I think Darren said it first, but 3 or 4 other people came up to me after the swim yesterday and said “that was the best swim this year!”
Yup, LOSTies certainly are an adventurous bunch…because that was one adventurous swim!
It was kinda weird. The weather was nice. No real wind and the air temp was about 70F/20C… certainly didn’t seem like September 26. And it seemed like it should be a nice quiet and calm send off for the last LOST Swim of 2015… but it was anything but quiet and calm! This has been a bit of an odd ball year really. Colder and rougher than most other years. But, hey, that’s open water swimming! That’s what makes it a lot more interesting than swimming in the pool! And, boy, it was interesting.
Mike and I got there early to set up and oddly, before you even got to the water you could hear it! I pulled the kayak out of the jeep and headed down to the water and as soon as I saw the water I dropped it and Mike and I had a good laugh. There was no way we were going to be able to launch the kayaks from LOST Beach… the waves were huge! Biggest waves I’ve ever seen there. We stood there in awe and just watched for quite a while. We tried to guess how big the waves were, without the typical BS that usually accompanies peoples biased measurement of wave height… I put the waves at 6-8 feet! A few might have been higher!
The good news was that the waves had quite a nice long wave length… which made them very swim-able… if you could get in!
Clearly we couldn’t get in on LOST Beach, although Darren and Fanny did get an earlier swim in from there and after helping them get out over our rocky beach we confirmed that would probably not be the best thing to do! Even though the first words out of a “kelp” covered Darren was “That was awesome!”
So we tried something different. Something kinda fun and exciting. We all went down to the end of the pier and jumped into the creek side and then had a great swim back to our usual spot! It worked out well because we were able to get out on the ladders at the same spot on the creek side too.
The water was 63F, so temperature was not an issue… but the waves, well it was hilarious! I think it was Mark who summed it up after by saying: “It was crazy, I was swimming and looked UP and saw Miguel above me!” You could be 6 feet away from someone and in the trough of the wave and see someone 6 or 8 feet above you on the crest of the wave! May not be unusual in big waves in the ocean, but totally unusual for Lake O!
There was 28 LOSTies that were rewarded for their loyalty by coming out a few days before October with a very memorable swim! The Blue Jays aren’t the only ones that had a great September!
Well that’s it for 2015. Thanks to all the LOSTies that were able to get out and enjoy some fun swimming this summer… and to all the LOST supporters who followed along too! (special thanks to Mike, Richie and Stuart for getting such great shots of this amazing swim!… here are Stuart’s pics!)
Mike, Miguel, Dylan and myself, along with all our volunteer kayakers over the summer put in a lot of work every Saturday morning for no reason other than to have a little fun… and honestly, it wouldn’t be any fun or worth doing if we you weren’t there and if we didn’t have the support from all the LOSTies and friends of LOST Swimming. So my sincere thanks to you all!
Next official LOST Swim… Jan 1, 2016 at noon… for the Polar Bear Dip! (and good luck to all the LOSTies going to Barbados for one of the last races in the Global Swim Series this year!… more to come on that!)
See you then and thanks for a great season!
Cheers,
Rob
