Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Monday, September 21, 2009

Tomales Bay Redux

It was a very well organized low-key event by El Sharko.

No fee. No course. No timing. No awards. No sharks or jelly fishes were spotted either.

Good food. Excellent veggie salads in addition to bbq-ed fresh caught oysters. Gretch said that otherwise well behaved swimmers were cutting lines and behaving badly to get to oysters.
Good piloting. Funny poetry reading by members of Wet Poets Society after lunch.

Water was crystal clear, like a lake, and very warm. i saw teeny weeny inch long fishes zipping around in the water. So much for a swim touted as "dangerous swim with white sharks"! During the swim, sunlight refracting underwater was very pretty, the beauty of it was mesmerizing. A ton of green moss lined the sea bed near shore. i thought of Flipper while wading through it :-)

Vincent, a fellow Dolphin, entrusted his buddy Whimpy to me during the swim. It was Whimpy's second open water swim ever. He was quite chatty and stretched distance swam by quite a bit. We swam out to a shark fin buoy which was probably 250 yards away, and Whimpy thought we swam a mile! Then, he decided to do backstroke. When i turned around to see where he was, he was going in circles doing backstroke, like a dog chasing his own tail. We finally made it back to the shore after i insisted he switch back to freestyle. Whimpy was disappointed that i did not let him swim farther, and complained i ate too much while waiting for Vincent and other swimmers to return.

i had a wonderful trip, huge thanks to Gretch for keeping me company! i could not have made it out to the remote location by myself.

Pictures.