensate for his extra speed by pulling his toggles early. The latter were his steering lines, and to really slow down, he had to yank them as far as thigh level. Ordinarily, without wind at his back, he would only yank them hard just when he was about to touch down. They were designed to flare the chute and bring a person into a full brake position. The toggles were an ingenious invention—they allowed a skydiver to touch down with hardly a bump.

But, once again, because of the wind at his back, he could not just use the toggles briefly, fifteen feet above the ground—or in this case, the water. He had too much damn speed. The boat seemed to rush toward him.

He pulled his toggles hard.

The braking effect momentarily kicked his feet and the rest of his body horizontal to the water. But then he went right back to a vertical position which was good and bad. He wanted to land on his feet, but he immediately saw that he had given in to panic and braked too early. He still had too much speed, and he desperately wanted to gently touch down on the boat. It was not stable like the ground. He would have no room to roll.

So he flared again. He had never done that before in practice, two flares.

If the first flare was too early, his second one was much too late.