Let me just start by saying, the Farallon Island swim is no joke. This is not something to be taken up lightly, if at all. Frankly I have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that it has actually been completed by a non marine mammal. It has all the hallmarks of a bad idea: fast moving water, extreme cold, large swells, boat traffic, and of course the ever looming threat of a visit from the landlord as we push deeper into the gnarliest corner of the Red Triangle. On Wednesday night/Thursday morning I watched a man take on the burliest, blackest, angriest water I’ve ever seen. My hat is off to JC for attempting to tackle this most unforgiving and unlikely of swims, I watched the whole thing from the deck of the SEQUEL and had a hard time determining if I would ever have the audacity to start such a thing. Anyways, let’s start at the beginning shall we?

I’ve never actually met JC in person before I found him in the parking lot of the San Francisco Yacht Club, but through the magic of the internet we’ve been chatting intermittently for quite a while. We have a lot of friends in common and are the same age. Back in January I got a note from him asking me what I was up to in May and if I’d be interested in crewing a swim for him. Based on my personal geography I assumed were probably talking Catalina, maybe a Santa Barbara Channel swim, but I wasn’t sure because he wasn’t specific in his need. Either way as long as I had the time available I was in. After asking a few more questions to figure out where we’re going he asks me to keep it in stealth mode and then drops the bomb… Farallones… stfu. I had two major thoughts when I saw that. One – of course I’m coming now! Two – are you out of damn mind? Haha, it was a shock… in my mind one does not simply swim to the Farallones much like one does not simply walk into Mordor. It just doesn’t work that way.

thanks laying it out for us Boromir, you're always such a downer

His dates were a little tight for me but I managed to work it out with my office to ensure I could get up to San Francisco on time. In the years my current business has existed my dad and I (we work together/started the business together) have had a general rule… first 3-4 business days of the month no one is going anywhere because we’re too busy. I think what put this particular trip over the top into exceptionville was the destination. My dad used to live in San Francisco, he was very familiar with our ill advised destination. As a dude I think he felt compelled to let me slide this one time in the name of adventure. In the weeks leading up to it we talked a lot about the um… biodiversity of the swim. Remember not only does this place get swarmed with pinnepeds and white sharks you also attract other apex predators like orcas. I know most of us have a pretty positive Shamu type appreciation for killer whales, but they’re pretty serious business… they can kill a white shark, as documented out by the Farallones, pretty sure they could swallow a human if so inclined.

So thoroughly amped up to go help a friend take on a swim of epic proportions, I hopped in the truck Wednesday after I was done working for the day and made a mad 265 mile dash for San Francisco. Somewhere around Palo Alto I got a call from JC checking up on my progress and got to chatting a bit. I asked him how he was feeling about the whole thing and he was a little nervous but ready to go. He said “like any other marathon swimmer I just have to get out there and put my head in it.” Good answer. Luckily I picked the right combination of highways and missed all the traffic. I rolled into the yacht club probably around 9:45 and gave JC a call. He came out to greet me and show me the way to the boat. We chatted a bit, this being the first time meeting each other in person and all, but we both had sleep on the brain. He needed to rest a bit before swimming and I needed to rack out if I had any chance of staying awake for the swim after only a few hours sleep the night previous, a full day of work and a long drive. While in the cabin I also met Andrew who’d be crewing as well. We spoke a little and then I turned my backpack into a pillow and crashed for an hour or so.

I woke up around midnight to Vito, our captain, boarding the boat and starting to get things in order for the trip. The rest of the crew filtered in shortly thereafter. We had Phil as an observer from the Farallon Islands Swim Federation and John from the South End Rowing Club who came out as a pace swimmer. Before leaving we got a quick visit from Joe Locke who just made an attempt at the same swim just a couple weeks ago. He put in a strong effort but the water dove to 47 degrees and the reality of the situation is that a human can only sustain life for so long at that temperature. I’m pretty certain Joe intends to hop back in again soon to give it one more go before White Shark season gets underway.

view from inside the SEQUEL en route to the swim start

A little before 1am we were motoring for the Golden Gate Bridge. I love the view from under the bridge, but this was different. It was the middle of the night and a huge moon loomed off in the distance. The base of the bridge was lit up a little bit and there was this orange haze that floated around it. I’m not sure what the proper adjective would be to describe the scene, but majestic and magnificent are my top choices. Beyond just the aesthetic beauty of being in this little boat surrounded by black water under a giant orange bridge on a clear night, there was a certain electricity in the air. My senses were on fire with the anticipation of the adventure we were about to set out on. Last time I was at the base of the bridge it was daytime and I got stuck in a whirlpool with a friend, we stayed away from the outside of the bay because it was too rough out there… this time I’m out there in the dark about to throw a guy into the ocean and tell him to swim away from the continent as far as he can. Craziness.

A few minutes before 1am Vito tells JC he can go anytime he wants and he did the damnedest thing, he jumped off the fucking boat like it was nothing. If it were me I would have hemmed and hawed, cracked jokes, complained, possibly waited for another invitation to go… a parade perhaps? I need a little fanfare. JC just tossed himself into the inky black waters of the Pacific under the Golden Gate with zero hesitation like he does this shit all the time.

JC and Andrew on deck

The swim was on and so was the ebb tide. The good news was the water was ripping from San Francisco out to sea, the bad news is that’s not a particularly smooth and calm process. JC was assaulted with big swells (my guess would be 6 feet-ish) with all kinds of random potato patch turbulence that area is famous for. I posted myself up on the deck outside with a glowstick (good thing to do on night swims so your swimmer can tell you’re watching) on my jacket and watched the whole swim unfold minus a handful of puke breaks on the other side of the boat. Every once and a while we’d hit a line of whitewash from the ocean and the bay colliding as one tried to push further into the other. Despite it being very dark out there there was enough light from the moon and the city behind us to allow you to decipher the shapes and sizes of the movements in the water and I think it’s fair to say that was some of the burliest water I’ve seen with a person in it. The whole thing still plays in my head as I contemplate whether I would ever have the balls to take on such a ridiculous thing.

At 30 minutes we were set for the first feed. Andrew was in charge of that and I think JC was starting with some Gatorade. The water was in the low 50′s at this point and he was doing pretty well (it’s worth noting he had a successful ice swim earlier this year).  The feeding had a few technical difficulties but we learned how to fix that up and make the future feeds a little smoother. In the early phases of the swim JC was having some technical difficulties with his goggles as well. I think he was fogging up and having a hard time seeing. After the first feed I started taking stroke counts. In hour one we were up around 62. Phil was doing the same thing on the boat and we compared counts occasionally to make sure we had similar numbers. It wasn’t always easy to see JC between the dark and the rough water, a lot of the strokes I counted were based on hearing them not seeing them.

As we charged on the water stayed agitated but we made extremely good time as the tide spat us out into the open ocean. The Golden Gate became smaller and smaller until ultimately it was just a line of lights in the darkness. It’s pretty weird to push that far out into the blackness away from the mainland. In Southern California you at least have the Channel Islands to break the power of the wide open ocean a bit and give you the sense that there’s some sort of land boundary between you and the vast unknown expanses of the sea. In San Francisco you have no such luxury. All we had was a brilliantly bright stripe of silvery moonshine in front of us and city lights behind us that were rapidly falling away, blurring together, and eventually disappearing. It’s an eerie feeling.

By about the third feed JC yelled to us on the boat that he wanted hot chocolate to heat up his insides a bit. Andrew worked on getting that all put together and JC went back to swimming along side the boat until it was time to feed. Around this time we started seeing some buoys in the darkness that drifted right along the side of the boat. It looked like fishing gear to me, I asked Vito and he told me they were crab pots. I didn’t even know people crabbed right there. It’s a good thing we had JC far enough off the side of the boat that he didn’t hit one of those things!

classic nighttime marathon swim shot...

Apparently Farallon Island Swim Federation rules say no pace swimmers in the first 3 hours of a swim so JC was out there from 1am to 4am with just him and the space between his ears. Who knows what was going on in there. Internal radio? Quiet panic? Determined self affirmation? Random contemplation of anything besides what may lurk below in the darkness? Hard to say, but he was chatty at feeds. As opposed to quick and dirty in and out drink and toss type feeds he would float beside the boat to drink, ask questions and contemplate peeing. I was a little worried about the length of his feeds although I do the same thing in similar water temps. My concern was mainly raised from his dropping stroke count and the fact that I heard him either throw up or dry heave really hard a few times. We started around 62 strokes per minute but were now hovering more around 54 and would eventually bottom out at 52/53. There were a couple feeds where he’d ask about progress and we just had to yell at him a bit because the tide was turning around… yes you’re moving forward but you have to KEEP moving!

JC kept good track in his head of how many hours he’d been swimming and on the feed prior to 3 hours he requested a pace swim be ready to hop in. John was itching to get in from the moment he boarded the boat so we let him take that first swim with JC. As JC finished drinking that next feed and swimming away from the boat we tossed John off the boat and he swam out to meet JC. Things didn’t go so smooth at first. Pacing in the dark isn’t the easiest thing you’ve ever done. When you’ve never swam with the other person and there’s a major speed discrepancy it’s even harder. At first John had a hard time slowing down and kept getting ahead of JC. We yelled at him from the boat to get out of that spot and stay next to JC not in front of him, didn’t want him to give him an accidental draft, plus it’s against the rules. Moving the guys side by side created a new problem, they were crowding each other towards the boat. JC damn near hit the boat at one point while I shouted at him to back off. It was a little dicey. On the boat we were questioning whether we’d be giving him any more pacers while it was still dark out. Although it was most likely a mental boost to have company it was looking pretty bad for actually swimming. Luckily after a while both guys figured each other out and managed to swim together pretty uneventfully for the remainder of John’s shift. The funniest part of the whole thing to me was JC’s response to the initial chaos. He said something along the lines of “no disrespect to John, he’s doing a fine job, I’m just not used to swimming with a pacer.” How many people can be so polite at time like this? John stayed in swimming very slowly based on his own natural pace for as long as he could stand the cold. His presence helped JC pick up his stroke rate a little bit and undoubtedly perked him up a bit.

With John on board getting dried off and trying to warm up JC was approaching the nadir of his Farallones excursion. The night had gotten extremely dark during the pace swim leg. The moon was gone and it was going to be a while before the sun broke out over the surface of the water. We were all alone save for the far away lights of container ships in the distance. At one point JC stopped and declared “this is a dark hour.” It was pretty obvious that was more than just a literal interpretation of our evening. The swim was getting to him. The dark. The cold. The unforgiving beating from the sea. They were all taking their toll. As an added bonus he was having a hard time peeing which is bad news in a marathon swim. He started asking questions about distance and how close we were to the Lightship. I ducked my head in the cabin to ask one, what’s the lightship? and two, how far. The lightship is some sort of large lighted ship or buoy or something that essentially marks the mid point of the swim. It was 2 nautical miles out. The way the question was asked I wasn’t sure if JC wanted to know to set small internal goals, or if it was the new goal and he wasn’t going to tell us yet. The way his stroke rate and navigation were going it was starting to look like we’d be making that call before he would. Ultimately we did pass the lightship and we kept charging into the night waiting for the sun to finally rise up and change the whole feeling of the swim.

JC kept plugging away, fighting with everything he had, he wasn’t going to stop anytime soon. We encouraged him best we could and as the east coast started waking up I was getting tweets and text messages from people wanting to get status updates and send along encouragement. You could tell JC really liked hearing that guys he looks up to like Dave Barra were proactively keeping tabs on him 3000 miles away. Little bits of brightness in an extremely dark place.

In the last 15 minutes of JC’s swim he started getting really squirrelly. He was reporting a big temperature drop, his stroke degraded in a major way and his navigation completely fell apart. Although his mind was still in the game we were watching the sea finally break his body. The captain told Andrew to put a suit on and go check JC out in the water. We tossed Andrew in and he went and looked JC in the eyes and asked him a series of questions to get a grip on whether JC had a grip. He was fairly lucid but slurring a bit. Although we’d occasionally been a little fast and loose with the truth for motivatory reasons up until this point Vito gave it to him straight from the deck. The flood tide was starting to win and we had at least 10 more hours of swimming as it stood right now. JC took pause and then made the right decision – get back on the boat and live to swim another day. He’d successfully swam 12-13 nautical miles off the US mainland through incredibly rough and cold water in the dark of night.

I don’t care that we didn’t make it to the islands, that was a sufficiently bad ass swim for me! I think only a small percentage of your hardiest open water swimmers would have ever even jumped off that boat in the first place in the dark swirling waters below the Golden Gate. I’m still not sure if I’m man enough to do that, JC gained a lot of my respect for making the attempt and it sounds like this won’t be his last dance with the Farallones. I have a feeling we’ll see him on this coast again soon looking to claw and fight his way through the hellacious waters between San Francisco to the Devil’s Teeth. Good luck to JC on getting ready for round two and thank you very much for allowing me to come along on the boat and have this experience that so few people will ever have I deeply appreciate it.

Last week I decided to instigate a somewhat longer swim than we usually do in Avila. I wanted to get in maybe 3 miles, possibly more. I’ve been itching for some longer ocean swims now that I’m starting to get back into the swing of things again. I pitched the idea to our Open Water email group and a couple of the guys were on board for a long swim since it was supposed to be pretty decent this weekend. My plan was to repeat the triangle course a few times and change directions each time we finished to make the swim feel different despite following the same lines.

Come Sunday morning we had 8 of us swimming. 2 swam early and went short, they said the water felt pretty cold. Niel measured 53 degrees mid-pier, but there were waves of fog rolling though the beach blocking out the sun making things feel a lot colder. As Sylvia and Yvonne came out of the water the rest of us got in except for Duke. He was going to wait a mile and then hop on so that if Niel decided he didn’t want a full 3 mile swim I’d still have someone to swim with for the last section. Niel, Ed, Ruta, Susan and myself swam out to the buoy line and then turned for Fossil Point. This was Ruta’s first swim with us and her and Ed stuck together. They swam a few buoys and then he swam her back to the beach. From the end of the buoy line Niel, Susan and I made our way to the pier, the creek buoy and back to the pier. The water had a really persistent and short spaced ripple to it that made the angle to and from the tip of the pier challenging.  There were also a lot of patches of much colder and much warmer water out there. Something odd is afoot. We have kelp right now in places we never have kelp and the cold upwellings seem to be transient because in 3 rounds they were never in the same spot twice.

At the buoy nearest the pier we picked up Duke and Ed rejoined us as well. We let everyone know what the plan was and Susan and Ed decided to just swim down to the creek buoy with us and then turn back to the beach leaving Me, Niel and Duke to finish the swim. We said our goodbyes at the creek buoy and then charged headlong into the swell. It was so tightly packed that you had a hard time timing your stroke to match it. Duke was nice and fresh so he pulled away from us and Niel and I slogged along behind him. He had some time to chat up the folks on the pier as we caught up. People on piers are always so chatty, it’s kind of funny. We chatted a bit and then made way for the far corner of the buoy line again. I fell in line behind Niel for a while and when Duke caught up and started to pass I hopped on his feet for a while. My goggles were fogging up so I used him as a navigational aid. To reward my laziness he took us partway to the wonky reef buoy out in the kelp patch :) Luckily we righted our course and got to the buoy about the same time as Niel.

The three of us swam back along the buoy line to the inside buoy and did a quick status check on everyone to see who wanted to go where. Duke was still in, I wanted at least one more round, and Niel decided he wanted to swim the full 3 as well. I downed the world’s oldest GU packet before we restarted, I think it has been in my swim backpack since the Reagan Administration, and tucked the wrapper back in one of my suits.

On our last triangle I was feeling pretty good besides a little twinge in the back of my thigh that felt like it could grow up to be a cramp some day if I go dehydrated enough. Niel was fading a little but still making good time. As before we rounded the last buoy, swam over the pier and angled for the creek. At that stop we decided to swim back under the pier to finish our swim since no one was fishing in that area anymore and we weren’t in danger of getting hooked. The water under the pier was stupid cold today. Duke asked me about it right away on the other side… hey man did you feel that? Um… yes… wow.

We arced back in to the beach with 3 miles in the bag. Niel and I spent about an hour and a half in the water. I felt pretty fresh and could have swam some more *if* I had something to drink. I don’t think mile 4 would have been very fun with no liquid in me. Back on the beach we talked about doing some more of this and working out even longer swims with swimmers staggered to support the guys who want to do bigger swims. I’m excited for what the summer holds… I might be too broke for a big swim this year but maybe I can train up and piece together a big swim that just doesn’t go anywhere :)

This week at the pool my lunchtime workout buddies were talking about doing a Splash and Dash at Hancock College over the weekend. A 500 yard swim and a 5k run. One by one each guy decided to enter and copious amounts of shit talking grew from there. Although I’m in no danger of running (hooray for back injuries ಠ_ಠ) a timed 500 sounded like something I should do so I set my alarm to go off early Saturday morning with hopes I’d actually wake up and go swim. I’m bad at mornings, but amazingly I woke up early enough to ride the snooze button for 45 minutes and still show up on time. In my haste to leave the house I did forget small yet important things like goggles… heh, whoops… luckily a lot of the guys like the same goggles I do and Berto lent me a set of B70 Elements which is what I usually race in.

I’d never been to the pool at Hancock… I actually didn’t even know they had one despite having a diploma from there… but I found it easily enough and started finding my buddies in the parking lot. While registering I found out I could sign up for just a swim which was cool, that way I didn’t have to DQ from something. I paid my registration fee, got numbered and then went to check out the pool. The pool, well… let’s say it’s not ideal for racing. Any pool is a good pool, don’t get me wrong, but yikes. The lane lines were pretty questionable with most of them under the water, one lane had a water jet in it that supplied hot water to the pool, there weren’t normal gutters, the walls had diamonds on them instead of crosses which was hard to process while swimming, and there were some ladders at the corners that would be bad news for whoever drew the outside lanes. Luckily our group included a swim coach so he got them to tighten down the lane lines some more and to take out the ladders for the swim. While he worked on that I braided down my beard for some sort of speed advantage? Haha… It was a pretty hot look.

Our unofficial team consisted of me, Mike, Berto, Duke, Chad and Ken. We all swim at PNAC together during the week, Duke and Chad are Avila regulars, and most of them except for Mike and I are into the whole triathlon scene. Somebody talked the race people into letting the 6 of us start together so we could race amongst ourselves a bit. A few minutes before go time they told us to go grab half a lane each. Mike and I both went for the solidest lane lined lane in the pool. We’re the swimmeriest of the group so we knew what was up. The two of us in one lane was prone to being a bit tight if we were shoulder to shoulder, but I was pretty certain he’d drop me within 200 yards. We dove in for a quick warm up 50 and when I got back to the wall they moved me into my own lane because I was the only one starting at that time who wasn’t going to do the run. Uh oh. Right to the janky lane. Crap.

Around 8:30 they started the first round of swimmers from a push off the wall. I started entirely too strong, but I think that’s what some of the guys wanted in hopes that I’d draw out Mike (the fastest swimmer of the 6 of us) and make him work harder on the front half than he wanted to. Best I could tell I led things for the first 100 by a lot more than I should have. Whoops :) I don’t have any splits, but it was definitely too fast… it may have been a touch under a minute. Besides starting at an unmaintainable pace for me, my lane was trying to kill me. On the far end of the pool I had to swim over a jet of hot water which sucked the life right out of me. Not cool. I’m like captain cold water over here so a burst of 90 degree water to the chest when I’m trying to get somewhere in a hurry is no good man! I also kept getting sucked into the lane line on my left side. Ken said he felt like he was pulling a pretty decent draft off me. He was a bit of surprise. He’s a quick in shape guy but I thought I’d put more distance between us on the swim. I think I coaxed him into taking things out way faster than he wanted too… later on he talked about his heartrate being way too high when he transitioned into his run.

On my last lap a counter poked a kickboard with a red X on it underwater to let me know I was on my last turn and I tried to pick it up for the finish. I’m pretty sure only Mike finished in front of me… as the other guys came in I cheered/high fived/fist bumped them on their way to 5k run glory. I went to go check on my time and nobody had it. Some students with clipboards and stopwatches huddled together (the event was put on by a recreation management class at the college) to discreetly figure out what happened because I obviously wasn’t going to figure out they totally missed it, haha. It was decided I swam about a 6:05 based on when other people finished. Why not. My previous best while racing a lot more was 5:44 in a techsuit so a 6:05 right now, assuming that’s near correct, is cool with me.

I dried off and changed back into my shorts and watched Berto wrap up his swim. He’s the slowest swimmer of the bunch but a beast on dryland. I followed him out onto the course and then worked my way backwards along it to spot my guys running. Ken was busy dominating, Mike was holding off as many guys as he could, Chad was working his way up, Duke was occasionally getting lost, and Berto was out to run down anyone he could. The guys had to do 3 laps of the campus for their 5k. Each lap  I tried to intercept them at different spots to cheer, harass, and/or warn them that someone was gaining on them with my best distance estimate.

Ultimately Ken won the whole thing, Chad cruised in after him, Mike held onto third with a really strong run, Berto was our next guy in after catching Duke, and Duke came in a little after him. I think our lunchtime crew basically finished with no one else in between so that’s a pretty good showing for our imaginary team :) We all hung out for a while talking about the race and watching other people finish for a bit and then we all scattered. Some of the more enterprising guys went for a bike ride to supplement their morning’s mini race… I went in search of a nap to make up for my early wake up. I’m still waiting for a multisport event with swimming and napping, I feel I may be dominant in such a combination.

Fog and low clouds have been clinging to the coast as hard as they can since Saturday, but Avila was trying to burn a hole in that so all us swimmerfolk could have a nice day. It sort of faded in and out, but after our swim the clouds broke over the top of the mountains by Port San Luis and it was only a matter of time before the fog took over the beach. When I got down to the beach in the morning Sylvia was already there and Kim and Jen showed up shortly thereafter. Jen was visiting us from Bakersfield and had spoken with me a bit on Facebook about coming to swim so I was stoked to see her on the beach. Since I knew she was pretty quick I explained a good deal of the route we’d be swimming today (the regular triangle) so she’d know in advance where to stop and where to aim since we’d never catch her if she took off on a wild tangent.

Duke’s stuff was on the beach as well but he was nowhere to be found. Apparently he took a longer than usual run pre-swim. That was ok though because no one was in a hurry to hop in the 50 degree water. Niel wasn’t there to get an official reading, but based on the nearest buoy and our standard 2 degree deduction 50 seemed about right and it felt about right too. Once Duke was half way in his suit a few of us made moves for the water to start pre-chilling for the swim. I was only about thigh deep by the time he got there. Luckily the surf was occasionally big enough to force the issue and after diving through a few of them it was time for us to go.

We swam out to the first buoy and the sky started clearing up a bit. A touch of sun in cold water is always extremely nice. Everyone was looking good and feeling good at the buoy. Sylvia (who is generally the only other non-wetuiter in our group this time of year, and is in her 70′s btw!) originally thought she might just do and out and back since she’s been out of the water for a while. She was feeling really good though so she decided to keep pushing along to the end of the buoy line with us.

When we all got to the last buoy Sylvia decided to check out and swim the way she came. Kim opted to follow along leaving Duke, Jen and I to take on the ever building chop. Things were starting to get rougher and the chop was being pushed in the opposite direction that we were going. I took off from the buoy first in hopes of getting a couple interesting shots of the other two from my wrist camera as we swam along. They caught up to me and we roughly held together for a while. At one point though I lost my focus and inhaled a whole bunch of water. Not bueno. I stopped for a moment to hack it out and then got back to chasing Jen and Duke. I never caught back up. They were waiting for me at the pier and Duke was busy explaining the next leg of our swim.

After a brief regrouping at the pier we made our way towards the other end of the buoys. On the way down Jen and Duke started arcing a little too far inside and it turns out they were chasing the wrong buoy. The creek buoy was being lost in the chop and I think Jen locked onto the wrong one. Duke straightened her out and they course corrected for the right buoy. The ocean really wanted to push us towards the wrong buoy though! It was coming at us from the left and really tossing us around.

At the buoy Duke talked about swimming down the buoy line, under the pier and back in. I saw the Harbor Patrol boat right there though and thought it would be smarter to swim in on this side of the pier instead. We looked at Jen and she was starting to turn smurfly colors and was a little more interested in just going to the beach. We decided that was a good idea, didn’t want to freeze the poor girl out on her first visit, so we all angled for the sand.

After the swim everyone hung out on the beach for a while hoping for the sky to clear up some more, instead it got a little thicker. It was still really pleasant however. Once everyone split I packed my beach stuff away and went to check out the Earth Day event my Surfrider buddies were having in conjunction with the Avila Sea Life Center. They had people out cleaning up the beach and were have some fun kids stuff at the sea life center while beer and live reggae entertained the grown ups. Not a bad way to wrap up an afternoon at the beach :)

I made this for Duke, do you think he'll like it? :p

It’s been a hot week here on the Central Coast which made Wednesday night’s swim extra nice. I got to the beach a little after 5 and I was starting to get a little sweaty by the time we made our way to the water. I felt bad for the other 3 guys in their wetsuits… up until the getting in the water part anyways. Niel measured 52 off the pier, which is “warm” for right now but as we’d find out later that number wasn’t totally consistent!

apparently the pier got in a gang fight... who stabs a pier?

Good news for this Sunday’s swim was that the weather was finally totally fantastic at the beach. Low wind, no clouds, lots of sun. I got to the beach around 9:45 and it was already heating up. The bad news was that we were in a totally mystery lurch as to whether the water was safe to swim in or not… at least they test the water around here on Mondays ಠ_ಠ The rule of thumb is to stay out 72 hours after a big rain event and it stopped raining here on Friday afternoon. A few of the guys preemptively pulled out via email or text last night and this morning but Niel and I were still planning to at least go to Avila and take a look. Niel met me down on the sand while I was catching up on some reading and picked me up to go get the water temp from the pier. My earlier toe test guess was 52. Warmer than last week but still pretty cold. While up on the pier we picked up a new swimmer who had never been out with us before. We all chatted a bit while letting the thermometer simmer. It came out between 51-52 so my human thermometer seems to be pretty well calibrated at the moment :)

Back on the beach we picked up one more swimmer in Kim who comes out to see us intermittently. Since the water looked ok on the east side of the pier (the west side was a little muddied and questionable) we decided to do a repeat of last Sunday and swim to the point buoy and then negotiate from there. I was still apprehensive about the water but figured if I got sick at least I’ll have company :)

I got a bit of a headstart on getting in the water. It was definitely easier than last week but still not warm! I took a little while acclimating and then a wave too big to avoid sped things up a bit. We all started swimming roughly the same time towards the first buoy. Once we got there everyone was doing pretty well and enjoying themselves so we angled for the end of the line. The water was pretty cloudy when you had your face in the water. I was still pretty distrustful of it. Hmmm

We regrouped at the last buoy to see who wanted to do what. Niel wanted to swim to the tip of the pier and Kim wanted to swim back along the buoy line. I offered to swim her back but the guys decided to we’d all swim back and then they’d turn up the pier from the buoy instead. While swimming back down the buoy line I arced out a ways to add some distance and found a pocket of really cold water. Not quite last week cold but 49/50 wouldn’t be out of line for the upwelling I stumbled into.

At the first buoy Niel and Byron made their way to the tip of the pier and I swam Kim in. I was feeling fine in the temperature department but really wanted out of the water, just didn’t taste right too me. Later on Niel reported a bad metallic kind of taste out at the end of the pier that he wasn’t too stoked on. Perhaps I was on to something and just have a much more refined palate than everyone else :) Unlikely, but a fun theory haha.

Back on the beach I changed into dry shorts and got to work soaking in the warm sunshine and eating my lunch. It felt pretty awesome. We had a whole gang of regulars drop in to hang out and run instead of swim. I lasted until about 1 when it finally got just a little too hot for me. We’re all hoping this weather sticks around for a while so we have a nice Wednesday swim with no quality questions lingering over it!

You know it’s cold when even the seals don’t want to be in the ocean. I got to the beach around 10am and there was a crowd on the sand around what looked like a seal, a Harbor Patrol guy was on site checking things out as well. My first thought was oh man I hope there’s not a bite in it… when I ran into Sylvia a moment later she had the same thought. Great minds think alike huh? :) Luckily for us and for our seal friend he hadn’t been chomped. He was just underweight and discombobulated. He looked like an elephant seal and he wasn’t much larger than a big dog. Speaking of dogs… if you’re at the beach and something like this is going on put your dog on a leash please! A lot of dogs did run-bys freaking out the seal which incidentally can net you a fairly enormous fine if someone feels compelled to dole it out to you. Anyways… the marine mammal rescue people came down from Morro Bay and scooped him up and took him off to get fatter and healthier and hopefully deposited back into the sea.

"you people are nuts, it's cold out there."

After all that excitement Niel showed up and I went with him to take the temperature up on the pier. He uttered the magic words “there’s no way it could be any colder than Wednesday…” and voila 48 degrees. Yikes. That’s the coldest water I’ve seen measured since I’ve been swimming in Avila. I think we’ve hit upwellings that cold, but this is the first confirmed 48. Oh boy.

more like 47.75 but no one wanted to call it that

Back on the beach we told the other swimmers what was up but conspired to tell Duke it was 55 when he got back from his run. He totally bought it :) As we neared 11 more swimmers filtered in, we had a lot of out of towners (Bakersfield, Santa Monica, and Australia!) and a few new people we’ve never seen before. All told we had 10 people get in the water, that’s huge for us in spring! Since there’d be a lot of people who never get anywhere near water like this I felt it wise to tell Duke the real water temperature :)

why am I always tied to shit these days?

Special today I had a new toy to try out, the Swimmer Buddy. It’s a towable safety float like the SSD but it’s made out of a boogie board and has a lot of room to strap gear that can get wet. I attached my GoPro to it to take pictures of today’s adventures. I’ll do a review of the Swimmer Buddy when I’ve taken it out a few more times, but for a first go it did pretty well.

our Poly Swimmer and Australian meet the balmy waters of Avila Beach for the first time

On our way to the water we were stopped by a lifeguard (they’re back in season). He asked Niel “hey has that guy been in the water like that?” about me with no wetsuit. Niel explained that I was that guy who swam to Pismo from there on New Years Day last year. The lifeguard was familiar with my ill advised exploits and said with a smile, “ahh, well then I don’t even need to watch that guy then.” When we walked into the water the cold hit you pretty solidly. Wow. As per usual I moved in pretty slowly. I hung back with our two newest visitors, a girl from Cal Poly and the Australian. He was pretty uncertain that he wanted to do this, turns out the water surrounding his continent is substantially warmer :) Our Poly swimmer swam out a bit and was having a hard time getting her face in the water but was otherwise doing ok, she did a lot of backstroke to give the front of her head a break. Our Australian wisely decided to pass… he’s a high level no body fat kind of triathlete, 48 was just too much even with a wetsuit. He is hoping to come back and get in a swim with us before he goes home, we just need to get back up into the 50′s first!

It's unlikely that Duke is making fun of me for not putting my arms in the water in this picture :)

Eventually I pushed off and swam for the first buoy. The water sort of hurt but I was in control of my frostiness. There was never a descent into shivering but a few choice extremities weren’t feeling so good. I met up with most of the group at the buoy. A few had already started moving towards the last buoy towards the point. After a brief pause I turned and started moving that way too. The conditions were really nice today save the water temp. Nice and smooth, minimal wind, no chop. The SwimmerBuddy towed nicely and didn’t slow me down too much although I wasn’t going  all that fast to begin with.

swimming to the buoy line... brrrrr....

checking for any stragglers

At the last buoy we all reconvened and Niel wanted to go to the tip of the pier like we did on Wednesday. I thought about it a bit and decided it wasn’t a good idea for me to swim that far from shore today. I was pretty in control of my internal temperature but if I lost my grip I didn’t want it to be 500 meters from the beach. I let it be known I was swimming back the way I came along the buoy line and our Poly swimmer decided to follow along. She’s a good swimmer and not new to open water, but this was her first ocean swim. Hell of a day to get started!

so who is going where?

I vote this way

We took off for the first buoy and swam together a bit then she dropped me. I hope she becomes a regular, it’s always good to have a few faster people in the mix to give the rest of us someone to try and chase. At the end of the line we took a quick pause, chatted for a moment and then aimed for the beach. The surf was nice and small so we didn’t have much to worry about, but I was cautious on the way out since I did have a board strapped to me with a giant fin on it!

2 more buoys and we can get out...

I get the sneaking suspicion I'm being followed

On the beach I dried off and towel changed into something dry. I didn’t want to get cold. Luckily there was a lot of sunshine to keep that from happening. Those of us on the beach hung out and talked a bit and shortly thereafter the rest of the crew came back in along the pier. A good number of us stayed at the beach for a few hours enjoying the weather and catching up since we’d been rained out so often recently. My friend Dani dropped in around 1 and we held down the beach until 3 something. It was a pretty awesome day. Hopefully we have more just like it en route, but maybe with some luxuriously warm water in more of a 53-55 degree range :)

with such a big head it's sort of a given that I'd be good at headstands

Avila Beach from above

There’s a trail you can see from highway 101 when you’re driving northbound towards San Luis Obispo that clambers straight up the spine of the ridge of a hill that separates Shell Beach from Avila Beach. I’ve looked at it for years but never ventured up it. I guess I was waiting for someone to give me the grand tour. Well last week I had dinner with my friend and kayaker Beth and we talked about checking it out. I decided that today on my lunch I would run a little recon mission up the hill to see what it’s all about and get a grip on things before the two of us take it on.

North towards SLO

I drove out to Shell Beach and found a place to park. The main street down on that end of town has no street parking so it can be a little tough to find somewhere to drop the truck. Once settled I put actual shoes on which is odd for me, but for what it’s worth they’re very minimalist shoes :) I brought my Camelbak but just packed a water bottle instead of the whole reservoir and used the rest of the room to hold my keys, phone, etc.

South towards Shell Beach

I went around to the start up the trail and looked up the mountain and wondered how much I wanted to do this. Turns out I had a previously undiagnosed apprehension toward heights. The first section of trail is very strait up and would flatten briefly every so often. I’d stop at each flat spot and wonder what the hell I was doing. The trail is basically on the edge of the ridge and covered in loose flaky rock. I kept thinking about falling to my right. A trip and fall to my left, no big deal I’d just roll through some brush until I hit a rust wire fence. If I took a tumble the other way I would just ramble down a very steep rocky wall. Oh boy.

we're still going up? sonofa...

I was very excited to get past that first part of the hike and come to a much less precarious piece of trail. Unexpectedly the actual hiking got harder as you kept climbing. It was hot up there too. I saw a lot of fog on my drive out but it was extremely clear on the north end of Shell Beach into Avila. I kept plodding along knowing that I had to get to the other side of the ridge because there was no way I was coming back down the same way I came, haha! There were some nice shady pockets here and there and I stopped in one to drink some water and enjoy the view. It’s spectacular. I could see way towards SLO and south to Pismo.

shade! yes!

The trail continues to roll up and down for a while and eventually you get to a point where you can see Avila as well. The whole San Luis Bay is laid out nice and clean for you to observe from above. All the piers, the buoys, the breakwater set against a deep blue ocean. Worth the walk I guess :)

not bad right?

After a little while I came to a weird radio equipment station of some sort. All the gear was fenced up and had all kinds of warning signs on it. I also had all bars possible on my cell phone. Maybe these things are related? Hmm. Once you pass that the trail widens into more of a dirt road. A shitty dirt road I would never drive a vehicle up, but I’m pretty sure it was intending to be a road.

hmmm... that's out of the ordinary

Soon after you cross paths with another trail and things start to move down the hill towards the parking lot above Pirates Cove. The descent is pretty steep and it was very slow going for me to avoid slipping and falling. Lots of tiny steps and lots of pressure on my knees and ankles holding me upright.

the descent... from the bottom

Eventually the trail dumps you out on the street near the dirt parking lot for Pirates Cove. If you follow it to the left you hit a little gate that blocks a road that isn’t really there anymore. Duck around it and there’s a much flatter trail that will run you back to Shell Beach. It starts out as a dirt path that’s a little overgrown in spots but eventually you hit busted up pavement. Go a little further and it’s a full blown fancy walkway that runs in front of some amazing looking houses. I followed the pathway out until it hit the street and then walked through a neighborhood back to my car. Apparently there’s a trail that goes behind those house that would have dropped me off a bit closer but I didn’t see the entrance and took a slightly longer route. Now that I’ve gone back and looked at some satellite maps I think I know how to do it right the next time around now.

pavement! flatness! more awesome views!

After about and hour and a half or so I was back at my truck. I measured it out to about 4.5km, I’ll have to take one of my GPSs next time to get a solid number. Overall not a super long hike but challenging. There’s a lot of climbing, some of it very steep. The views are incredible. If you do it make sure you hit a clear day so you can see everything. My only real cautions I can think of are pass if it’s very windy, that initial ascent would be really sketchy under a heavy wind, and pass if it’s been raining a lot. That steep decline to the parking lot at Pirates Cove would be an awful muddy slip and slide of doom when rain saturated. For more info I would check out Hikespeak.com, that’s where I researched the route before hiking the trail and it’s a great site for figuring out how to go about these things in advance.

Wednesday night swims are back and so am I! I was extremely apprehensive about swimming tonight which was made up of a mix of my general health, the rain we got last night, and my questionable fitness from a lot of downtime. Once I dove through my first wave and let the cold salt water sink in I felt right and like my old self again. Ahhh.

I hit the beach a little after 5 and met Niel who was fresh back from taking the temperature from the pier. He pulled 54 which is the warmest we’ve seen since November! Great news! Until we swam out to the end of the pier, that number would have been a little smaller if we had something to measure it with. I’m guessing 52? After we chatted on the sidewalk for a while John came to join us and the three of us made up this year’s inaugural Wednesday night swim of 2012. While the guys were still getting into their wetsuits I went down to the water to start my slow process of getting in the water. I was about waist deep by the time they got there. The same time they showed up a big set of waves did too. We were pretty stuck for a while as they crashed out in front of us. John pushed a little further ahead than Niel and I and ended up having to do a lot of serious duck diving. When things mellowed out for a moment Niel and I took off. Although nothing else broke in front of us we scaled some pretty big swells most of the way down the pier.

We took a quick pause mid pier to make sure everyone was still on board and then we swam down to the tip of the pier. It took a little bit for me to find my rhythm again after being out of the ocean so long. Swell, chop, etc are all dear friends of mine but I didn’t quite have my bearings that first 500m. Once we lost a couple degrees of water temp I think my body clicked back into open water mode and figured things out. We took another pause at the tip of the pier to decide where to go next (the point side buoy) and we took off in that direction. I swam a lot stronger on this leg and started having a lot of fun. It felt extremely good to be back doing what I love to do.

On the way to the buoy we had to mainly navigate off of the cliffs since the swells were too big to actually see the buoy. You’d catch a glimmer of it occasionally but for the most part it was in hiding. We all took slightly different lines. Niel arced out to my right, John took and inside line and I cruised through the middle. I got there just a couple seconds ahead of the guys and while waiting noticed we had a pretty decent current running towards the point. I probably drifted 3-4m in very short time before I started stroking back towards the buoy. Looking in towards the beach it looked like there was a rip current straight in front of us that was dispersing maybe 6-7m away so maybe that where some of that movement was coming from.

From the end of the buoy line we set our sights on the other end of it. We had a lot of swell moving across us and John and I were tossed into each other a few times. At the last buoy we made the turn towards the beach but were very careful about our approach of the beach. It was the kind of day where it’s much harder to get out than in and the waves were breaking in a way that bodysurfing just wasn’t going to end well. We swam half way in and waited for a lull. John pulled ahead after a little bit while Niel and I hung back waiting for something although I don’t think we were sure what it was we were waiting for. Well…. sure enough right as I was about to just swim the rest of the way in a monster started building on the horizon… shit… no time to swim away from it. Niel and I sprinted AWAY from the beach to avoid being caught inside. I sneaked through the face of the wave just before it broke, phew! No time to rest though because one more was en route. A few more frenzied strokes and through the face of another wave. All smiles from me. John was too far in and got to practice his duck diving a little more. Once those big waves finished raining down we had our lull and Niel and I swam real quick for the beach.

All told we swam maybe a mile tops, but the distance wasn’t really the issue I just needed to swim and this was perfect! Cold water, texture, swells, surf, and a couple buddies… exactly what I needed to get back in the game. I can’t wait for our next swim. We’re hoping it’s Sunday but the weather might foul it up, we’ll see how it goes.