Two BASE jumpers drown in Big Sur tragedy
A BASE jumper who parachuted off a
bridge overlooking the Pacific Ocean likely drowned, as did the man who
heroically jumped in to try and save her, according to police.
The two thrill-seekers have been missing in the Big Sur area since Saturday morning.
Monterey County Sheriff's officials
say a video from a helmet camera shows Mary Katherine 'Katie' Connell,
of Ventura, descending nearly 300 feet and landing on Bixby Creek, which
feeds into the Pacific.
Shortly after the landing, three
large waves overtake her and she vanishes from view, presumably having
been dragged out to sea.
Sheriff Steve Bernal says her
companion, identified as a BASE jumping instructor from Finland, then
leaped off the bridge to help her, reported the station KION.
While the male victim's name was
being withheld by the authorities pending the notification of next of
kin, it is believed that the man who attempted to save Katie Connell was
Rami Kajala.
According to his Facebook page,
Kajala, a Finnish national, was a BASE jumping instructor and flight
suit designer who was friends with Ms Connell.
His final status update, dated
January 13, featured more than a half-dozen photos of the young woman
jumping from a cliff in Perris, California, in one of Kajala's
custom-made 'tracking' suits.
According to his website and his
social media postings, Kajala had been BASE jumping since 2003 and had
2,500 jumps to his name. In 2013, he started the company RavenBase.com,
which manufactures and sells tracking suits designed to fly.
'BASE' is a term that stands for
four categories of fixed objects from which one can jump: building,
antenna, span and Earth. Practitioners of the extreme sport parachute or
wingsuit-fly from man-made structures or cliffs.
In BASE jumping, tracking is a
freefall technique in which jumpers assume a forward position that would
take them away from the fix object, be it a cliff or a bridge, as they
fall.
Kajala, who referred to himself as a
'master jedi tracker,' operated a BASE jumping school offering courses
in the art of tracking.
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