Avila has been absolutely nuts the last week, it’s like the Pacific rotated a few hundred miles and we’re getting someone else’s surf! We had 3 swimmers tonight… me, Niel, and Natalie… and we didn’t bother making a plan for the swim on the beach because we weren’t sure if we were going to get out! The waves were spaced out more than the last couple trips I’ve made, but they were really big and boom-y.

We walked down to the water together and watched big green walls of doom bear down on us. This was an evening full of disbelief and short yet powerful words :) While looking for a hole to sneak through to open water we got beat the hell up. Niel took an early shot and managed to sneak out through a short set break. Natalie and I continued to get savaged in the whitewater. The way things were spaced out you couldn’t recover from one beating and beat the next wave before it crashed. The wash of the waves would take waist high water and put it up over my head. I got tumbled and tossed back a lot. At one point I saw a little wave and thought we were coming to a break so I tried to swim it out a little further… wrong move… I got washing machined right into the bottom of the ocean… ouch. Eventually, I have no idea how, I managed to swim out. I stopped just past the breaking waves to make sure Natalie got through too, which she did a few waves later, and then we swam out to meet Niel at mid pier.

We all needed a moment to recombobulate ourselves, but not too long because it was cold! We decided to swim the triangle tonight and to hurry up and get started. All three of us swam fairly similar paces tonight and hung close together. The ocean was still throwing big swells at us and some chop was starting to build.

Just past the end of the buoy line we stopped watched the water rise up so high on its way towards us we thought it could almost break into a wave at the buoy line! Absurd. The ocean is amazing in what it can do when it wants to! Anyways we took off for the top of the pier and fought through all the weirdness pretty well.

At the tip of the pier while regrouping the whole group shifted further out to sea while floating around. The current was moving out and the wind was offshore and really building up that chop now. We angled for the phantom creek buoy and I definitely swallowed some salt water on the way there. Again we held in a fairly tight pack which is good because if we had spread out we’d probably never see each other until we stopped.

At the spot formerly known as creek buoy we stopped and scoped out the rest of the route. We started to get some swells from a new sideways direction which was interesting and we could see the backs of really major waves breaking en route to the beach. Our plan was to swim just short of the buoy nearest the pier, turn left, and hope for the best on the way in.

On the way in I flipped over and backstroked a lot just to see where the swells were. I ended up finding a spot that was shallow enough to occasionally stand but positioned in a way that I’d ride over waves as opposed to get pounded by them. I hung back and took some pictures and enjoyed my own personal rain shower. The waves were having the tops blow off as they crested which left me in sets of temporary sprinkles, pretty rad :) Eventually I had to swim it in and I waited for a lull and sprinted until I was shallow enough I could just run out without a wave reclaiming me for the sea.

All told we went about 2000 meters but a lot of that was just getting beat up by the waves trying to get in! Now that I’m home I have a sore jaw and right hip, but I’m out of my mind happy. I’m ridiculously stoked on the ocean right now or I’m just buzzing on the euphoric giddiness of mild hypothermia :) I’ve gotten in 4 Avila swims since Saturday and I’m probably looking at 2 San Francisco swims in the next 2 days! Awesome awesome awesome.

If any of you guys are going to the Open Water Safety Conference in San Francisco this weekend I’ll see you there!

 

I was really stoked for this all day! We haven’t had a post work swim since early November and I really missed them… something about the rush of diving into cold salt water is very therapeutic after a day in the office.

Right at 5 I hopped in the truck and drove down to Avila. As I came up onto Front Street I heard the boom of a really big wave and smiled instantly, this was going to be fun :) I parked and hurried down the stairs while getting a good look at the conditions… fairly calm, no wind, but really big waves coming through in tight groupings. As I put down my beach chair I saw Natalie walking back up from the water’s edge, she had gone down for a brief toe test and confirmed that yes it was in fact still cold. We’d both been checking out the water temps online that day and it spent most of it’s time at 50. Normally downtown Avila is a degree or two warmer than the buoy, but with all the post tsunami weirdness in the water that hasn’t really been the case. I don’t know what the real temperature was at the beach today, but I felt much colder than I did yesterday which is saying a lot!

Once I was ready to go we marched down to the water… excited but a little apprehensive about how cold it was going to be. Even the wet sand was cold on the feet… when the ocean surged up to mid thigh thanks to a good size wave I think a pretty healthy string of expletives came out of my mouth. While I was trying to get my body to acclimate we watched a set of really big waves come it. They were steep, deep green and clean. Natalie took off first to try and get out. Some waves she managed to get through unscathed, others repositioned her a little behind where she started from. I knew I needed to hurry up and do the same so as to not leave her stranded while I tried to get comfortable so in a break between sets I ran up a little deeper into the water and waited to have the first wave of the next set kinda force the issue. I dove through it and came out gasping for some air… whooo that was cold! But at least now I could get down to swimming and try to catch up.

I swam up the face of a wave or two and found myself at the bottom of one of them. Once I got out of the waves the water never stopped rolling in a major way, the bottom just ceased to be shallow enough to break a wave. I swam out to a spot parallel with the buoy line to meet back up with Natalie and figure out where we were going. I’d lose sight of her, along with most of the pier, between swells. Once I caught up I was breathing a little funny but holding on. She was a total trooper and doing really well, even in a wetsuit this would be a cold ass swim! We decided to swim to the end of the pier and then decide where to once we got there.

We swam side by side down the pier and we had a couple small groups of spectators up on the pier wondering what was wrong with us that we’d do this on purpose… I saw one lady taking pictures… I wonder how many people have vacation pictures of me at home :) On the way down you literally felt like you were swimming uphill. The swells were so gnarly it felt like it took 4 or 5 strokes to get to the other side of them!

At the tip of the pier we took a break and soaked in the view while trying to ignore the water temperature. Looking down the pier you could really see the amplitude of the swells moving towards the beach. We’re talking like 10 feet of play from top to bottom. Once we got our fill of the view it was time to decide where to go… I felt cold, ok, but marginal enough that I didn’t think it’d be a good idea to try and go long so we swam back down the length of the other side of the pier.

We went with the rise and fall of the ocean down past the buoys and then slowed it up looking for where the waves were going to start breaking on us. By the time I got some sand under my toes I didn't actually want to get out. We messed around in the surf for a while trying to surf down a wave or two. Neither of us was particularly successful today, I think they were a little too big to paddle into without some fins. I got close on one but couldn't quite sprint over the top into the right spot.

Moving forward with this year I’m hoping to beef up the weekday swim schedule a bit. It was pretty popular last year when it was just Wednesdays, we’ll see if we can fill in some bonus days this time around. My not so secret goal is to have someone to swim in the ocean with everyday… that wouldn’t suck :) Anyways… I’ll be in the pool tomorrow but back in the ocean on Wednesday!

Today was a cold one! I went out to the beach way early to get breakfast and watch the waves. The water was glassy but some really big (for Avila anyways) waves were rolling though. They were tall, clean and loud! The bigger waves were booming really loudly. Once I was done with breakfast I went to the truck to collect my swim stuff and my duck feet so I could go do some bodysurfing.

After getting on my board shorts and fins I waded out into the water and it was really cold. Definitely colder than yesterday. It took me a while to get all the way wet. Diving under the first wave of the day took my breath away, but I leveled out after a few minutes. I was cautious with my wave choices because if I timed them wrong I was going to get tossed head first into the bottom by 6 feet of falling water. I got in a few really good rides and managed to not get too beat up. My favorite consisted of me riding right at the top of a wave and then getting chucked forward but landing in a way that I continued surfing… totally weird feeling to be airborne above a rushing ocean!

Once I’d had enough I got out and dried off. I ran into Sylvia on her way to the beach and my parents were walking through town and I caught them up on the side walk. Once Niel showed up I went with him to go get the water temp. It felt really cold to me and I wanted to see if my human thermometer was on point today. We measured about mid-pier and came up with 51.5 degrees… definitely cold!

Back on the beach I got geared up and decided to try out my Swim Safety Device (SSD) storage buoy thingie today. I put some clothes and shoes in it, rolled it up, inflated it and attached it to my waist. The 4 of us walked down to the water and once it was deep enough I let the buoy float behind me. While we were all standing around avoiding actually getting all the way in the water we saw a 5th swimmer show up on the beach. We couldn’t tell who it was but decided to wait for him to get set up. Niel and Pete got out of the water for a minute but I stayed in to get acclimated. Once there was a bit of a break in the sets coming in I tried to swim out a bit and get a feel for the SSD. On my way a wave got a hold of the both of us and broke it right off me! The clip that holds the tether to the buoy broke right in half and my stuff surfed all the way back to the beach without me! Luckily Pete was there to pick it up, once I grabbed it from him I ran it back up the beach to toss with my stuff to worry about later. I’m going to have to fashion some kind of replacement attachment or request a new one somehow… I still think the SSD has potential to be a cool tool but it apparently isn’t so great for swimming out through the surf.

Once I had made my way back to the water we now had 5 swimmers working on getting in the ocean. The ocean wasn’t particularly into the idea however. We were getting pushed pretty hard up top although I felt a strong undercurrent at my feet. Eventually Pete took off swimming up the face of a wave and after the rest of us took a few more waves we chased after him.

Niel ended up out front and instead of stopping in line with the buoy line he just kept going. Me and Chad stopped and watched him for a while wondering how far he was going to swim before stopping. Since it didn’t look like stopping was going to happen soon we followed after him. I guess Niel was basing his guess on where to stop on the swells and didn’t realize that he had swam as far as he did.

From here we swam down to the end of where the buoy line should be before stopping to regroup. Niel, Chad and I got there about the same time and hung out while Pete caught up. We could really feel the rolling of the ocean out there. I wonder how long it’s going to be agitated like this?

Everyone was getting pretty cold but we decided to swim to the top of the pier and then renegotiate once we got there. The swim out was ok despite some push in the wrong direction from the ocean. What was not so ok was the steady drop in temperature. You could feel the water slide into being colder and colder. By the time we hit the pier we must have lost at least 2 degrees. All the guys in wetsuits felt it too. We’re pretty confident that we crested into the 40′s out there today. That being said there weren’t a lot of takers for a much longer swim so we finished by cruising down the pier back to the beach.

On the way down it was hard to figure out where to start looking for breaking waves because such big swells were rolling so far out. Once it was shallow enough to just barely stand I put a few toes down and started looking for a wave to ride in. Chad was right there and we both saw the same one coming right for us. We swam up into it and rode down towards the beach. I ended up staying about thigh deep in the water to watch Pete swim in to make sure he made it ok and he put on a little bit of a show. He swam right at the top of a cresting wave and we had no idea if he was going to get tossed off of it or just barely miss it! He ended up sliding down the back of it but you could tell he was surprised by what had just gone on! If he’d have been about a meter further forward he would have been whomped pretty hard by that wave!

Post swim I felt pretty good, no shivers.  I think I could definitely push my cold tolerance down a few more degrees but I’m not sure that I’ll get the chance unless we have a really unusually cold spring. We’ll see how it goes! In the meantime I’ll be back out tomorrow and Wednesday. We’re going to relaunch Wednesday night swims for everybody this week and I’m hoping that we draw back out a lot of the crowd we had last year!

Yesterday everyone in town was talking about this whole tsunami thing that was a result of a huge earthquake in Japan. I woke up on Friday to find a facebook note from my friend Mike in Russia asking if I’d found high ground… at this point I had no idea what he was talking about but after hitting some online news sites I put it all together. We had a tsunami warning for the coast and the local authorities were taking it pretty seriously. There were evacuations and road & business closures at the beaches. Randomly my friend and kayaker to the stars, Beth Barnes, had been in town visiting Thursday night and woke up Friday morning to the hotel owner telling her she had to split in 30 minutes due to the inbound tsunami. I kept up with what was going on down in Avila via a facebook friend that owns a kayak shop in the port. He was posting video updates that showed the water pull way out exposing parts of the sea floor no one had ever really seen before. When the tsunami wave came back it filled the port back in up to the top of the sea walls but nothing seems to have flowed over the top. Luckily all this went down at low tide which probably minimized the chance for any major damage. Some folks did have boats and docks damaged, but nothing really happened past the beaches.

I had plans to swim today at 2 and according to the local news we were out of the tsunami zone now, but they did urge caution if you were going to be in the water. I met Natalie on the beach and surveyed the scene a bit. Everything looked fine, but the waves were pretty decent sized for Avila. The only way to get much going on at that beach is to have a big south swell, and I guess a tsunami will do that for you! While she got into her wetsuit I ran down to the water to check the water temp real quick. I got about 53.5, but there were a lot of patches on our swim that you could feel the water temp drop quite a bit.

We decided to take on what I like to call the Poly Parallelogram swim, it’s where you start a regular triangle swim but then go all the way to the Poly pier before turning back to the buoy line to finish things up.

On the way into the water we picked up the beginning of a new set of waves, they were pretty decently sized… maybe a couple feet over head. Natalie got going first and I watched her swim up the faces of some big waves while I continued to get acclimated. I set myself in motion between sets but still swam over some big waves en route to breaking. I chased after her and we stopped a little ways past the buoy line. From here we turned towards the point and swam down towards the 2nd buoy.

At the buoy we both mentioned how the ocean felt a little wild today. We were getting pushed in a few different directions which made the swim more exciting. The wind and chop were picking up too but hadn’t become much of an issue yet. On the way to the tip of the Avila Pier however we really started to get a feel for how serious that chop was! It was really moving and hard to predict. We both made it to the pier fine but it took some doing to get there!

While floating off the end of the pier we contemplated the rest of the route… did we really want to swim all the way to the Poly pier headlong into this chop? I was down for it and Natalie decided that she was in too so we went for it. We grinded straight through this stuff… it was a mess. Waves breaking into your face, lots of getting pushed around, this was a real deal ocean swim! I couldn’t even see the cross braces on the pier so I just swam by memory out there hoping to be roughly on point. We kept a pretty decent line but stopped a bit further out from the pier than I usually would. With as much movement in the water as there was you really don’t want to get too close to anything metal and covered in barnacles!

We couldn’t see any of the buoys on the port side of the Avila Pier so we decided to swim towards the middle of one of the hotels and then adjust fire when we got close enough to see a buoy over the chop. Things sped up considerably on this leg of the swim. We had the ocean pushing us along and I tried to kick down the faces of the swells behind us to get as much help as I could out of the motion in the ocean. About half way in I stopped to find the buoy and we ended up turning quite a bit to hit it. The line I started us on would have been good for the old creek buoy but was too wide for the new end of the buoy line. One of our swimmers found the missing creek buoy by the way… it’s crashed up on some rocks somewhere, apparently you can see it from the road to the port.

As we neared the buoys it got really cold. Like 2-3 degree drop colder. I really felt it and Natalie noticed it through her wetsuit as well. Our regrouping at the buoy was real short and then we made our way for the pier and then in. Normally we’d swim around the last buoy closest to the pier to make our turn but it’s been pushed way closer to the pier. Instead we turned early and swam most of the way back in. Once it was shallow enough to stand we hung out for a few minutes body surfing waves. We both got some pretty decent rides in before it was time to get out. We swam about 2.25km and spent 47 minutes in the water. I felt pretty good afterwards, this was just what I needed after a fairly stressful week.

We’ll be back out in the ocean tomorrow and possibly Monday and Wednesday nights now that the time is changing! Brief side note… all my pictures are weird today because I had my camera set to video instead of pictures. I ended up with plenty of odd shots and angles so I pulled some frames out and messed with them in photoshop until they became interesting enough to post :) I promise to set my gear right for tomorrow!

I had a really good ocean swim today. The weather was beautiful, the water was pretty nice, and we had a couple new swimmers come out and get wet. One of them had found out about the local open water group through the SwimAvila facebook page and got in contact with me through that, and we set up a swim online. I’m always stoked to have new people come out and swim so this was a lot of fun for me!

I got to the beach early and hung out a little observing the odd mix of people out this morning. The beach is like a dog park before 10am (no dogs are allowed after 10am) and there was some shirtless older dude doing a mix of like karate and tai chi at the water’s edge. I ran into Pete K. (who swam Catalina in the 90′s) while I was taking the water temp and we talked cold water swimming for a while.

Around 10 I saw 3 girls walking around, 2 with wetsuits, and figured they were my swimmers… luckily my assumptions were correct! I showed them over to our usual meet up spot and described the route of the day and a little bit about how we do stuff around here. Natalie and Jen joined me in the water, their friend stayed on the beach.

The plan was to just swim the triangle so they’d get the full tour and be able to see all the points and piers and buoys and stuff and get their bearings for the bay. Normally I’m the last one to get all the way wet, but since I was the one that knew where we were going it was kinda on me to get this party started. Luckily a couple of waves rolled through that were just big enough to not be avoided, they got me over the shock on the cold and set me in motion. I dove in, dolphin kicked underwater for a bit and then swam out to the buoy line. The girls followed along and when we stopped to regroup it was all smiles.

Next stop was the end of the buoy line. I pointed out where we were going and an alternative point for spotting if they lost the buoy in the glare. I swam on the inside of the buoys and they swam along the outsides in a spot where I could see them while breathing. At the end of the line Jen decided she wasn’t quite ready to swim around the pier yet and turned back towards the beach.

The swim out to the pier was great, I felt pretty smooth and the water was really still. Natalie followed right along with me and we hit the pier at about the same time. I think she’s about my speed, probably a touch faster actually, and was just avoiding passing me since I was the one who knew where he was going :) Out at the pier we hung out a little bit and I pointed out some of the routes we take sometimes… the poly pier, fossil point, and the phantom creek buoy. Since saying “aim for where the creek buoy used to be” wouldn’t be so helpful, we aimed for the new end of the buoy line and swam on down.

After a brief break at the buoy we swam back to the pier and turned in towards the beach. Natalie was super stoked on the swim so hopefully she’ll become a regular out here!

Now that I got my ocean swim in, and it did make me feel a lot better after being kinda sick all week, I have to temporarily turn my attentions to the pool. I’m leaving town way too early tomorrow morning to swim the CalTech Pentathlon. It’ll be fun, I just hate mornings… at least Mike is driving and not me, that’s a major quality of life boost right there. Anyways, if you’re out in Pasadena keep an eye out for me!