Monday, August 22, 2011

Another good reason to swim GSL

This morning Cathi emailed me this story about a woman who was ran over by a boat yesterday evening in Pineview while she was swimming. According to the report it happened at 8pm which is dusk time.  That is the worst time to swim because if she wore any lights they wouldn't be visible, and it's not really light enough to an SSD very well (even if she did have one).  My instincts are to lash out at the boater, but it's also the responsibility of the swimmer to be extremely cautious and take precautions such as wearing an SSD, or have a kayak support boat nearby to make it easier to see that there is a swimmer in the water.  It really is sad.  Pineview is crazy busy with boats and I've witnessed alot of boaters who just are plain reckless.

Many times while swimming you can hear when a boat/jetski gets close.  Even when they're a hundred yards away, under the water, they are noisy!  I've never seen a motorized boat in the GSL (except for the harbor master's).  All sailboats, kayaks, or rowboats.  Problem with these boats is that your can't hear them coming! But on the other hand they are very rarely out on the water and if so, it's such a huge lake that there are miles and miles of water to share and they get very spread out!

This morning's swim was out at GSL and for the first time that I've swam out there over the weeks in the early morning I saw my first boat!  It was a guy on a single skull boat.  He was about 30 yards from us as we were heading back from Black Rock on our first lap.  Then he was coming back to the Marina while we were 1/3 into our second lap out to Black Rock.

On the last length back to the marina I pretended that I was wearing my massive hand paddles.  I felt like I was getting a stronger pull and was able to make pretty decent time back to the marina.

Total distance: 4.3 miles
Time: 1:01:17



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