First swim

How I got started in this open water craziness, ten years ago

You can also listen to this post on the Reset Button podcast.

When I first started to swim in the ocean, it was in a shallow, protected cove halfway up the southern reach of San Francisco Bay. Coyote Point is a good twenty-five miles from the open ocean, well inland of the Golden Gate, facing east toward the tame weather and waters of the Bay’s midsection, exposed to nothing more dangerous on most days than some afternoon wind and the occasional small fishing boat.

Still, when I first contemplated getting into that water, it seemed as wild and daunting as the English Channel. A light breeze ruffled the limestone-gray surface of the water into little wavelets. But the closer I got to the water the bigger those waves looked: Like chop, or rough water, really. I looked closer and noticed little whitecaps forming on some of them. Waves were even breaking on the beach. Tiny surf, but still surf! I wasn’t seriously considering going out in these conditions with no boat to protect me, no surfboard to cling to, no floaty to hold me up, was I?

And who knows what horrors lay under that forbidding surface. The Bay is filled with creatures that are bigger, stronger, faster, and hungrier than I. Seals, sea lions, and sharks are all known to be common in these waters. There have been jellyfish in this cove. Some jellyfish stings can be deadly!

Never mind that the Coyote Point cove is about two to six feet deep at low tide and no more than ten or fifteen feet deep at the highest tide, that the jellyfish here don’t have lethal stingers, that the seals and sharks that swim here don’t bite, and the sea lions don’t wander this far south.

I didn’t know all this the first time I ventured into the water here. For me, I was swimming in (and over) all the mysteries of the deep. And I was doing it alone.

…

Read the rest of this post:

First swim

How I got started in this open water craziness, ten years ago

DYLAN TWENEY NOV 10, 2022. 6 MIN READ