Sunday, January 12, 2020

Winter Swimming Conditions On the Central Coast

The air temperature was 56 degrees, the water 52 - 53 and looked nice and clean. It was sunny with a strong offshore breeze that was making a current and small wind chop towards the ocean. The waves were 3 to 4 ft. plus with some lulls between the larger sets that would make getting out easily a matter of timing.

We had a nice group today with some faces we have not seen in a while; Duke was back from knee surgery at Thanksgiving, Hillary dropped in after a year away and Teresa was back after a bit of a break. The rest of the group was Niel, Heidi, Jonny, Tom and David. We decided to plan a shortish swim with the option for people to go longer if they had not gotten cold yet.

We decided to include the reef buoy in today's route since there was a king high tide at 10 AM and there would not be much kelp on the surface around the buoy. We swam out to the end of the pier, over to the reef buoy, back to the pier on a roughly parallel line with the beach and in.

At today's water temperatures I wear a 3mm surf suit, a neoprene cap and large goggles and getting out to the end of the pier is a matter of waiting for my face to numb up enough so I don't feel the cold. The big goggles keep me from getting a ice cream headache but anything exposed skin is screaming for the first few minutes.