I was all excited to go swim a mile or two tonight out at Avila but around 4pm I saw a post online from one of the local news sites that a possible 1000ish gallon sewage spill resulted in beach closures through out the Avila/Port San Luis area… boo… a pipe burst somewhere between the Poly Pier and the creek and the excitement contained within said pipe made it’s way to the sea. There’s a chance what was leaking was potable water, they had people out testing it after it happened, but in the meantime we’ll just assume it was the bad stuff. I’m hoping they let people back in tomorrow.

Since my first beach of choice was closed I turned my sights towards Pismo instead. I had my bodyboard in the truck and some board shorts in my swim bag so I changed at the office and drove straight down to the beach. It was pretty nice out but the wind was building. I set up my beach chair, piled up my shirt and towel, then marched off into the water… it’s worth noting that my Lumix came back from warrantyland today! I have waterproof picture taking powers yet again! I feel much better :)

The walk out was pretty frosty and since Pismo is so shallow eventually you just have to toss yourself in. The waves were a mess… mushy, blown out and breaking in all directions. Not too many people were out but there were a couple good surfers tearing it up over next to the pier so I figured it couldn’t be all bad. I kicked out looking for a good spot to set up and it didn’t go so hot. I spent so much time looking outward and ducking under waves that I didn’t notice how hard the current was pushing south. I probably finished my session like a quarter mile down from where I started!

While out there I found a handful of waves. Most were pretty weak but I did have one real good one where I got to go real fast and cut left into it as the lip broke behind me. I mainly just duck dived the whole time however, which I guess is kinda fun too :)

After about 45 minutes I called it a day and took the long walk back to my chair which had blown over at this point. Luckily my other stuff was blown into the chair as opposed to down the beach! I dried off and watched the water for a while and readied myself for the rest of my workout for the day… furniture moving… I helped my mom move stuff this morning which mysteriously resulted in me having more furniture in my house. I moved it all back and forth and up and down stairs by myself this evening. I guess this alternative dryland training makes up for the lost swim :)

Talk about timing… I hung out in Avila yesterday and I have plans to swim there tomorrow after work, but TODAY a whale decides to come cruise the pier! I saw a picture on Facebook posted by KSBY, but I don’t know who actually took the picture to attribute it appropriately. How rad is that though… I swim right there all the time! The row of buoys is where I set myself up to do my Chief Shark Officer application video, and the white spot a little further towards shore is part of the buoy line. Hopefully my cetacean friend is doing ok because that’s only about 20 feet of water and it’s probably not an ideal place for a giant sea creature to hang out, and hopefully someday I get to share some water with one of these guys while out for a swim. I’ll probably die of a heart attack when I see something that big in the water, but in theory it would be wonderful and magical :)

So while all that was going on I was in Santa Maria, in a pool… boo :p I guess it wasn’t so bad though, it’s outdoors and the sun was shining. We had a fair amount of wind, but once you’re underwater that doesn’t really matter much. I was joined by one other masterly person and she had a bucket full of workouts. We recycled one from a couple weeks ago.

400 swim
8 x 50 kick @ 1:10
4 x 100 IM

Repeat x 3 all with fins
100 fly drill @ 1:30
50 easy at :45
3 x 50 feast @ 1:00 (r1 fly, r2 & 3 free)

2 x 75 free

run back to work…

2250 yards total

It was a pretty decent swim, Kelly and I were around a similar pace which made it a good pairing. I felt a lot better in the water today than I have in the pool for a while, hopefully I can hang onto that feeling!

Tomorrow I have plans to go hit the beach and swim with one of the guys… I’m looking forward to the end of the week and some cold salt water!

Somehow I landed back in the pool again… it only took a week, that’s good right? :/ I really need to get my act together in the stripey hole, I’ve got a marathon swim in like 6 weeks… yikes… I mean I’m confident I can do it, it’s just a matter of how well. One of my Santa Maria swim buddies that also has a membership to Kennedy in SLO say he’s going to be swimming nights more often and that fits my schedule pretty well. Maybe we can start scheduling some later swims so I can start packing on some more distance.

We had a pretty healthy group today, at least 7 swimmers that I can think of off the top of my head. Right now Mike is getting ready for Nationals at the end of the week so he’s trying to maintain his intensity and has been mixing in a fair amount of fast 25′s, broken 200′s and stuff like that. He’s looking fast, I’m excited to see how he does!

400 reverse IM (swam 300, got in late)
8 x 50 kick @ 1:00
4 x 100 alt IM/Free

12 x 25 variable @ :40

Broken 200 (25, 50, 50, 50, 25) with :10 rest between each portion

5 x 100

run away to get back to work on time…

2200 yards total

I felt pretty fast on some of the 25′s and I was strong in that broken 200. I need to get back into more short sprinty stuff on these Santa Maria swim days to balance out longer ocean swims and things like that. I think coming into the summer I should get a lot better with this. I’ve had some major personal life rearrangements recently that once I get them all in order I should have a lot of time to really get down to business with my training.

Fast forward to Monday night and Boogie Monday! Dani and I ventured back out to Avila for our weekly program of boogie boarding away the stress and not-so-fun-ness of Monday :) The water felt pretty decent, maybe 54, and we had some ok waves although they were pretty spaced out and moving fast. Even with fins on I really had to kick and lean down into waves to catch them. Dani was out there just barefoot and kept sliding down the back of waves because they were moving just a touch too fast.

I got some ok rides in and worked on trying to spin in a circle while riding into the beach. I managed to do 1 real complete spin right in front of Dani. I asked excitedly “so it looked awesome right?” she smiled politely… so I asked a little less excitedly ” I just looked like a goofy fat old guy trying to spin in a circle huh?” Judging by the extended laughing that followed it that was probably closer to the truth… whatever, I thought it was cool :p

We stayed in for a pretty long time and I got to surf a pretty good number of waves, it made my Monday substantially better :)

half way down the 3000 foot pier

Today I got an opportunity to see what was on top of the Poly Pier after swimming along side it for quite a while now. I got an email from my swim buddy Sylvia letting me know that they’d let the public come check it out between 9 and Noon this morning and I made sure to get up and to the beach early to take advantage of the situation!

The pier was built in 84 after a storm took out the old pier. It used to belong to Unocal but they donated it to Cal Poly when they left town. It’s a little more than half a mile long and used for research now instead of oil transport. They had students and professors showing off their work, their instruments and some animals.

I took a bunch of pictures of my day and made them pretty with instagram, if you have an iphone you should get it, I dig it :) You can follow my photographic adventures on there, I’m “aquarob”

found a caterpillar guarding my doormat on my way out of the house

down on the beach early in the morning

flat and glassy with no real surf today

under the pier at low tide

this part is usually submerged hence the thick coating of crusty sea life

wouldn’t want to brush against that while swimming!

close up of the growths on the pilings

this guy is an isopod, sort of like a pill bug of the sea

entrance to the pier

me and the beard hiking on down with Avila Pier in the distance

view back to the base of the pier, there’s a seal in there somewhere

winding out onto Poly Pier

seagulls enjoying the view

A bunch of crabs from local waters for us to see and touch!

he looks pinch-y

I find these guys jammed between rocks sometimes

gnarly decorator crab

Octopus! These guys are my favorites

giant sea star, they’re kinda squishy

upside down sea star

water sample collector

starfish and sea cucumber touch tank

live video from divers 15-20 feet under the pier!

view back towards town… I’ll be down there in the water tomorrow!

I got an email from Niel this morning along the lines of : the water is up to 52 and it might rain, sounds like perfect conditions! I’m glad I found someone else whose idea of a good time is just as bad as mine, I have the best swim buddy ever :) I confirmed that I would be there too and waited for my chance to go play in the sea. To top off his swim buddy awesomeness he brought me a copy of Penny Dean’s book on Open Water Swimming! I’m going to have to dig into that this weekend!

Things were looking pretty ugly weather-wise when I left the office at 5. Overcast and windy, about a mile from the Avila Beach offramp it started raining… uh oh. It kept raining as I traversed the windy road that takes you to the beach and a half mile out of town it stopped. Perfect. As I came up onto Front street I saw Niel walking from his car and I managed to snag a really good spot right near our staircase to the beach. When I got out you could smell fresh rain… apparently we had enough rain to smell good, but not so much as to make the water dirty or ruin my day.

We got ourselves set up under the only overhang between the sidewalk and the beach just in case the skies opened back up. We debated routes a little bit while observing what the ocean was up to. Most noticeable was a very steady right to left (west to east) current driven by a fairly strong wind (17ish miles per hour according to the nearest buoy). We passed on taking a water reading since we knew we didn’t want to know, and with the water moving that much we were probably going to have all kinds of different temperatures out there.

We decided to get in on the port side of the Avila Pier, swim to the buoy then down to the phantom creek buoy and over to the cross brace on the Poly Pier. We’d return the same way.

Getting in sucked. The wind and water temperatures combined made for a less than good time. The “good” news was that a set of fairly healthy waves was en route and I wasn’t going to have much of a choice about getting in shortly. When the first unavoidable wall of water came rushing at me I dove through it and came out on the other side with a big “YEEEEEAAAAAAAAAARGGGGHHHH!” It got a giggle from some folks up on the pier watching in wonderment that two crazy people really thought it was an appropriate time for a swim :)

One more wave hit me and then we were off swimming up the faces of the incoming swells and I was doing what I could to acclimate to what felt like 50-51 degree water (the buoy has been running 50.0-52 today). We took a really brief stop at the buoy and then set a course for where we feel the creek buoy would probably be even though it’s been absent for quite a while now. On the way down I saw the Pale Kai Hawaiian Outrigger club setting up and getting ready for their workout. That whole scene is pretty interesting to me but they workout the same days we do so it’s pretty much out for me.

Once we hit about where the buoy should be we regrouped real quick and then turned a little bit to take on the Poly Pier. Although the first leg was bumpy, this one was straight uphill into the wind and chop. Also… that super cold patch me and Duke found on Sunday… right where we left it. Oh man! Cold cold cold between the phantom buoy and the pier. I need some kind of watch thermometer or something to get a reading on these cold patches to see if they live up to how cold we think they are. This must’ve had a 4 on the front of it. The hair on my legs hurt it was so cold. It felt like someone was beating me with a cactus all over my legs and armpits. Really weird sensation.

Eventually we hit the pier and everyone agreed it wasn’t particularly warm today :) We also took solace in the fact that the way back would be all “downhill,” yay! We set a course for the Avila Pier and trudged back through the super cold spot… brrrrrr… Once we were over half way to the pier we transitioned into warmer seeming water (this is the same freezing ass cold water that we got in through at the beginning of our swim) and it felt way better. When we got to the buoy we even just hung out there for a few minutes shooting the breeze no longer affected much by the cold.

As the swells started to pick up again we decided to swim it back in to the beach. I like swimming inline with bigger swells and having all that elevation change while just going about your own business. In the shallower water I looked for something to bodysurf but it didn’t really happen. Once we got out I was ready to just dry off and get changed. I do really well inside the water, but add wind and I have issues sometimes. I managed to get dressed and put together without ever breaking into a shiver, but it was definitely one of the colder days I’ve ever been out. As I was leaving the beach I was treated to a chunk of rainbow peeking through the clouds out towards the point. I tried to get a pic with my iPhone but apparently iPhones don’t work on rainbows… maybe they’ll upgrade that on the iPhone 5? :p

I’ll be back in the pool tomorrow! Hopefully it goes well and I break out of my pool swimming funk… I think I’m going to bring a new toy with me to make it more interesting…

Dude, I’m in a pool swimming funk. I just can’t get into it recently. The turns, the intervals, the warm water… it’s just not working for me right now. Mentally I’m not on, and I’ve been having some unpleasantness in my back/shoulder region recently. I feel it after about 500 yards in the pool, but the cold of the ocean masks it really well from me. I don’t know how I’m going to get myself back to where I want to be in regards to working out in the concrete box, but in needs to happen soon. My friend Evan from Freshwater Swimmer wrote a pretty good piece on that topic today that’s worth a read if you find yourself in a similar situation.

Anyways, enough complaining :) Even if I wasn’t totally into it I did get to go swim outside on a fairly decent afternoon which is never a bad deal. No one really had a plan for today so one of us made it up in the water as we went. It started with just 2 of us but the group kept growing as the workout went on to the point that we almost had to revert to circle swimming (oh the horror! haha).

800 (200 swim, 200 kick, 200 ‘pull,’ 200 swim)

4 x 50 IM Switching @ :55

3 x 100 kick w/ fins
50 easy
3x 100 swim
50 easy
3 x 100 drill
50 easy

2150 yards total

I had a few sections in there where I felt pretty good, but they weren’t sustained. My speed is really slipping. I can still bang out a fast 50 free or quick laps of butterfly, but once we get going for a while I just fall off. I think the only solution to this is a lot of hard work… I should probably look into that :)

I’ll be back out in the ocean tomorrow weather permitting. Hopefully the water temps warm up soon to ferret out more locals to swim more often! I’d be pretty stoked to string together more than the 2 swims per week we have right now.

I was really not excited about the start of the week until about 1:30 when I realized that this wasn’t just Monday… it was Boogie Monday! Yes! I grabbed my phone to text Dani and confirm that she was in and she’d already texted me the same thing half an hour earlier. As an added bonus the Surf app on my phone said that the waves would be pretty decent tonight. All of a sudden I was excited for Monday, yay boogie boarding :)

She picked me up around 5:30 and we decided to go to Avila instead of Grover or Pismo because it had been cooling off a lot today and the air temps would be better in Avila. The beach was looking pretty beautiful, but man that water was cold! The buoy is running 50.0 right now so it probably wasn’t too much better where we were surfing.

There were sets of really decent waves coming through but they were spaced out a bit which meant you had to wait for something to ride. I was doing ok out there but Dani was getting pretty cold. Luckily getting launched back towards the beach on a wave will get the adrenaline pumping enough that you forget about that for a little while :)

The highlight of the evening, for me anyways, was when we both caught the same wave. Dani rode it straight towards the beach but I turned into it and ended up right along side her. While we were rushing towards the beach we were close enough and it had to be done… mid wave high five! We might not be able to do all the cool tricks and stuff, but you don’t see that in the surf magazines :)

Towards the end of our time in the water I finally found one wave that was substantially bigger than everything that was rolling through. I wasn’t quite in the right spot and ended up with a bit of a late take off which either means something awesome or really bad is about to happen. After losing contact with the face of the wave for a moment I landed right where I wanted to be and cut real hard to the right until it closed out on me and I just sort of rode the foam way back to the shallow water. Super fun… I need to go find some better and maybe a little bigger waves… hmmm…

Eventually we called it because Dani was turning into a popsicle. I rode one last wave all the way to the beach and we walked back to the truck to get dried off and change. We wrapped up the evening with tacos and beer in town. All told I think this was about as good as a Monday is allowed to go :) If anybody wants to get in on this Boogie Monday action let me know! I wouldn’t mind a few more folks catching waves with us and this is a little too fun to keep to myself!

Spring is a funny thing. The beaches heat up, the weather gets more beautiful than usual, and… the ocean temperatures bottom out… surprise! By the time I left the beach around 12:30 I couldn’t stand barefoot on the sand because it was so hot, but the water was probably 52 in the warm spots and we found plenty of much colder water as we toured the space between the piers.

I got to the beach around 9:30 and spent some time just messing around in the surf with my boogie board. There wasn’t much going on in the wave department so I’ll chalk this one up to cold water tolerance training. How much low 50′s water can you handle while just floating around waiting for something to happen? The nearest buoy was at 50 even and it was probably 52ish down by the beach. On the way into the water I watched a dude in head to toe neoprene struggling to figure out how surfboards work. In talking to him a little bit late I found out that he was from Arizona hence all the rubber. He was giving it a pretty good go, but I think someone set him up for failure… the board looked more like it was borrowed than rented and it was maybe 6 feet long, not so good for learning on. Watching it fly out from under him a few times I decided to move further down the beach so as to not have an unpleasant run in with the pointy part of his board.

I caught a few waves but mainly just hung out watching other people also not catch much. Eventually I decided to bring it back and sit out in the sun for a while before it was time to swim. Sylvia joined me soon after and after a little while Duke came out too. Duke and I decided to swim out to the Poly Pier and Sylvia said she was just going to do her own thing.

Getting back in the water after roasting on the beach a while sort of sucked. The change in temperature from one to the other was pretty dramatic! We hung out about chest deep for a while so that everybody could get acclimated and then Duke and I set out for the end of the pier. Since it was just the two of us we skipped the buoy line stop and swam straight to the tip. On the way down I paced along with a family walking the length of the pier. Somehow we were all going the same speed so I made sure to keep level with them the whole way down.

From here our target was the Middle of the Poly Pier, it’s a nice long stretch where you can really fall into a rhythm and just swim for a while. We always aim for a certain cross brace in the pier, but today our aim was a little off. I think a mix of a fairly strong offshore breeze and the outgoing tide turned into a current that kept pushing us off course. Once we got to the pier we had to turn and swim about 15m parallel to it to get to our intended stopping point. I think we were both pretty comfortable at this point and we hung out for a minute talking, negotiating the next leg of the swim and taking in the view. While all this was going on a big “psssht!” came from what seemed like right behind me… scared the crap out of me! It was just one of our local pinneped friends who always hang out around there, but he really caught me off guard today. Another one popped up in front of us and we decided it was time to get a move on.

We were swimming into the current on this leg which is ok, but the really challenging part was the wild changes in temperature… all of which seemed to be in a downward direction! About half way to the Avila pier we hit a patch that was insanely cold… like a 4 degree drop out of nowhere. Duke called it 48 degrees and I don’t think I would argue with him!

We finished up by swimming under the pier and then back in to where we started. The water was back to normal on the other side of the pier… it’s weird how that works some times.

Post swim we hung out on the beach for a while. I stayed until the sun got to be too much for me… it was hot in Avila today! I wrapped up my day with a trip to Pismo for dinner and to see the sun come down. It was a beautiful weekend here on the Central Coast, hopefully we’re done with the rainy season and this weather holds for a while!

I hit the beach early today because I had a special guest in town! My friend and kayaker to the stars, Beth Barnes, dropped by and spent a few hours with me down at the beach. Before she found me she was asking the lifeguards down on the beach if they’d seem me… the bald guy with the beard that swims here a lot with no wetsuit… turns they knew exactly who she was talking about so I guess I need to behave when the lifeguards are around because they know who I am :) They hadn’t seen me though because I was up on the pier. Eventually we found each other and met up at the base of the Avila Pier and we chatted for a while and enjoyed the fantastic day that was unfolding in front of us. It was warm with a light breeze, perfect beach weather. While asking me about hiking trails and stuff like that in town I mentioned how my folks walk the Bob Jones trail pretty regularly on weekends, and while I was busy trying to explain what it was and where it goes I spotted them about a block away from us! We chased them down and worked on introducing everybody. I’m sure my mom was glad to finally meet the lady that keeps me out of trouble and on track whilst floating in the middle of the ocean for miles at a time :)

Afterwards we walked up the hill for a better view of the beach and sat up by the bluff and talked while watching what was going on in the water. We saw a seal out on patrol pop his head up intermittently, some surfers doing what they could with the small waves rolling through, and eventually a big black dolphin! I haven’t seen a dolphin out here in months so it was super cool to see him swimming around in the bay. Beth spotted him first and we kept track of him as  he cruised the buoy line towards Fossil Point and then did some circles near the reef buoy. Hopefully we see more dolphins out tomorrow when I come back to swim! They say if there’s dolphins around there won’t be sharks… whether that’s true or not I couldn’t tell you, but I’m going to go ahead and believe it anyways!

Eventually I grabbed some boardshorts, duckfeet and my bodyboard out of the truck and went down to the beach while Beth went exploring in town. I paddled out into the frosty water (the nearest buoy was running 50!), but the 80ish degree air took a lot of the edge off of it. The waves were small and few and far between, but they were nicely shaped and you could have some fun with them. I caught 4 0r 5 and I’m feeling myself get a lot better at controlling the board and working the wave… now I just need some bigger, better waves to show up! My current goal in life is to build up enough speed on a wave to catch air off the top of it like the guys in the magazines… I think it’d be pretty epic for me, and pretty entertaining for people on the beach to see some big crazy adventure bearded bald guy launch into the air over a wave on a boogie board :) After a while I ditched the board and went back in just to body surf a little bit. If everyday started like this I think I’d be pretty ok with that!

When I was done with the water I spent a little more time with Beth and then went in search of other adventures. I drove up to Morro Bay to check out Central Coast Stand Up’s new shop. They got some space right on the water that they moved into yesterday. It’s pretty sweet to be able to rent a board and hop on it right there! I think they’re going to do real well over there with that direct water access. The wind in Morro Bay was kicking pretty hard and there was some healthy chop in the water… since I’ve paddled there a few times before and they know I’m a strong swimmer and not afraid of some cold water they let me give it a go. I pushed off from  the dock and fought about 50 meters into the wind with the the wind and water teaming up to turn my board backwards anytime I took a break between strokes. I didn’t fall off my board or anything, but it was getting pretty obvious that nature was not interested in letting me paddle today. I turned around and was back at the dock pretty much immediately… just a few strokes and I was where I started… it’s amazing what some wind can do! Turns out my timing just sucked, later in the afternoon the wind died down and the water glassed over… oh well, next time!

I’ll be back out in the water tomorrow for my regular Sunday swim!