Sunday, February 3, 2013

We had combined winter and summer conditions today; the water temperature was a wintry 52 degrees and the sky was all summer fog and low clouds.  The morning gloom looked like it was starting to break up when I arrived at the beach but within a half hour conditions had reversed, the fog had thickened and actually would gradually increase while we were there.  The tide was very low and there were sets of head height waves.  Niel, Brad, Byron and John were swimming, Charly was going to go for a run and Sylvia and Yvonne were going to stay on the beach and enjoy the big thumps the large waves would make when they closed out.  We decided to do the traditional triangle route with no thoughts of trying to swim under the pier today!  Nobody liked the idea of getting burrito wrapped around a barnacle encrusted piling by the surge.  The Harbor Patrol has pulled out the buoys for the winter so our navigation is a bit more approximate and the plot tells the story.  We covered just over a mile in 37 minutes.  We had a wide variation in speed amongst the four of us so we didn't stick together in a group and without the buoys the idea of meeting 'where the end of the buoy line was' left us a bit spread out at the end of the first and third legs, so we spent some additional time getting regrouped.    While I was taking the temperature I had seen a large otter floating on its back in the surf line on the west side of the pier and before we got in there had been several sea lions and possibly a dolphin working a patch of ocean near the end of the pier.  Byron and Brad had a dolphin swim between them on the leg from the end of the pier towards the mouth of the creek!  Coming back in was uneventful for John and I but Byron and Brad took an earlier wave and got run through the spin cycle.  Nobody lost anything and we all had a good swim.  The gloom was getting thicker after we changed so no one hung on the beach.  There was bright sunlight at San Luis Bay Drive, just a few blocks form the beach. 

niel