Sunday, August 14, 2016

Blog report from TOM.  Sunday August 14, 2016.

In Haiku format:

Fog at Avila…
Many people; routes for all…
Sun pokes through mid-swim.

In longer format:

It was a foggy overcast morning at Avila to start.  Well beyond the pier out in the open ocean, there was a sailing regatta in full swing – boats heeled over pretty good.  But that was out there.  On the beach, it was calm, although there was a bit of a chop on the water.

Swimming today were many – some new, some regulars, and some infrequent regulars.  It was Duke, Chad, Heidi, Tom, Jeff from New Zealand, Amy, John Hampsey, and two youngsters whose names I didn’t get.  Mark was the paddle escort on his SUP.

Most of the swimmers did some form of the buoy line, with John & Amy doing their own route that included the end of the pier.

In the words of Jeff, coming from the dead of winter in New Zealand, “The water was perfect, tropical.”  It wasn’t quite tropical, but it was nice, probably mid-high fifties.

And this from John Hampsey - 

We had a good crowd with some newcomers—Jeff from New Zealand and two teenage sisters who had recently moved to SLO from Arizona. With about ten swimmers over all and mixed levels of experience, we decided to swim the buoy line and were fortunate to have Mark joining us on his stand up board! The water was about 58 degrees south of the pier and there was medium chop. As we entered the sea we were still enshrouded inside a thin fog. After reaching the last buoy Amy and I decided to swim to the end of the pier, everyone else returned along the buoy and under the pier to continue on the north side. As Amy and I swam our diagonal, the sun began to break through creating a mystical glint of light. At the end of the pier there was a commercial fishing vessel that Amy and I and Mark avoided by swimming fairly close to the pier on the north side. By the time we returned to the beach the fog had morphed into a puffy-white layer a few miles out to sea and we were under a gorgeous blue crystalline Avila sky.