It always seems to take a few days for a long swim to really catch up with me. This morning I woke up super hungry and sore as hell. Not like bad joint destruction sore, but the better I-just-hurt-because-I-did-too-much sore. I solved problem number one with an egg McMuffin, problem number two proved a little harder. I wasn’t feeling so fantastic at the office. Luckily this was a lunchtime swim day so I had a chance to stretch out in the water.

The weather was nice today and the water felt really good. As an added bonus Christy was there! I haven’t seen her at the pool in forever so that was super awesome. Overall we had a decent sized group, but enough lanes that no one had to circle.

After swimming a bit in the warm up I decided that today was going to basically be a big kick set. My shoulders earned a day off but I still needed to work off that McMuffin :)

200 swim
200 kick
200 swim

12 x 50 kick w/ fins

Repeat x 2
100 kick
8 x 50 kick
100 swim

2400 yards total

I put fins on for the first set and they pretty much never came off until the end of the workout. Yeah it’s kinda cheating, but like I told everybody else as I motored around “I have excuses!” :) I was splitting a lane with Kelly and she tossed fins on intermittently as well so at least I had cheater company, haha

I’ll be back in the ocean tomorrow night enjoying the last few days of my 20′s… I turn 30 on Saturday… yikes :o

During the week I let Niel know that I was picking up a kayak over the weekend and I’d be able to paddle for him if he wanted to go long on Monday and do a lap of the Martini or swim somewhere else a little further out than usual. I got an email from him Sunday night letting me know that conditions had been pretty bad that day and despite having paddlers available they had skunked a longer group swim due to little things like gale force winds and small craft advisories. We figured worst case scenario we could just swim together and skip the boat part.

When I left the house in the morning I still had the kayak on the rack and I tossed my surfboard in the bed as well just in case there were waves to play in. I figured if I couldn’t find a way to have fun today it wasn’t going to be for lack of trying!

Since I was at the beach early I scored an excellent parking spot and then went to the Custom House for breakfast. Early on in the day it was gorgeous out… sunny with no wind. I sat out on the patio with a full view of the water and ordered some eggs, chicken apple sausage and potatoes. It was pretty awesome. I followed it up with a little bit of a nap on the beach which was even awesomer. I woke up for the occasional text message or loud passerby, but largely just laid on my towel unbothered with a some music playing on my phone loud enough to hear it but quiet enough to not cover the sounds of the ocean.

I’m pretty sure I was snoring a little bit when Niel showed up… I think his shadow or sound of his chair unfolding woke me up. He said he was going to go get the water temp and then decide on what he wanted to do from there. He came back with 50.5 degrees and no desire to go on a 2 1/2 mile swim.

Instead of paddling for him I ended up just swimming along on a shorter route with him. The plan was to enter the water down by the creek, swim over the top of the pier and then to the buoy line and back in.

Getting in sucked pretty hard. I had just spent a lot of time in 60 degree water and had a couple pockets of sunburn hidden on my body which were very not excited to be submerged in 50 degree water. After plenty of complaining and swearing a decision maker rolled over the top of us and since I was now officially wet all over there was nothing left to do but swim.

I leveled out pretty quickly and did my best to chase after Niel. I wasn’t too fast today, still recovering from my 10 mile training swim on Saturday, but at least my shoulders didn’t hurt in the cold water!

We swam straight to the top of the pier and then regrouped at the far corner of it. There were a bunch of people up there today and we were quizzed by a family leaning against the railing. “Isn’t it cold?” “How deep is it?” “How far are you going?” etc… I don’t mind answering questions but it’s always so hard to tell what exactly people are saying up there.

From here we swam to the end of the buoy line and although the conditions were smooth and glassy a sneaky little current picked up and started to push us towards the beach. While regrouping we definitely drifted towards shore. Since it was cold we didn’t hang out too long and turned back in towards the pier then turned it to the beach. I tried to body surf a bit but only half caught waves… I’d get a short ride and then just slip out the back.

After our swim we hung out for a while longer and I’m pretty sure I got in a little more beach nap time. By the time we left the beach the wind was back and white caps were forming further out. I had tentative plans to paddle with Dani today and went ahead and crossed the ocean off our list of places to go for this afternoon.

We traded a few texts during the day and settled on a trip to Lopez. She dropped by my place and then we drove to the lake together. We skipped over the marina and launched at one of the spots me and Jason swim at. There’s parking right at the water and not too many people hang out there, plus there is a boat ramp for us to walk down.

We undid all the straps and cords that I had on it from the night before and pulled it off the rack. The kayak has some fishing rod holders that are basically just big holes directly into the boat which isn’t so good if you don’t want to, you know, sink so I plugged them up with some foam (from a pool noodle) and rubber (from a flip flop). I need a much better solution to that soon, but on a holiday that’s the best I could do with what I could find in my garage.

The wind was pretty high at the lake as well with plenty of chop and even some tiny whitecaps. We decided to paddle it in circles in that section of the lake. Dani is getting ready for an adventure race that involves a 10 mile paddle so this was just training not sightseeing.

We paddled circles in that space for a while and on the last lap expanded it all the way out to the buoy about half a mile from the boat ramp. Luckily the wind was blowing back to the shore and we rode that all the way back in.

It was nice to go paddle, especially in my own boat, I need to go do that some more. Not sure if I can really load and unload that thing solo though. It’s not huge but it is a tandem making it a little unweildly. Maybe I just need to get some of those kayak wheels… yay more toys to buy… damn, leisure is expensive :p Tomorrow I’ll be back in the pool, hopefully my shoulders agree with that idea!

My buddy and fellow open water Adventure Beard enthusiast, Cliff from Colorado, emailed me a little while ago to invite me along on a long swim (4-6 hours) he was going to do in Long Beach with my friend and Kayaker to the Stars Beth Barnes. Normally I don’t like to travel out of town on holiday weekends… there’s a lot of traffic between here and there… but this sounded like a good opportunity to get in a really long training swim, plus I needed to go see Beth anyways to pick up a kayak that she’d been holding for me. The only hitch was that I had some concert tickets for a show in Avila Beach on Friday night… hmmm… I went to Facebook and found the event page for the concert and subsequently a dude in SF that wanted to get his hands on 2 tickets. I didn’t know him, but randomly we had one friend in common from my swim team in Thousand Oaks! He sent a friend by with cash to pick the tickets up and my gas was now paid for and the Long Beach trip was a go!

I took off right at 5 on Friday night and assumed the traffic would totally blow seeing as it’s a big holiday weekend… totally wrong… smoothest LA trip in months! I told Cliff best case scenario I’d get to his mom’s place in Westminster at 9pm, I was in his front yard at 9:05. If only all my drives were that smooth! We stayed up and talked swim adventures for a while over a beer and then crashed out for the night to get ready for the next day’s super training swim. He hadn’t swam around Naples Island since he was a 12 year old kid, we had intentions of making up for lost time!

In the morning we ate a little bit, got bottles and feeds prepped, then cruised over to Naples Island. We were greeted by Beth and she was all smiles and excited to go as usual. We were starting from the dock on a house actually on the island and we got suited up and lubed up in the backyard. I made sure to go heavy on the Bag Balm to keep from chaffing…. I think I’m going to have to like quadruple my efforts for the Great Salt Marathon Swim!

Alamitos Bay was pretty calm and the water was warm for me… the thermometer on the dock was around 59 and my digital thermometer was running more like 62. I think most of the swim was around 60-61… probably the perfect temp for a long swim in my opinion.

After a brief run away kayak adventure while we were trying to launch Beth, Cliff and I decided to finally get down to business and start swimming. Both of us are the types to ease into the water, but the whole dock situation didn’t really allow for that so a run and a jump was in order!

We started out swimming counterclockwise around the island with both of us on the left hand side of the kayak so Beth could keep between us and other boats on the water. This was working pretty well until we ran into a bunch of jerks in a sculling boat. It was really busy on the water and everybody was cool except this one group. They even claimed to have hit a swimmer the week before! I can’t hear much while swimming, but best I can tell Beth politely invited them to piss off for us. We later ran into another swimmer who had problems with the same boat. Beth said that she felt like we were little ducklings that she was doing her best to protect on the water… so for the rest of the swim we were Beth’s Bearded Ducklings :)

After one or two feeds we switched up our configuration. Beth took the middle and I swam to the left of the kayak while Cliff was on the right. We were both holding a really similar pace and everything was running really smoothly. With the boat in the middle I wouldn’t see Cliff for long stretches of time though so it almost felt like a solo swim sometimes.

Once we were almost to the last bridge of the island we picked up a straggler from another group that was out unescorted. I didn’t see him until we stopped for a feed. We had to see if he had a beard to join our gang. Turns out he only had a goatee… I’m pretty sure I told him to come back when he grew a real beard… I think I sounded more serious than I meant too but was totally kidding, hopefully he got that :) I never saw him again. I’m not sure if it was because we dropped him or because he was just done anyways. He said he was almost to his finish point when we talked to him.

We did about 2 1/4 laps in this direction which was good for about 10k and things were running really well. I was counting the 1000m buzzes from my GPS as we went along so I knew about how far we had swam at any given time, and I had Queen’s Greatest Hits on repeat inside my head. A lot of Killer Queen, Don’t Stop Me Now and Bicycle Race were going on inside my brain. But this is where we ran into our only real problem on the swim… a boat race! There were a bunch of kids racing teeny tiny sailboats and running them all the way to the docks giving us no clear course through that wouldn’t involve getting run over. We floated there for a bit contemplating our options and I suggested we just swim the other direction and hope they’re out of the way by the time we get back, so that’s what we ended up doing.

Since I’m a right side breather it was kind of nice to swim the other way around the island and see all the boats and houses on the island. I read a lot of goofy boat names and saw lots of people reading the paper and having their morning coffee. Despite the new visual stimulation my body started to have issues. My elbows were locking up and my shoulders were weakening a bit although my cardio engine was having no issues at all. From about 12k-13.5k I was slowing down and not doing well. For the first time in hours Cliff and I were separating a bit. Maybe 5 meters at most, but still after all that time side by side it was pissing me off a little to be drifting backwards.

As we neared 14k I pushed through my rough patch, caught up and proceeded to hang on for the rest of the swim. We swam the rest of the way with both of us on the right side of the kayak, actually seeing Cliff helped me keep the pace and not fall off again.

Once we got back to where the sailboats were there was still a lot of activity going on but it was further out now and we managed to sneak through and swim a full circle around the island. At our next feed we decided that we’d swim it back into the house when we got there because we’d be safely over 5 hours and have at least 15k swam by that point. Ultimately we had 5 hours and 19 minutes in the water and 16k or 10 miles swam! Awesome for a training swim! And now that I think about it my longest swim that didn’t involve getting out of the water occasional to feed or run through a check point. The map below shows the route, but if you go to http://connect.garmin.com/player/88918107 and click play you can see how we actually went about it.

Back on dry land I was pretty sore up top but no chaffing. I did end up with more sun than I had bargained for. I’m pretty tan and don’t typically burn, but a few spots got pretty red. I have two red angry crescents on the backs of my thighs at the base of my suit. Apparently it’s slightly shorter than the majority of my other suits… and now I know by exactly how much :o

Major thank yous go out to Cliff for inviting me to swim along and putting me up for a night, as well as to Beth for her expert guidance and cheery demeanor all throughout our 5+ hour adventure!

After our swim we chowed down on some Thai food to refuel and then went our separate ways for the rest of the weekend. I drove down into Orange County and met up with my friends Merritt and Bekah to hang out… and build IKEA furniture? We’re a pretty exciting bunch :) haha…

The next day we all went to the LCM meet at Mission Viejo. Merritt was actually racing, Bekah and I just swam a bit in the warm up pool to loosen up. Eventually she was drafted to be the head timer and shortly thereafter I was also handed a stopwatch. Amazingly this was the first time I’ve ever been a timer in my life, I had no idea how all this stuff worked. I’m always in the meet so I’m never in a position to work at one. Bekah looked at me in disbelief when I explained this to her and then gave me a 14 second run down of the process… apparently it’s not that hard :)

My big highlight of the meet was helping one of the ladies from the 90-94 age group up on the blocks for one of her races. Maureen swam a ton of events and still dives off the blocks, it’s pretty amazing stuff. She tapped me on the shoulder and proclaimed that “this handsome young man is going to loan me an arm to get on the blocks.” Can’t argue with that right? :) So I put an arm out for her to balance on, she got up on the block, held on to me until she had to take her marks and then boom! She was gone and swimming! Awesome reminder of a what a great sport swimming is… you can literally do it competitively into your 90′s, not too many other sports allow for that!

After the meet I had lunch with my friends and then went back to Long Beach to see Beth again. She had scooped up a kayak for me for cheap a while back and this was the first time that I had been in town to pick it up. I was pretty apprehensive about transporting it 200+ miles and the heavy winds we were having didn’t help much either. We got it up on my rack together and then strapped it down tight. It was obvious that it wasn’t going to budge but I still didn’t trust it… I had visions of a big red kayak escaping my truck at freeway speeds on the 405 :o I made a pit stop in Agoura Hills to see my coach and to stop worrying about my kayak turning into a 13 foot plastic dart of freeway destruction. We hung out for a couple hours and she fed me dinner, score! :) Around 8 I got back on the road and wrapped up my drive. Despite high winds the whole way home, including 45 mile per hour gusts through Gaviota, I made it back just fine although I was a little worried!

All told a good SoCal adventure! Next exciting thing up for me is my night swim birthday party next Saturday! Still figuring everything out for that, but it should be cool :) if you’re around on the 4th and interested in a swim in the dark shoot me an email and I’ll fill you in on the deets.

Lagom is a Swedish word that roughly translates in this context to “meh, that’ll do.” I’ve been swimming a lot with a really long swim coming up this weekend and today the objective was to just cruise and see my friends. Luckily the front end of the workout was kick heavy which gave me a chance to talk while floating along with my kickboard :)

200/200/200

Repeat x 3
4 x 50 kick w/ fins @ 1:00
100 fast @ 1:30

3 x 100 swim @ 1:30
50 fast

go to back work…

1850 yards total

It wasn’t a whole lot of swimming, but the 4 x 50 plus a fast 100 set got my heartrate up plenty which makes it worth going. Once we got to the end of the workout I think the idea was to do that set 2 or 3 times through, I just did the first one and then made moves back towards the office. I probably could have squeezed out a little more but my shoulders were a little creaky and I was pretty much done for the day.

Not sure if I’m going to get wet tomorrow, but I will be setting a course for LA. I’m swimming with my buddy Cliff from Colorado with Beth Barnes as our guide on Saturday morning. We’re aiming for a lot of hours in the water so that should be exciting!

Today was a pretty exciting day, it was the first ocean swim lesson of the year! I started working with a guy getting ready for an Alcatraz swim this summer, I’m really excited to help him work towards his goals and be able to spread that open water swim stoke to new people… being stoked isn’t just for surfers, us ocean swimmers can get in on that action too :)

I met up with him at 9 this morning and took him out for probably about 1000 meters worth of circles around the left side of the buoy line. We had fairly mellow conditions at first, but the wind chop picked up a little bit as the class went on. We worked on picking his stroke apart and fixing a few things, as well as sighting and holding a line. The main words of the day were: relax and stretch. They’re pretty simple concepts in theory but not very natural for humans suspended in moving salt water to act on. I saw a lot of improvement in the course of our hour and I’m excited to get back out next week to expand on that!

To make my day even better I got to go back to Avila for a second swim after work! I’m a lucky guy :) Turns out while I was at work the conditions degraded pretty badly. The wind was a lot stronger and the chop a lot more substantial. It was on the verge of breaking further out towards the end of the pier.

I met Niel on the beach and we were joined by Ryan, John, and new swimmer Damien. After a little indecision on the course we decided to face the chop head on from the start and do a reverse triangle. Might as well get the burliest part out of the way early right?

We marched on over and the wind was really kicking, I could already tell the water wasn’t going to feel so great at first thanks to that. We waded in pensively and took our time walking through the waves. There were a couple kids with intentions of surfing right there who drifted into that area about the same time we got in. I don’t think that went so well for them… sideways chop and surfboards don’t usually mix so well. I don’t know if they caught any waves, but they were long gone by the time we were done swimming.

Eventually everybody took off but me… I’m not sure what I was holding out for… a mystery burst of warmer water? Who knows. Eventually I tossed myself in and chased after the guys and met them at the first buoy. We tried our best to explain the phantom creek buoy to the new guy and it’s a good thing we did because the dude is fast and smoked all of us right out of the gate! He took it out a lot further than we normally would, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I took a brief pause en route to let John and Ryan pass me so I could take a couple pictures before I got back to swimming the rest of the way to the regrouping spot.

From here we were aiming for the top of the pier and doing our best to avoid hawaiian outrigger canoes that were cruising around out there. I put a little more effort into this leg to try and keep up with Damien and get a vibe for how fast he is since I kind of just hung back on that first leg. This plan worked for about 50m and then kinda fell apart. He’s quick, I’m not :) The water was coming from an awkward angle on this leg and it was probably the hardest stretch to swim, and since we went so far towards the Poly Pier this was a long swim as well.

While waiting for everyone to catch up you could really see the conditions continue to deteriorate. The clouds were rolling in and that wind wasn’t giving up. Luckily the next leg was at least a little “downhill.” I paced alongside John on this one. I really tried to focus on my stroke and what I was doing with my catch. I spent my morning talking all about this kind of stuff so I figured it was a good idea to apply it to myself as well :)

We took a short break at the 2nd buoy on the point side and then swam it down to buoy number one and in towards the beach. On the way in there was a really weird “warm” stretch that was an odd color compared to everything else. This might explain Niel measuring 55 from mid pier when everything else was registering 50… no idea where the hell this water was coming from though… but as an ocean swimmer it’s best to just enjoy the warmth and not question the source because you probably really don’t want to know, ewww… haha

We wrapped it up with a little bodysurfing into the beach and then everyone scattered to go about with their evenings. I took off pretty quick to get home and try to catch up on life a little bit… not sure I was particularly successful, but it’s the thought that counts right?

Tomorrow will consist of a trip to the pool and then, who knows… my regular lake swim buddy is splitting town for a while and I’m not sure if anyone else wants to swim Lopez tomorrow, I’m going to have to send some texts and emails tomorrow to figure it out.

While my Monterey Bay Relay swim is on ice for the moment I need to turn my attention to the Great Salt Lake Marathon Swim coming up in just a few weeks. I need to be ready to plow through 8+ miles of salty goodness on the 11th of June. Not sure how workouts are going to shake out this week, but I have plans for a big long swim this weekend with a friend… that should be a good start. Gords has been posting old newspaper articles from the 30′s and 40′s that covered this same swim. Sounds like the lake is capable of some pretty gnarly conditions… is it weird that it makes me more interested in the swim? If we can have some high seas on a salty inland lake that might work to my advantage in the race :)

Out at the pool today I was excited to be there but not super excited to get started. I was still in that post I-didn’t-get-to-do-what-I-wanted-to-do funk. I asked Mike what we were doing today and he started talking about anaerobic things… I didn’t really want any anaerobes for lunch today, but that’s why I swim in Santa Maria… time to take my medicine right? haha

600 reverse IM

Repeat x 4
100 IM @ 1:40
75 free overkick/easy/overkick by 25 (forgot the interval)
50 IM Switching, rotate by round @ 1:00
25 fast choice @ :40

12 x 50 choice, as fast as you can maintain

100 cool down

2300 yards total

The workout he put together wasn’t all that crazy but it worked! I could feel my head throbbing inside my goggles in the middle of that first set. My allergies have been pretty bad too and I’m a little wheezy which I guess just made it extra anaerobical. The end of the workout was supposed to be 8 x 100 of something but I didn’t have that much time so I cut over to a 100 cool down and ran back to work.

I’ve got a lot going on tomorrow… I’ll be in the ocean twice and be talking swimming for lunch! It’s going to be an exciting day!

Ok so although my Monterey Night Swim Adventure was shut down this weekend I do have a special night swimming treat for you guys courtesy of my friend Glenn at Go Swim. We’re working on a new video “Swimming in the Dark with Rob D.” It’s pretty awesome… my stroke is looking sweet and Glenn’s cinematography is outstanding as always! Anyways, here’s a clip!

Amazing right? :)

Speaking of night swimming… I’m having a little Birthday party in the dark in the ocean on June 4th at Avila Beach. Swimmers, paddlers, and spectators are all welcome! Contact me directly at rob@robaquatics.com for more info or to RSVP.

we were totally ready for battle!

So my grand Monterey Bay adventure didn’t exactly come to fruition. We were ready to go and every one was psyched. James, Bekah and I loaded to boat together in the early afternoon down in Monterey. Then we picked up more team members en route to Santa Cruz and got the whole team and support crew together for dinner in the Santa Cruz Harbor. I had strawberry shortcake while everyone else had fancier dinners, I’m still pretty sure I made the better choice :) And then I noticed James had been gone for a pretty long time on the phone and started to realize there’s only one dude that could hold his attention for that long right now… the boat captain… oh shit…

He came back with cell phone video from the boat that showed conditions were pretty gnarly out there. It looked like stock footage from deadliest catch or something, not good. There was hope that when the sun went down it would flatten out a little bit but that didn’t appear to be what was going to happen that night. Part way to Santa Cruz the captain called it and shut us down. It just wasn’t safe to run the swim. It sucks to lose out the opportunity to swim the Bay, but better safe than sorry… it’d suck a lot harder to misplace a swimmer or paddler in 3000 feet of water.

at least I got to be on the boat for a little bit even if it was docked

Without a plan as to what to do now we fell back on the Wine portion of the Westend Wharf Wine & Swim Club and headed to their “clubhouse,” Vino Prima, up on the wharf. Afterwards we shuttled down to Monterey to get our stuff back off the boat and then went to my Kelp Krawler friend Chris’ house to crash out for the night. After waking up today Bekah and I went out for a whole bunch of Korean food and then drove back to my house. She’s en route back home to Orange County now and I’m already getting calls from James about possible reschedule dates. He’s determined to make this thing happen and I definitely want in, hopefully we can pull it all together one more time and cross the bay this time!

Saturday is the big day! Tomorrow afternoon we (my Distance Swim Challenge peer pressure buddy Bekah is swimming too!) drive up to Monterey to meet part of the team and then carry on to Santa Cruz to meet up with everyone else. From there we hop on the boat to get this party underway! Our first swimmer will hit the water after dark and we’ll swim through the night with our sights, or at least compass bearings, set on Del Monte Beach in Monterey!

I set up an experimental page for you guys to check up on our location during the swim. No promises that it’s going to work completely as advertised, but I think I’ve got it most of the way dialed in… go to robaquatics.com/w3sc to check it out.

I’m super stoked that I found my way onto a relay team getting ready to take on the length of the Monterey Bay. A major thank you to my Kelp Krawler friend Chris for throwing my name in the running for a spot! This is such a rad opportunity for me to preview a swim I really want to do as a soloist someday when I grow up. I’ll try to post Twitter and Facebook updates best I can during the swim but I don’t know what the cell phone situation is out in the middle of the bay so we’ll see what gets through.

I had a full slate of aquatic adventures today! I began with a trip to the pool in Santa Maria for lunch. We started with just a handful of us but our numbers grew a little as the workout wore on. It was a pretty nice day out and I was happy to have the sun shining on me after a string of days that were pretty gloomy.

Since Mike was distracted with something on deck at the beginning of workout I just started swimming a reverse IM seeing as that’s a popular way to start a workout around here. Turns out I guessed wrong, but it’s ok since I managed to squeeze in an extra 200 yards before we really got going.

200 warm up
300 swim
200 kick

12 x 25 fly drill

8 x 50 variables

300 swim

6 x 50 kick

hustle back to work

2000 yards total

The last set of the day was supposed to be 2 rounds of 400 pull and 4 x 100 swim descending… since I had one more swim today and wouldn’t be able to finish that before going back to work I did a 300 swim then kicked 300 yards before getting out of the pool.

After wrapping up my workday I met Jason out in my parking lot at the office. We had a bunch of people that were interested in swimming with us tonight but that didn’t really work out so well. I think a mix of real life and the Tour of California making a stop in Paso Robles distracted our more triathletely leaning friends. Hopefully next week we get them out in the water!

Anyways we cruised out to the lake and it was pretty empty. These weekday swims are awesome because no one is around… summer weekends this place goes crazy… chances are we’ll avoid those completely. There were some turkeys hanging out by the water and just one dude fishing off a little dock on the right hand side of where we were planning to enter the water. Basically we were going to copy Monday’s swim since we don’t know how long the lake will be this full allowing us to do it.

I brought my digital thermometer with me and checked the water temp at the edge of the lake, 68. Not bad at all. There were a few colder patches, but nothing below 64 I’m sure.

We swam straight out from where we splashed to the bridge. We stopped there to hang out and scout where we were going to look for boats and fishermen. We noticed a whole bunch of bird activity under the bridge tonight. They’ve been building mud nests under there and were hard at work expanding them. We also noticed a mild current pushing us under the bridge.

We aimed for “ghost tree” again and made just one stop en route for Jason to fix his cap. While we were there Ryan who swims in the ocean with me rode by on the road above and yelled down at us. No idea what he said but we waved :) He left me a comment on Facebook later about how me and my SSD looked like a bobber floating in the lake.

Jason and I finished our swim towards the end of this finger of the lake and hung out and talked for a while out there until he needed to get swimming again to generate some heat. We swam straight back to the bridge… well I stopped short to take some pictures. The lighting looked pretty awesome and I had this killer shot in front of me each time I took a breath so felt it was best to get out the camera real quick :) Once I caught up we spent more time observing our nest building bird friends and then turned it in towards the boat ramp.

Part way down we spotted some guy fishing in our spot. Crap. Jason wanted to try and get out over by this floating dock thing instead. I wasn’t a fan of the idea but it beat swimming straight at a fisherman. Now that I’ve done it though I’d like to retract my previous statement :) We swam up to the side of this thing and there were full on bushes underwater right next to it so I had tiny branches jabbing into my feet while trying to get out… fun! Then the dock goes nowhere, you have to offroad it through much and stinging nettles to get back around to where the truck was parked. I was not a fan of this part of the adventure.

Once we were dried off and put back together we drove out to the marina to scope out some future possible swim courses. We may get a little creative and go long sometime early next week. In the meantime I have to get ready for my Monterey Bay Relay adventure! I’m getting really stoked for this and I’m extra excited that we added one of my really good friends to the roster as a last minute replacement for someone that had to drop out. She’s coming up here from SoCal tomorrow and then we’ll head up to Monterey on Saturday to meet up with the rest of the team and go to Santa Cruz to begin our swim back down the coast.