BERNARDSTON — Bob Clancy looked out over the rolling countryside of western Massachusetts from the open door of a plane 13,500 feet in the air and, in an instant, jumped out.
Clancy began plummeting toward the earth stomach-first, the wind rushing against his smiling face. In what seemed like no time at all, a minute had passed in free fall and Clancy released his multi-colored parachute, hoisting him upward again in one tremendous whoosh.
Over the past 39 years, skydiving has become one of the Bernardston Elementary School principal’s greatest passions. Since his first jump on Oct. 8, 1977, at the age of 21, Clancy, now 61, has done about 5,600 jumps.
“It’s exhilarating,” said Clancy, who lives in Rowe. “It’s a very difficult feeling to describe, but it puts a big smile on your face, and you want to do it again and again.”
For Clancy, it all began during his freshman year at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, when he noticed a table for the UMass Sport Parachute Club in the Campus Center. Though admittedly a bit scared, Clancy signed up to skydive at the now defunct Turners Falls Sport Parachute Center.
“It was just an interest in trying something new, different and exciting,” he said. “And then after you do it the first time, you realize ‘This is fun.’ It just sort of becomes a part of you, and becomes a hobby.”
Since then, Clancy has gone skydiving across the country, often traveling south to skydive in winter months, as well as in Africa and Asia. Still, Clancy said his “home drop zone” is Jumptown in Orange.
Throughout his lengthy involvement in skydiving, Clancy has done exhibition jumps for spectators over Boston, jumped into his friends’ weddings and become a skydiving instructor, instructor examiner and a pilot.
Prior to the birth of his two sons, Liam, 13, and Sean, 15, Clancy said he would jump several hundred times per year, often with his wife, Lisa Miller.
“Before our children, we would go every weekend,” he said.
In a way, his children are skydivers too.
“They have skydived when they were in the first trimester with their mom,” Clancy said.
Now, outside of his responsibilities as a father and principal at Bernardston Elementary School, a position he’s held for six years, Clancy said he’ll make one or two dozen jumps a year. He keeps track of every single jump in a log book and even has all his own equipment, including a main parachute, reserve parachute, container system that holds both and an automatic opening device for the reserve parachute.
In a day spent skydiving, Clancy jumps five or six times, driven by the sensation of flight, rather than of falling.
“You just kind of leave everything behind,” Clancy said.
In one of his most memorable jumps of all, Clancy went skydiving without a plane. He once did what is called a “base jump,” where a skydiver leaps from a building or land formation, by jumping off the El Capitan cliff in Yosemite National Park.
“It’s different, that’s for sure,” he said, explaining that it takes more time for a base jump skydiver to pick up speed in midair.
Clancy said one of the things he loves most about skydiving is the social aspect. Skydiving allows him to spend time with his wife and many of his old friends from the UMass Sport Parachute Club.
“Everybody is kind of there for the same reason and everybody’s talking about skydiving,” Clancy said of going to Jumptown. “It doesn’t matter if you’re blue collar or white collar. At the jump zone, everyone has no collar.”