Sunday June 25th, 2017

It was warm and sunny at Avila beach with an air temperature in the upper 70's and a water temperature of 59 degrees.  No wind to speak of, an occasional 3 to 4 foot wave and nice clear water. We had a nice crowd today; Niel, Sylvia, Duke, Dave Van Mouwerik, Steve, Heidi, Sydney, Katy, Maria, Jonny, John Hampsey, and Peter Kelly. 
It was nice to see Dave VM. He joins us when he needs to do some ocean acclimation prior to an ocean swim, which are anywhere between 6 and 20+ miles. Steve is a friend of Dave's who was over from the valley and joined us. Katy is from Utah and is here for the summer.

Sylvia and Peter would do their own swims. The rest of the group decided to swim the buoy line from the Avila Pier to its east end and to then see how everyone felt about distance and conditions. At the east end of the buoy line the water felt wonderful and everyone was enjoying themselves so we decided to swim to the end of the Avila Pier. 

Dave and Steve

 

 From the end of the pier we could head for the mouth of the creek which would end up being a 1 mile swim or head over to the Cal Poly Pier and come back which would be a 1.5 mile swim.  Everyone voted for 1.5 miles so to the Poly Pier it was. 

Grouping up at the Cal Poly Pier

From the C.P. Pier we swam back to the mouth of the creek, along the buoy line to our starting point on the east side of the Avila Pier and came in. I had 1.52 miles. Dave and Steve did an additional 1/2 mile along the buoy line. 

Steve Snyder and Nan joined us after the swim. The had come to the beach to watch the launch of a Falcon9 rocket from Vandenberg at 1:25, so I hung around. The launch was to put 7 (?) or 9(?) communications satellites into orbit. This photo is just after launch. The flare from the rocket is just above the gray line of clouds on the horizon and to the right of the white clouds. I think that the dark object above the white clouds is a bird. 

 You can see the flair of the rocket clearly in this picture.  Steve had some powerful field glasses and he could see the body of the rocket. 

 Gaining altitude. 

I lost sight of it when it was double this distance above the horizon. Just after that Steve saw the separation of the first stage and we began to hear the roar of the rocket.

Wednesday Evening Swim

There will be a swim this Wednesday evening. In the water at 6. We'll see if we can keep this going this summer.

Next Sunday we will plan a 4th of July Swim. Details will be in next Sunday's post. 

niel