Meet Spider. If you give him 20 bucks, he’ll hold your GoPro camera — and jump 80 feet straight down into the water off the cliffs of Negril, Jamaica. You can then post the video of his death-defying dive on YouTube, if you feel like it.
What we’ve got here is Spider’s latest dizzying GoPro dive. Watch it if you dare, then ask yourself — does this look like something I would like to do?
If the answer is yes, you’re not alone, and not just because of Spider the Jamaican GoPro cliff diver. There is an entire mini-industry set up in Jamaica around tourists jumping off the equivalent of eight story buildings into nothing but crystal clear water below.
Rick’s Café in Negril may be named after the famous expat nightspot run by Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca , but while Bogey’s “Rick” may have shocked, shocked the local police by hosting casino gambling in his back room, he probably never envisioned the specialty of his Jamaican spinoff.
The main attraction of Rick’s Café, which opened on the Negril cliffside in 1974, is watching divers like Spider leap off the cliffs into the water below. And in many cases, the tourists themselves give the dive a try.
Unfortunately, it is all-too-possible for this tourist activity to go very wrong, as it did for a 26-year-old Canadian man earlier this year, who perished making a cliff dive at Rick’s Café.
But Spider makes it look easy . In fact, jumping off a cliff looks easier for him than watching him do it on YouTube.
So here’s a gut-check for you. Could you dive off a cliff like Spider, who amazingly holds the GoPro in his hand all the way down? As you’ll see, the anticipation is worse than the dive. Spider hits the water only a couple of second after he jumps off the cliff. Watch what happens.
