Wednesday Evening - 13 March 13

Our first Wednesday evening swim of the season was wonderful.  It was warm and sunny with light breezes out of the east (?!) so there was a small chop on the water running almost parallel to the beach from left to right.  The tide was way out and there what surf there was was only knee high.  I didn't get a water temperature but it has been in the low 50's since December so I wasn't expecting any big changes.  Swimming were Rob, Niel, Byron and John Segal, who we have not seen since the last Wednesday evening swim last fall.  We did a reversed triangle, kind of the classic Wednesday evening swim.  The buoys are not out yet so navigating along and to 'the end of the buoy line' is a bit approximate.   We got in on the right side of the pier, swam out and headed towards the creek.  The water from the creek was flowing along the beach so the water felt warmer than expected and got quite a bit warmer off of the mouth of the creek.  This all got corrected on the way to the end of the pier.  About a third of the way along this leg we swam back into unadulterated Avila ocean water and the temperature dropped into the low 50's.  It was actually kind'a nice to have this happen once I was already warmed up.   While we were regrouping at the end of the Avila Pier Byron and I commented on how nice it was to be out here after work because you can just feel all of day's stress just fall off of your back.  We completed the triangle and came in .  We covered a mile in a total time of 41 minutes, which included some lengthy pauses at each of the turning points where we fell into talking about swimming and training.

niel