Saturday, October 22, 2011

Open water season ends

It's officially fall here in Southern California, which means that the fun we've all had swimming in the ocean (and making friends with various sealife) is now officially on hold until next year.

Which sucks for me. I much prefer swimming in open water to swimming in the pool, but even though I'm totally game to hop in the ocean when the water's below 60 degrees, no one else is, so I'm stuck staring at the black line until summer.

Yesterday, a group of us went for our last OWS of the year - I just dragged my legs, although I could have kicked as the water made my feet, hands and face go numb after a few minutes.

The downside was the visibility - about 18 inches (although given what's probably in the Santa Monica Bay, that might be an upside. I don't really want to see the shopping carts and used condoms.), except that every so often, we'd swim through these odd warm patches of water.

I know that it's just an ocean current thing, but part of me kept wondering what it was that could pee that much and how close it was to our group.

We swam about a mile, which was a bit longer than usual, but we had to swim an extra few hundred yards to find a place to exit that wasn't crowded with surfers.

I don't mind surfers, but I don't want to be swimming near them when one of them loses a board.

We managed to go through the surf zone in between wave sets, which is good for swimming but bad for body surfing.


It was a great morning, and I'm sad to see the seasonal end of the ocean swims.

Guess I'll have something to look forward to for next year.

Because of the injury, I've dropped out of what was to be the final race of the year - the Palm Springs HITS Olympic. I'll probably go and cheer team mates, but it's not the same as actually doing the race.

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