Sunday, Feb 6, 2011

I'm just waking up at 10 AM over and I am sore. My low back is sore from leaning over my longboard scraping off the wax. Lesson learned: next time get a couple of wood rests and lay the board higher up on the work benches-or whatever the heck they are called. Oh, I know, saw horses they used to call them. So next time buy two saw horses to lean the board on when I clean it. Isn't life interesting?
I'll hit the beach later this afternoon.
I got in the water in the afternoon for a swim with fins around the pier. Pretty uneventful swim. Afterward, I jogged back up to my car. Then I got the idea to go back in the water without the fins and wet suit to see how I would fare. Well, there IS a big difference with wet suit and without the suit. I swam through the sets of smallish waves (2-3 feet) and tried to swim north parallel to the beach. I swam for about ten minutes and started to feel it so I stopped. I was farther south than where I started. The current was pulling south and without fins I was not going anywhere, except in reverse. Getting out I was a little dizzy and was falling down in the waves-probably a bit too cold. Once again, I need to learn more about currents, tides, etc.

Saturday, February 5th

I woke up and decided that I would break out my old longboard and clean it up to use it on base at that Del Mar Jetty break. My surfing ability is lousy; I can stand up in about a two-foot wave on the longboard, but it gives me a big thrill. My board is 9 feet, 2 inch, I think. I got out my wife's hair dryer and a new paint stirrer. I layed the board on the grass in the backyard and heated the layers of old, nasty, dirty wax and then easily scraped it off with the wooden paint stirrer.
I didn't go surf today; instead I went to the Oceanside Pier and swam around that. The tide was very low so the swim wasn't that far. The water was cold. I had purchased an extra swim cap and I wore two swim caps today. It was a great idea. I was warmer and my ears were covered much better, which, as an ocean swimmer knows, is important.
I swam the crawl, even though my neck was hurting, because it just makes me feel good!
I've been trying to improve my arm stroke-the reach, catch, pull, and recover-when I crawl out there. I try to keep my elbows at a ninety-degree angle when I arm-pull. Now that has caused my right shoulder ball-and-socket joint to give me problems. Maybe I just need to arm stroke like I used to-that was painless.
Oceanside Pier was beautiful. The water out there was flat and great for swimming. I jogged back to my car and my butt was kicked jogging through some fifty yards or so of soft sand at the end. That soft sand is a killer-that's why a trainee runs all over the soft sand up and down the beach at the Navy's Special Warfare Training Center. Heck, they even have a bulldozer that piles up the soft sand so the trainees can run up and down the mounds. Now, that's a leg and lung killer.

Friday, Feb 4th Camp Pendleton

Today after work, we went to the same spot on base. I wanted to touch the bottom as we went out to get used to the feeling as we went out from the beach to the deeper water. I was much more relaxed doing it this way and could report at intervals: about 10 feet deep, about 15 feet deep, about 20 feet deep, maybe twenty-five feet deep, and that's about as far as I tried for the day.
We swam out straight from the beach on our backs with fins because of my neck. The water was smoother than yesterday. Then we kicked across south to the rock jetty, the Del Mar Jetty, or DMJ as surfers call it. I realized that, while not a great surfing break by far, the DMJ is a great surf spot for beginners. There's nobody there, or only a few surfers there, so one can line up for the real waves to learn to surf without the stress of the lineup with the experienced surfers.
I decided that I would try to surf it soon. The wave is a left, and it was 2-4 feet, I'd say.

Thursday, Feb 3th, 2011 On-Base Camp Pendleton

We went to 21 Area, the Del Mar Beach Area, on Camp Pendleton, to get our chill on after work. The water was cold-maybe 57 or so. I didn't check, but it felt chilly. The water was rather choppy with some powerful, surgy waves. My neck has been hurting so the plan was to kick on our backs out a few hundred yards and come back in. No neck pain that way for me. I tried to reach the bottom while we were out there but I couldn't make it. I wear the Churchill Slasher fins and still couldn't reach the bottom. I gues that it was maybe thirty feet or so and I haven't tried that in years.
We could see the Navy LCAC boat about a mile or so north leaving the beach and heading out. That's the boat with the jet engines on it that make it float on the surface of the water. That LCAC can MOVE!
Hardly anybody on the beach. Very nice.

Sunday Swim Oceanside 2-3 Foot Chop

The water was very choppy today; it was like swimming in a washing machine. I wore my fins, without them I wouldn't have gone very far. I had to kick forcefully with my breaths just to get my head above the chop to inhale. To make up for yesterday, I felt that I needed to do a longer swim.

The water was about 56-57 and rough. Very few surfers out-no shape at all to surf actually. I made it to the pier and decided to swim around the end of it. It turned out to be quite a challenging swim, even getting in after rounding the pier kept me kicking hard and putting a good pull into my stroke.

I jogged back up the beach to the car and the wind had really whipped up. There were several windsurfers getting their gear ready. Or maybe they're kitesurfers, who knows? I have some pictures to attach here. A good swim.