Sunday, July 22, 2012

Rob D., Allison, Susan James, Rob W., Sylvia, Yvonne and Byron were already at the beach when I arrived today.  Duke and Rick arrived shortly after I came back from taking the temperature.  The water was 59 degrees and clean.  It was gray with heavy overcast.  There was only a slight breeze and a few pelicans about, but no seals and nobody was fishing from the pier.  The swimming conditions looked great.  The only potential problem was that there was a yacht race shaping up and some buoys were being placed off of the end of the Avila Pier, so we planned out a swim but figured that it might get changed by boat traffic.  The idea was to do the regular triangle route but to have the option of adding an additional 1/2 mile by swimming from the end of the Avila Pier over to a point 1/3 of the way along the Poly Pier before coming back to the buoy line at the creek and finishing up along the triangle route.  The triangle route is about a mile, the leg over to the Poly Pier would add another half mile.  Allison was going to be accompanying us in her kayak which would give us some additional support and visibility.  We got started and when we grouped up at the last buoy on the left there were sailboats maneuvering around the end of the pier so we switched to Plan B; to head back along the complete length of the buoy line to the creek, swim over to the same spot on the Poly Pier and double back along our route to the start.  This would still be a mile and a half.  I wanted to swim long today, so when we returned to our starting point and everyone else headed in I continued to do laps along the buoy line.  I had tethered a bottle and some Gu at the first buoy so I could tank up as I went by.  Having Allison accompany me was great and an unexpected bonus.  I was nice to have her along for both the company and so I did not have to think about what the boats were doing.  The second lap went great.  On the third some wind waves out of the SW made thing more interesting but not difficult.  The wind did make the overcast clear off so it was nice and sunny.  On the 4th lap the wind waves had turned into a chop that was accompanied by a good current that seemed to run almost parallel to the beach from west to east.  This was getting to be tough, I'd run out of Gu and decided I'd done enough.  I'd covered about 4 - 1/4 miles in 2 hours 21 minutes, about what I had hoped to do. 
Rob and I will be back to swim at 5:30 on Wednesday.


niel