Well that was amazing.
Saturday was the first LOST swim of the year, our 10th year of LOST Swimming in fact, and considering the first year of LOST swimming there was only one person who showed up (me!), I’d say we’ve come a long way!
For the first few years we’d get 6 or 8 or 10 people out, which I was totally fine with, I never had any grandiose plans of growing this to huge numbers. In fact, I remember one time Carl Messenger Lehmann (from Hyperweb, who helped build and host this site!) said to me after a particularly good turnout early in the season when we had probably 14 or 16 people out, “you watch, by mid-summer there will be 30 or 40 people showing up!”. I just smiled politely. But of course he was right. It just keeps growing!
Yesterday we had about 60 people out for the very first swim of the season!!!
And it wasn’t because the water was toasty warm either… in case you were wondering! Although I have to admit that it was warmer than I thought it was going to be. Only a few days earlier it was only about 42F/6C. Which, for those that know me and my measuring system, anything in the 40’s falls into the category of “stupid cold”. Well we were just outside of “stupid cold” at 50F/10C. Far from toasty warm, but actually swim-able… kind of.
The nice thing is that after a particularly cold winter with unprecedented ice on the Lake… it seems like the Lake is on track for a “normal” summer (unlike the weird temps we had in the Lake last year!)
So Mike Morton and Miguel optimistically set up 3 buoys. Honestly, I figured this was going to be a splash and dash. I figured everyone would swim out 50 meters to the first buoy and then back in… and pretty much call it a day. Actually I figured there would be a lot of people who would not even go in, which happens.
But after I gave the huge group the instructions on how to swim in cold water and what to expect and how to deal with it… we went in. Everyone. And that my friends, is the power of LOST Swimming! Seeing everyone do something that you aren’t sure you can do gives you motivation to try it… and do it!
Mike had set it up in a small 125m triangular loop and off we went. And much to my amazement people did more than one loop… and more than 2… in fact, there were people out there doing 6 or 8 or even 10 loops!!! On top of that, there was probably about 10 people swimming naked! (for the newbies, “naked” is non-wetsuit! ;-).
And you know what?… it was awesome. Everyone had a great swim. Actually I was speaking with Caroline, one of our great volunteer kayakers, after the swim and there was one new swimmer who did have a bit of difficulty in the cold water. He swam over to Caroline and her kayak, who assisted him to shore… which was only 50m away. And he was fine. No fuss, no muss. But it was pretty cool to see that after 10 years we seem to have the safety issues set up pretty well. Good work Caroline… and to the swimmer (I’m not even sure who it was) for keeping their wits about them and doing just as I said, swim to shore and then get things sorted out.
So thanks to the ‘yakers, by the way! Especially Mike who is always there setting up and taking down and keeping an eye out for us! Always room for more ‘yakers or SUP’ers if you have a non-swimmer that wants to join the fun too! And while I’m at it… thanks to Darren too! He was the guy standing in his drysuit at the shore for the whole swim just helping people in and out, out very own “Walmart greeter!”
And as I said to everyone after a very good and much longer swim than I expected, “… the good news is that this will be the coldest swim of the year!”. After having kept track of how the lake warms up each Saturday for the past 10 years, I can tell you it will now warm up about 5F each week for the next month or so… until we get to the first “roll-over”… but we’ll swim under that bridge when we get to it! haha.
See you next week!
Cheers,
Rob