SPIKE Wilson took up parachuting just after his eighteenth
birthday.

He jumped twice and was looking forward to the adrenalin rush as the light aircraft took him, two instructors, and a cameraman, skyward for his third jump.

After climbing to 10,000 feet the signal was given to jump.

Spike stepped out onto the footplate next to the doorway, looked down on Pinjarra in north western Australia and gripped the wing as he waited for the others to join him.

Together, the three daredevils launched themselves earthwards, reaching speeds of up to120 mph.

At 3000 feet, all four parachutes opened correctly, but at 500 feet, Spike’s life changed forever.

He passed through a thermal and his parachute collapsed.

Spike was tangled in the ropes and he went into a back spin.

He remembers his instructors shouting at him, telling him not to open his emergency parachute.

Then he heard the chilling message, ‘This is going to hurt,’ and he hit the ground with a sickening thud.

“I landed on my bum,” he said.

Amazingly, he stood up but he was badly winded and he was given mouth to mouth resuscitation to fill his lungs with air while he waited for the ambulance to arrive.

The final result was a broken coccyx, and a compacted spine, with every vertebrae ruptured.

Surgeons inserted bolts through the upper vertebrae, fusing his neck, and Spike remained in traction for the next six months.

His injuries forced him to give up a promising career as an amateur soccer player.

He was a midfielder for Cockburn United (now Cockburn City), which was then in the first division and the club was grooming its young footballers for stardom in the professional ranks.

When he got out of hospital, Spike worked in the family’s carpet laying business for a year .

His father sold up and bought a pub, and Spike found the hospitality industry was far less physically demanding and less painful than laying carpets.

Spike found being in charge of the ladies in the pub’s Raunchy Show, was much more fun than laying carpets, but after nine years, it was time to move on.

He still needed regular massages and a warmer climate to ease the pain in his back, so in 1998, Spike moved to Thailand.

“Massages in Thailand were cheaper and the masseuses were much prettier than in Western Australia, so I moved to Khao Sok national park and set up the Freedom Resort,” he said.

Seven good years followed, and then, in 2004, the tsunami struck.

Spike sold the resort and returned to Australia where he worked in a mate’s butcher shop.

One day he was watching the sausage maker churning out sausages, and he thought to himself ‘I could do that’.

He talked to his family about his plans to export sausages to Thailand, and his three-year-old nephew asked him ‘What’s a sausage.’

“They’re like hot dogs,” explained Spike.

“Spikey Dogs,” said the toddler, and the business had a name.

Nine months later, Spike was in Phuket, making his Spikey Dog sausages.

Unable to get pub life out of his system, he bought the Sick Buffalo bar in Patong, specialising in breakfasts and barbeques, which, of course, featured his Spikey Dogs.

“Where did the sausages come from? Has the buffalo died?” quipped a friend.

Now 38, Spike is out of the bar business and is happily making his sausages in a factory in Kathu.

He supplies many of the local restaurants and bars, and he can usually be found in one of his clients’ bars, clutching a cold one and watching his sausages sizzle on the barbie.

But his near-tragic parachute accident didn’t stop him from jumping out of aeroplanes.

“I made about 20 more jumps, just to convince myself that the accident wasn’t my fault,” he said.

“But the landings were just too painful, so I hung up my harness forever.”