This weekend consisted of a couple trips to float in Avila. Saturday I did some experimenting with my GoPro in the small waves at Olde Port Beach (aka the Dog Beach). I put together a swim contraption that I needed to test to see if it would work to record a swim in progress. It was made of a lifeguard rescue can and a couple GoPro mounts… I was anticipating having to add some fins as stabilizers to keep it from flipping but needed to check the angles first. I took it out into the water and swam back and for a bit, things went ok. It stayed upright most of the time but did lean pretty hard to the side. If chop or swells of sufficient size hit it sideways the whole thing went over. I deemed it semi-successful. Works in theory but needs some kinks worked out.

I went back to the beach after swimming a bit and moved my GoPro from that mount into a wrist mount that I had ordered up a week ago but hadn’t tried yet. The wrist mount is a little awkward. It points in every direction except the ones you want it to. I bodysurfed and swam with it too see what I’d get from that, and then I took it off and used the strap to just hold it to my hand instead and switched from video to photo. The GoPro takes nice 11 megapixel pictures and has a really cool burst feature that fires off 10 shots in rapid succession which makes catching the right part of an action shot a lot easier. I got cool wave and dog pictures.

On Sunday I was back at in Avila at the main beach around 10am. I brought my swim filming contraption and it promptly fell apart between the truck and the sand. The adhesive on the mounting disc just wasn’t cutting it apparently. I was bummed I wasn’t going to get to try out my GoPro on the swim, luckily I had a new little point and shoot cam in my bag that I could bring with me instead.

Since I was there early I took a chance to return a call to my buddy (and Chesapeake Bay Swim host) Dave in Maryland. Niel and Sylvia showed up on the beach a little later. I went up on the pier with Niel to get the water temp and it wasn’t pretty… 52.5… definitely didn’t match how nice it looked outside. After a little debate and surveying the sea we decided to swim for Fossil Point today. The tide was fairly high and there wasn’t much surf left over from the week’s big swell series so a point swim wouldn’t be too dicey.

Getting in sucked really hard today. My body just wasn’t in the mood at first. The water burned on my feet and didn’t get much better on the way up. Definitely one of those days where you wonder why you think this is fun :) Eventually Niel and his luxuriously thick wetsuit took off and a few waves later I started swimming too. I was feeling it at buoy number one… here I am apparently meditating away the cold, or possibly peeing…

We swam down to the end of the buoy line to regroup again. I felt pretty ok by then, it just took me a while to process the cold through my system and kick in the internal heater. From the buoy line we headed straight towards the point. As we got closer you could feel a lot more water moving underneath us but it wasn’t shallow enough there to break so we were ok. I haven’t been down to the point in a long time so it was cool to get a chance to see in up close and in person again and snap a few pictures.

After a prolonged break we decided on the next part of our route since we only planned up to the point. We decided to swim to the tip of the pier in a straight shot with no stops which is about a 700ish meter leg. Niel and I swam parallel to each other for most of it and even had a mini arm tangling at one point. Half way there I felt something in the water but wasn’t sure what was going on. I popped my head up and spotted a small boat moving incredibly slowly past us. It must have been electric or something because there was zero motor noise. Luckily they were paying attention and going slow because they passed very close to us, a little too close really, but the boat was so quiet Niel didn’t even know it was there until I told him about it later!

Out at the tip of the Pier we decided to extend the swim to the creek buoy before turning in. We made a quick stop at the buoy then turned for the pier. I though we were going to swim to the pier then turn in but Niel kept going under the pier so I chased him under to the other side. We had a small group watching from above and they were on the other side to see us pop out as well. We took a brief moment to soak in the sights and then arced back in towards the beach. Niel had 52 1/2 minutes on his watch which was a perfect compliment to the 52 1/2 degrees we had in the water. Overall we swam about 1.7 miles.

I spent my lunch on Thursday out in Avila surfing some waves and experimenting more with my new GoPro camera. Normally I’d go for Pismo at lunch since it’s closer and the waves are more surfable, but two things held me back… 1. the area around the pier tested dirty this week, boo bacteria 2. there’s an enormous W-NW swell breaking on the coast that is way to much too handle. Avila was the better choice since it’s a south facing beach. It still gets some of the size from the swell wrapping around the coastline, but it’s not as big and out of control. The waves were anywhere from shoulder high to a little overhead when I got to the beach and the weather was insanely beautiful. Despite it being January it was hot on the sand, while changing into my boardshorts the sun liquified some of the wax on my board! I’ve never seen that before!

The water was about 54 today but the air temp was so nice it almost didn’t even matter, at least to me. I eased my way in waiting for a lull to paddle out without getting hammered. There were a few other guys out most on boogie boards, on on a shortboard. Everyone was having a good time and catching waves. I spent about 45 minutes in the water catching whatever I could and had a ton of fun. I experimented with a few angles on the camera and got some fun shots. I got a series of ridiculous beard shots… it looks like they came from a photoshoot for bacon donut scented cologne :)

I’ve been asked a couple times how you mount a GoPro to a bodyboard since they don’t make accessories specifically for that. First off, DON’T use the tiny adhesive mount that comes with the Hero2 surf kit, it’s no good on foam. What you need to get is the older version of the surf kit with the big disc mount, you can get it from GoPro direct here or from ebodyboarding.com like I did. You’re also going to need a couple of leash plugs.

Next up you need to pick where you want the mount to go (don’t forget to account for any stringers your board might have!) and drill some holes. I used the adhesive base to hold the disc down and then drilled holes through it and straight through the board. I started with a small drill bit and worked up in about 3 stages to a huge one to made a big enough hole for the leash plug to sit somewhat flush. Once the holes are in place you can screw in the plugs and then clip in your camera, easy! So far my mount job has been super solid. It’s gotten bashed around in fairly serious surf with no issues.

For a more in-depth version of how to do this, here’s a video from ebodyboarding.com

This morning I went to Pismo on a mission… to get barreled with my new GoPro camera. The older surf mount kit I ordered (which is better for boogie boards) showed up Thursday, I modified it and drilled it into my board on Friday, and today I was in search of a big ride for the camera. The good news is that it was big out in Pismo, the bad news was it was a touch above my skill level. Undeterred I went out anyways, got tumbled and faceplanted a few times, and got some awesome footage. I grabbed a few stills before leaving for Santa Barbara to celebrate New Years Eve… I might have some video in the next day or two.

See you kids in 2012! In the meantime… me in a wave from start to about to get thrashed :)

Normally I don’t believe in mornings, but marathon swim machine and sports psychologist Jen Schumacher was in the neighborhood and wanted to go for a Wednesday morning swim… who am I to say no to that? :) I got up early and headed for the beach a little ahead of the rising sun. I got there early to scope things out and get a water temp. The wind was light, not too much surf, and there wasn’t much sealife moving about. I couldn’t get a water temp reading over 50… I got 49 like 5 times in a row… but I think that was influenced a lot by the 42ish air temperature. In reality the water was probably more like 52, and although the air started cold it did warm up quite a bit in the course of our swim.

Jen and her family drove up right on time and I greeted them on the sidewalk. The rest of the Schumachers would be out running while Jen and I ventured into the ocean. We walked down to the beach, got ready to swim and then sloooowly worked our way into the water. Luckily she’s a fan of the little bit at a time method of acclimatization like I am. Eventually the waves were tall enough we didn’t have a lot of choice about it and we had to dive through and start swimming. I had already laid out the route on the beach with plans to stop at major turns to regroup. Jen is quite a bit faster than me, so she swam circles and back tracked at some of the turns while I caught up so she could keep moving and not freeze out.

Everything moved along really smoothly. The ocean was great, the scenery was beautiful, and it was just a good day for a swim. We chatted a little at each stop and took some pictures since we both had cameras on us (I’m testing out a new point and shoot!). At the tip of the pier we had to make sure and stop so Jen could add to her piers of California collection.

Once we’d swam all the way to the creek buoy we decided that we’d think about swimming under the pier since things were looking mellow enough to do so. We swam down to the last buoy, gave it one more look, decided it was a good idea and then Jen added a couple extra buoys to the swim. She wanted to swim back to the end of the buoy line on the other side which was cool with me so we set off under the pier and swam into the sun all the way to the far buoy.

Afterwards we swam it back towards the pier and then in towards the beach. I didn’t wear my GPS but by my calculations it was good for about 1.5 miles. All told a great start to the day! We were greeted on the beach by a few shocked dog walkers not expecting to see wetsuitless humans emerge from the sea while they were bundled up as if there were real winter here :) We also caught up with Jen’s mom and then the rest of the fam back up on the sidewalk. I hung around to chat for a bit but couldn’t stay too long because I had to get back to work. Hopefully we see more of Jen up here in Avila, it’s a great place for those who are marathonally inclined to hang out and get the occasional shot of barely 50 degree water!

My family gets all its Christmasing out of its system on the 24th so Christmas morning is all mine to do what I want with. Since it’s on a Sunday this year I went to the beach just in case someone from my open water group showed up for a swim. I figured the odds were slim, but worst case scenario I could play in the surf and learn to work with my new GoPro (yes!).

After sitting on the beach in the sun for a while I decided it was time to get in the water. It was totally gorgeous out and almost no one was around. I grabbed my fins and my GoPro and waded it out into some 52ish degree water. Although the air temp still wasn’t that high it helped the sun was shining. It took a little while to get out past the break, largely because I was avoiding putting my face underwater :) Once that was out of my system it was time to play! I bodysurfed a bit and tried to shoot shots of the tiny tubes the waves were producing. I’m pretty stoked with a lot of the shots I got today!

When I got out of the water 30 or 40 minutes later I found a swimmer on the beach goggles in hand. She was visiting from San Francisco and looking for a wetsuitless Xmas swim. Who am I to say no to that? :) I’m excited with how popular we’ve been with out of towners recently. Last week I had a swimmer from the Central Valley and one from Sacramento in the water. I went to grab my goggles and spread on a little body glide then returned to the water. She was just looking for a short swim since she was coming off of a cold so we did a loop around the pier. Nice and easy in some cold but beautiful water. It was a pretty perfect morning!

I spent the rest of my afternoon playing with pictures, it feels nice to have a waterproof camera again, ahhh… Here’s the choice cuts from this morning…

For the life of me I don’t understand the appeal of Black Friday shopping… standing in line with a bunch of deal crazed individuals prone to pepper spraying fellow shoppers in order to buy crap no one really wants anyways? Pass. I’d much rather take advantage of a weekday off of work and get in some playtime outside. I’ve been wanting to try out a longer swim in Lake Lopez all year and a light bulb went off in my head earlier in the month that Black Friday would be the day to do it. I enlisted my friend Danilu as a support paddler and decided on a 5-6k route from Mallard Cove to the Dam. This swim is something a few of us have talked about a bit and I figured I may as well be the test pilot for it before we try taking other folks out that far because once you get about 1/4 mile out there’s no real good exit points from the water, you gotta swim whether you want to or not.

Dani came by my place around 8:20 and we rode out to the lake together. The drive in actually takes us along a lot of the part of the lake we’d be swimming so I tried to observe as much as I could from the road above. The lake was definitely a little textured this morning and I spotted one speed boat and one stationary fishing boat. Not bad. We paid to bring the kayak into the park (we both have annual passes for our vehicles) and drove out to the cove. I was surprised with how many people were at the lake, I figured it’d be a little quieter this time of year. We parked and unloaded and I got ready to swim. I had a small mesh bag with a few supplies in it… back up goggles, gatorade, gu chomps, electronic thermometer and FlipCam. Before we took off I grabbed a preliminary water temp. I took a few readings that ranged from about 56-59, the swim ended up averaging 58 across the whole lake which is a nice happy, comfortable temperature for me.

When we were both ready to go I marched on down to the water’s edge in an obnoxiously pink swimsuit that seemed to amuse the family hanging out right there fishing :) I waded out a ways and adjusted to the temperature a body region at a time. While I was working on that I noticed the wind going the opposite direction of what I’m used to. Instead of barreling in through the hills from the dam it was blowing from shore out into the lake. Odd but ok. The biggest problem this created was that Dani couldn’t maintain a position next to me because of the wind, she ended up staying about 3-5 meters ahead of me which was fine since boat traffic was light.

I felt a little rough while swimming today, my low back remains upset with me and I’m having some tightness in my left shoulder. Good news is it’s a muscular tightness and not a grinding. It took a while to get into a rhythm and at the half mile buoy I stopped for a moment to stretch and make sure Dani was going to be ok paddling back against this wind once we turned around. She was game as always.

As we swam out into unexplored waters we hung to the right side of the lake which turned out to be a good call because all the faster moving boats and jetskis were making moves on the opposite side of the lake. If I can put some space between me and motorboats I’ll take it so we decided that we’d swim back on this side as well once we made the turn. I started swimming a little better out here although the chop coming from behind me was messing up my flow a bit. It was rolling at a really odd frequency that would drop my hips as I tried to catch a breath which lead to a few mouthfuls of less that delicious lake water.

Eventually we rounded a point that opened up a clear view of the dam. I didn’t want to swim all the way up to it since 1. It’s roped and buoyed off, probably for good reasons, and 2. it’s on the fast side of the lake. Instead we swam to the next spur of land that was straight across from it and used that as a turn around point. While we were out there I took a break and drank a bit and ate a few of my Gu Chomps. I made a major tactical error with the Gatorade though. I didn’t read the label and had some goofy low calorie bullshit that did absolutely nothing for me. Lesson learned on that one.

As we started the long swim back we passed through some much calmer waters. Things had started to lay down in this part of the lake because the direction of the wind was shifting and we were sheltered from it by the hills to our left. Dani cut a course more through the middle this time since fishermen were starting to filter in along the shore and we didn’t want to get too close to those guys.

I was pretty glad to feel my GPS buzz at the 4k mark because I knew I was almost done and my left shoulder was really making some noise. The muscles were tweaking out and I was hoping to finish swimming before I was in a position to hurt myself. Around this time is also when we lost the cover of the hills and got the full force of the winds. They were blowing left to right across us and I think that had a lot of impact on the line of our final approach to our finish.

As we neared the finish I started to sight off of Dani’s truck instead of her kayak and within about 10m of shore I put my hand straight down into the mushy lake bottom. Since it was too shallow to swim any more I stumbled the rest of the way in across the overly soft bottom which occasionally would eat up my leg all the way to mid calf, yuck. As I hit dry land I checked my GPS and today’s swim came in at about 5 1/2k, not bad for a Friday morning right? :) The one part that really sucked though was I stunk, bad. The lake water left me a little ripe and even a shower later I can smell that funk on me. After the swim I got changed, we loaded the kayak back in the truck, and we went in search of food down in the Arroyo Grande Village.

It was a good swim and I think this is something that we could turn into a group swim with similarly speeded swimmers and enough kayak or boat support. I know my buddy Jason wants a crack at this one and I’m sure we have a few others that would be interested in giving this route a spin. The next time I feel like doing something interesting in Lake Lopez I think I need to swim end to end or try to swim the whole thing which could get up to 16-17k if you plan it out right… hmmmm :)

This made the rounds on Facebook last week, but I realize not everybody is a Facebooker… or a USMS member for that matter, so I figured I should toss this out on the blog just in case :) A big thank you to Laura Jones for such a nice write up, and USMS for deeming me interesting enough to eat up a page of the NOV/DEC issue! If you click the picture of the article above it will take you to a larger version that you should be able to actually read.

I’ve been keeping busy this past week with the switch to heavier pool swimming now that daylight savings time is here and there’s no more sunshine when I leave the office at 5pm. I made the move back to Kennedy’s 50m pool in SLO and laid down some decent late night long course workouts on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. On Thursday I spent my lunch at the beach soaking in some 56 degree water while searching for waves in an unexpectedly docile pre-storm sea. With my LCM adventures I could definitely feel myself getting stronger as the week went on, but Friday dealt me a major setback. I swiped my card like I usually do and was off to the locker room when they stopped me to let me know that my membership was expired. Shit. I asked for how long since I’d been there all week… the dude said January? Uhhh…. probably not… it was late on Friday night and nobody wanted to figure it out so they just let me go workout anyways. Something similar happened to me earlier this year, maybe it’s the same mistake all over again. I’m going to have to figure out what’s up this coming week, I need the flexibility and late hours of that pool to get myself ready for various longer swims I want to do in the coming months.

Today’s swim in Avila Beach was our first foray into sub 55 degree waters in a long time. Luckily the rest of the conditions and the weather were really fantastic. Niel emailed me Saturday night to make sure I’d be showing up since he figured attendance would be light due to the time of year and rain on Friday. I let him know I’d be there, and this morning I got a bonus text from him telling me to bring my rescue buoy because we might make a run on Avila Rock. I was stoked on the idea since I haven’t been out there in a long time and it’s a cool swim that takes you about 3/4′s of a mile off shore.

While we were on the beach scoping the route and looking for any signs of trouble between here and there we had one more person show up which was a bit of a surprise. Amy has been swimming with us for a little while now but she’s still learning a lot about open water. She was open to the idea of trying it out, but Niel and I decided to scrap our original plans since the rock is a fairly advanced route with no real exit points. That matched with the distance and the cold made it seem like a bad idea. Instead we opted for a Poly Pier swim which would still be a good distance and build up some new experiences for Amy that will help a lot for someday that we take her out to the rock.

We went down to the right side of the Avila Pier and made plans to swim out to the buoy line to regroup. It took me a little while to get all the way in. I was definitely feeling that 54 degree water. It’s not something that I can’t do, it just takes me a little while to get my internal heater pumping and the desire to fully submerse myself. Amy took off swimming first, followed my Niel shortly thereafter… I complained my way through a few more waves and then took off swimming. By the buoy I had burned about halfway through my acclimatization but needed a few more minutes to get all the way comfortable. On the way to the buoy I had a seal stalker. As a matter of fact through the whole swim we had 3 very curious seals trailing us. 2 big black ones and a smaller guy that was grey and spotted. Every time we stopped they’d pop up in various places around us to observe what we were up to.

After our quick regrouping session we swam to the end of the buoy line and then angled for the cross braces on the Poly Pier. We let Amy get out in front of us a bit since she’s slower than Niel and I. She started out on an ok line but then started to peel left towards the tip of the Poly Pier. I chased her down and tried to herd her back online a bit. We were going the right way again and I shifted back into my own gear and made my own way to the pier with the occasional turn onto my back to make sure she was roughly on course. Somewhere towards the end she started drifting outward again. Niel and I had already made it to the pier so we decided to swim her down and cut off her route instead of waiting for her to notice she was off course. Sighting off a couple of extra pipes on the pier can be a pretty hard thing to do especially with the glare of the sun and never having been there.

Once we had everyone regrouped we negotiated the next leg of the swim, it would either be back to the buoy line on the end of the Avila Pier. Since we were directly in line with the tip of the pier we opted for that. We let Amy get a little ahead again and Niel took extra care on this leg to make sure we kept her on line. It’s probably a 600m shot and we made a couple regrouping stops in the middle to keep the group together.

At the tip of the pier we took a few moments to rest and regroup while the people on the pier observed some of San Luis Bay’s more peculiar marine mammals in their natural habitat. Since there was a dude fishing off the corner of the pier we made plans to arc out a ways and then turn in for the beach. The tide was really high so we had a lot more swimming than usual to do to get all the way back. En route I crossed paths with a sea otter. He looked a little displeased with me interrupting his Sunday stroll. About a meter from my face he dove, disappeared into the murky water and popped back up behind me undoubtedly muttering sea-otter-anese expletives about swimmers harshing his mellow.

All told we did about 1.25 miles and I felt really good afterwards. My only real concern was the water quality, it seemed a little questionable on the east side of the pier… fingers crossed on not getting sick, don’t need that! Looking forward into next week I need to figure out where and where I’m swimming so I can keep up my current workout escalation.