Our swim

I found a picture, from last year, of our destination islet. As you can see, it’s not quite a Bum’s Rest, but not really big enough for a picnic.

Our big swim

The granddaughter and I had a good swim on our vacation, a  900-metre round trip to a tiny island. The surface water was warm and the deeper water was refreshing.

I mapped our route to get the distance. We figured about 450 metres, and it seems we were right!

Our swim at Eagle Lake Narrows

Unlike our swim a couple of years ago to the palm-tree island in Nottawasaga Bay, this one was not cold enough for wetsuits. Here’s the map for our 2009 swim in Blue Mountain, which was about 550 m each way and not quite straight.

Swim meet

Today we drove to Hamilton and watched a high-school swim meet. It’s the last one before the Golden Horseshoe regionals.

Drowning is a quiet affair

This explains why life guards ask me if I’m OK when I’m floating around the pool, contemplating the whichness of why: “Drowning doesn’t look like drowning.”

Drowning is not the violent, splashing, call for help that most people expect…. Drowning is almost always a deceptively quiet event. The waving, splashing, and yelling that dramatic conditioning (television) prepares us to look for, is rarely seen in real life.

The Instinctive Drowning Response – so named by Francesco A. Pia, Ph.D.,  is what people do to avoid actual or perceived suffocation in the water. People can’t cry out or reach for a life-ring: they’re fully occupied pushing their hands down in the water and breathing. They don’t even kick. And you have only tens of seconds to get to them.

Swimming!

A bunch of us had a swimming lesson last Sunday, and it was fun.

The "airport" drill, passing over each other at different levels

Nottawasaga Bay

Nottawasaga-Bay-50, originally uploaded by monado.

One of our entertainments on holiday was to spend a few hours at the beach of Nottawasaga Bay at Blue Mountains. The older and younger generations did a long swim.

We chose as our target “palm-tree island,” where someone has built a couple of artificial palm trees.

The middle generation created an Om symbol out of sand.

Here is a satellite picture: we swam out, from the beach to the right of the pier, to the island and back.

"Palm Tree" island

We left before heat and humidity built up to destructive storms, including a downburst of wind.