Swimmingly

I drew this in July, six months before the 24-hour swim. That's how excited I was to return.

Swim No. 1, 9:58 a.m.: This must be how a musician feels, saving a lost guitar, tentatively retaking a rhythm, attempting a certain choreography of fingers, feeling rough but right.

Hitting the green water, salt once again in my mouth, tripped memory. First, around the wooden pier with its hinged ramp bobbing like a great hungry jaw. Ah, the buoys next, tall and cylindrical, in permanent cant, a row of crooked teeth stretching to the black grove of eucalyptus beyond. Somewhere at the end of the buoys is a box-shaped one with a flag on top and a thermometer tethered to it, a sort of Aquatic Park mascot. I can't see it from here; I just have to swim and find it, like last year. Here we go.

Brad Schindler has gone first, two laps. Then Cathy Harrington. For how long? I can't remember. So how long until I swim next? Two hours? Is that right? That can't be right. Ah, forget it! Just swim, fool!

I'm going three laps this time, three laps each time if I can. I don't think I could have done that last year. But that was last year.

Such a difference a year makes! Since meeting him at the first 24-Hour Relay Swim last January, Craig Lenning of Colorado became the first person in 47 years to swim from the Farralon Islands to the mainland, a 25.7-mile trek in treacherous waters west of the Golden Gate.

Since meeting him last year, Simon Dominguez, an Australian by way of the Bay Area, swam the English Channel.

Since last year, my relay teammate Lisa Amorao has racked up the miles and night swims and tricky waters, and bounded into this relay with abandon, night swims and all, recording it all on her GoPro™® camera for another much anticipated video of events. So did Cathy Harrington, who swam and swam and swam over the last year, and has swum up at our Lake Natoma several times, an opportunity lost if not for having met at the relay.

David Walsh and I have extended the miles at our lake since last year, and David shed his wetsuit even through the coldest water. I talked him into another relay. We were ready to do more this year.

An alternative design, meant to evoke the ever-moving, clock-spanning, rollicking nature of the relay.
As with the top illustration, you can "read" the illustration from any angle.

Marathon swimmer Suzie Dods created the relay, inspired by a long-ago event in Quebec called 24 Heures La Tuque. That event comprised two-person teams trading off 'round the clock for a full day. Suzie's version features teams of different number, from four to 10 this year, who divvied the swims in different ways.

Of the 40 or so swimmers this year, at least a fourth know each other from the facebook™® page, Did you swim today?

Swimmers ranged from common schlubs like me to world-class marathoners. Our team boasted Brad Schindler, who has crossed Tahoe and swum an ice mile, which is a mile in water 41 Fahrenheit or lower.

"Fast" Karl Kingery, who used to swim with me at Lake Natoma before finding work in Colorado, joined the team of four that, besides Lenning, comprised:

• Elaine Howley of Boston, last summer the first person to swim the 32-mile length of Lake Pend Oreille in Idaho and
• Sarah Thomas from outside Denver, who within six months in 2013 swam two lengths of Vermont's Lake Memphremagog (50 miles) and was the first "skins" swimmer to double-cross Lake Tahoe (44 miles)

They each swam in three two-hour blocks — just strolls around the block for them, I'm sure — compared to our team, the Fogheads, which swam five or six rounds each.

We kidded Karl that he was out of his team's league, but know he'll soon be amassing his own massive swims. Besides, we kid in admiration: Karl was swimming with torn ligaments in one knee, from a skiing accident the week before.

Swim No. 2, 2:26 p.m.: The good news — thanks to teammates Paul Springer and Lorena Sims, who know their way around cyberspace, the swimmers who make up the Fogheads know when they'll be in the water each round of the 24-hour relay, and for how long, and what they'll be doing at any other part of the relay. 

Lorena and Paul orchestrated a spreadsheet they could change on the fly from their handhelds, and it only took one round of us swimming for them to develop an accurate prediction of our endeavor.

The bad news — the data show I've got K.P. duty at 3, so I have to hold my second swim to one lap. I resolve to enjoy it, stretching out my arms for an extra glide, paying attention to how my hands enter the water and hold straight and wide. Someone over at Ghirardelli Square, the old block-long brick factory-turned-mall above Aquatic Park, has the gall to bake cookies and send their warm sugary splendor out over the water.

I can make a straight line out to the bay opening of Aquatic Park, with no real tide to fight, and Swim No. 2 ends too soon. Nothing really needs doing in the kitchen, it turns out, as everyone gets quiet in the rhythm of the long event, saving energy. I long to be back in the water.

I was trying to serve two masters with this one version: Something that will fit on a cap, and a taste of
the counterculture/spiritual still alive and well in San Francisco. Can you not tell how really, really
excited I was to come back for this event?

The inaugural 24-hour relay last year coincided with California's only real winter storm, a rollicking deluge that barely let up, and churned Aquatic Park's water so hard that swimmers were restricted to swimming along the beach through the night.

This year's relay followed days of unseemly warm false-spring days, par for the four-year drought, until the weekend promised: Rain! Some joked we should market the relay as a rainmaker. Swimmer Mark Spratt of Indianapolis took personal blame, or credit, depending.

Just something completely different. I wanted to do something inspired by
the Ohlone people who first inhabited what became San Francisco, but couldn't
find much beyond the spare geometry of basket art;besides, I feel
uncomfortable co-opting native art. This reminds me more of some the
Works Project Administration murals around The City.

Except for Sunday morning at the relay's end, though, the rains never really came. The Golden Gate Bridge gave its glory day and night, the Marin County end perpetually swallowed in fog or lavender-hued rain clouds. We never saw that bridge last year.

Stars competed for attention this year with lights of The City during the night swims.

As evening fell a cruise ship, the Star Princess, sailed out under the black span of the Golden Gate Bridge. The ship looked like a skyscraper laid on its side, lit top to bottom as if on the night before taxes are due.

Swim No. 3, 6:47 p.m.: First dark swim. Teammate Kelley Prebil has kayaked out to the buoys and attached blinking lights to help swimmers see the route better. They look like cartoon time bombs, as if Kelley has mined the swim route. But when the buoys bob wildly, the blinks frequently disappear, and navigation requires finding the buoys' silhouettes against the dazzling lights afar. I zig and zag, stopping too often to guess where the buoys might be, hoping I don't hit one.

The famous flag buoy at the end of the row has been moved, I'm convinced of it, as darkness begins its trickery.

I manage to crash into the same swimmer I collided with last year, just in a different part of the course.

Cigarette smoke gives way to marijuana smoke, wafting from somewhere in the blackness of the eucalyptus groves. The ocean, flowing hard into the Bay now, gives me fits. Try as I may to reach the gap between the city pier and the breakwater, I end up far to the east each lap, which resembles not a triangle but a loop like one of those breast cancer ribbons.

The kayaker at the first buoy compliments me on my butt buoy, a bright orange inflatable tow device swimmers use for safety. Borrowing a British swimmer's idea, I put my backpacking headlamp inside, turning the buoy into a jack-o-lantern and me into a low-altitude firefly. It works better than a blinking light, making me visible from a great distance.

So when the unseen beasties under water get me, the relay organizers will know where I was last seen.

The water is 55 to 57 Fahrenheit, far warmer than Lake Natoma right now and four to six degrees warmer than last year in the Bay. It's discomfiting, how comfortable it is.

San Francisco blazes relentlessly into the water, setting fire to the bubbles of my wake.

One late variation after it turned out my designs would
overwhelm a cap.

When all was new last year, I fretted unreasonably that I had to stay awake to make sure our team was swimming when it should and carrying out its volunteer duties.

Even after I realized that, of course, they're adults and would do more than their share to ensure the event goes on, I resisted sleep. The early morning hours were almost intolerable as a result, time having stopped, enthusiasm having drained away.

This year I played it smart, knowing not to worry about the Fogheads. After each swim I wound my way through a utility passageway of the Dolphin Club, around some sawhorses, to the hobbit door that opened to a handball court that served as sleeping quarters, and napped for an hour.

The relay's off hours passed in comfort of a hardwood floor and the joy of chocolate muffins on waking up.

Swim No. 4, 11:16 p.m.: San Francisco refuses to sleep. The Fontana Towers, twin condominiums above Aquatic Park that Alcatraz swimmers use to sight themselves back to shore, is still lit top to bottom.

Pot smokers refuse to quit.

The tide having slacked again, I can make my way to the opening of the park a bit straighter. The second leg of the triangle route, out to the opening, feels the longest, only ghostly sailboats to guide by, and a mesmerizing collection of lights out in the Bay, devilish as sirens, by which to sight. The buoy out at the opening is always farther away than I think.

The homeward leg feels downhill by comparison, over before I realize. I slide stern to stem past the Balclutha, a three-masted 19th Century sailing ship moored in the park, and feel like I'm sneaking alongside to do battle, cannons ready.

Next I must take care to swim wide of the mooring chains of Eppleton Hall, an early 20th Century side-wheel tugboat, its prow jutting out into the park. A quick adjustment and I angle back to the Dolphin Club dock.

Back at the dock on the first lap, I see Jim Bock, my friend from fourth grade, working the midnight-to-3 shift checking on swimmers as they pass. Jim is dressed in a banana costume. From the water I break into the opening lines of "Greenland Whale Fisheries," a ballad I heard Jim sing from the dock last year. I learned the song since and waited for this moment. We sing together. I flub a key line. My throat is scratchy and I'm a little loopy. All, though, is well.

My mind refuses to let me be, imagining beasts crisscrossing below, to nudge and nip. My hand hits a stick in the water. I think it's a stick. I quicken a bit and wait for the stick to chase me. Nothing.

When Lisa Amorao shot this Saturday afternoon, it'd be another three hours
and 20 minutes before I swam again, when night fell. I watched from
comfy heights as David Walsh got out ("went dry" in the relay lingo)
and Paul Springer got wet. 

Waves from a growing tide thumped against the pilings below, waking me from my cocoon on the handball court floor. Nap No. 3 done.

The relay had gone into hibernation, sleeping-bagged bodies on the main floor of the Dolphin Club, in among the varnished wooden rowboats, up on the little stage, even up in the locker room. It's a stark difference from 9 a.m. when everyone cheered the first round of swimmers.

In short time the event became a matter of quiet survival, hanging out on the dock in view of The City, or quietly talking around the tables inside, until it was time for each to swim again.

No matter the hour, swimmers could count on a slice of pizza and a cornucopia of grub coming out of the kitchen.

Swim No. 5, 4:18 a.m.: My goal is not to be the last swimmer at the end of the relay. It was a treat last year to be last on my team, to swim up to a crowd on the docks, cheering all the last swimmers as much in happiness for having taken part as in relief that we all had made it through.

This time I wanted to be done and have my sopping gear all packed, ready to cheer someone else from the deck instead. Using Paul and Lorena's projections, I resolved that if I did four laps, or three miles, I would be almost certain to be finished with my swim contribution by about 4:30. Cathy Harrington would be our last swimmer when 9 a.m. came 'round.

San Francisco is finally dark except for the Ghirardelli sign and the bulbs that outline the big old factory. The bubbles below me glow green on their own.

The lights on the buoys blink sleepily, weakly, barely now.

I'm cold. How can I be cold!? I have yet to complete the first lap and my head feels icy. I really, really need to hang out here for four laps, so I breathe slowly, stroke deliberately, trying to blank out the cold.

On the first lap out to the watery opening of Aquatic Park, a buoy swims by. It's round and dark, bobbing and bearded with vegetation, untagged by a blinking light. Where did that come from? How did I end up swimming by it? Great, now I've gotta watch for it each of the next laps, hoping I don't bash into it.

People are walking along the concourse on the edge of Aquatic Park this time of the morning. Someone is still smoking marijuana. In a lit doorway of the Maritime Museum, a man in a sleeping bag is screaming into the night.

Green flashes suddenly explode in my head. I am dreaming, or one of the buoys is following me, or a boat is sailing out of the park. No, it's a swimmer, blinking light on his goggle strap, going incredibly fast past me.

On my last turn around the buoy at the opening, I thank the kayaker and see, above her, dark figures standing on the pier, watching, like sentries on a battlement. At 4:20 a.m.

The cool heat of eucalyptus oil settles on the water, trumping all, calming me. The fourth and final lap is warm and normal. I conquer the Balclutha in one more sneak attack and make for shore as stealthily as an orange firefly can swim. A wave spits me out on the sand.

All told, I swam about 10 1/2 miles. The foursome that included "Fast" Karl each swam half again more.

The surest sign of the relay's success is that we want to do it again. Though the sides of my tongue are ground raw and can't taste — though a "greater than-"shaped welt of red has tattooed my neck — I want to do this again.

All the art I'd done wouldn't work on a cap, so I pulled this detail from
my first illustration of the famous flag buoy, and tweaked it for a new purpose.

Flow and ebb

So now Doug's gone. Maybe just for a year. Coming back briefly in the fall. We'll see.

Lake Natoma got emptier.

We'd been swimming together several times a week for 2 1/2 years. Doug's leaving for his native New England to help with his grandchildren.

"Fast" Karl left earlier this month. Though he had only been swimming with us for seven months, he was dedicated, and his dedication inspired even if his speed deflated.

On his last swam before heading for work somewhere in the Rockies, he laced twice the length of Lake Natoma, about 10 miles. Notre Dame swimmer; whatcha gonna do?

Karl's a mountain man who found California's ways strange. I don't think he's coming back. Except, of course, to swim the length of Tahoe, 21 miles, later this summer.

What did good ol' Heraclitus say? "You could not step twice in the same river."

To which I add, "Not even with the same toes."

Change: The only constant.

Toes come and toes go.

Sarah had already joined our core group of rogues before Doug and Karl took flight. It wasn't until she said it out loud that we finally acted on our shoulda-coulda-wouldas, swimming longer distances regularly. Once a week for the last month, Sarah has swum the length of the lake, and small various and sundry of us have joined in.

The length used to be a daunting once-a-year enterprise, borne out on the Fourth of July. Now it's oh-so-slowly becoming a routine change in routine.

David's the iron man now, literally and figuratively. We've been swimming together longer than I have with Doug; in fact, I think it was a winter morning on upper Natoma when Doug first joined David and me.

David is the exception to every rule: An Iron Man©® triathlete who eschews triathleticism … a wetsuit wearer who defies conventional wisdom and swims just about as fast without one, when we can get him to … the polite smiling contrarian who I guess really meant it when he said he wouldn't pay the measly $10 annual fee to our meetup.com group.

That's how we all met, though, through the Sacramento Swimming Enthusiasts page on the meetup.com site.

But we've become an ad hoc splinter cell, using text messages to gather, rather than the site. We're the few who like upper Natoma chiefly, where the water spilling directly from the bottom of Folsom Lake is always a little colder. It's much less crowded, free of beachgoers. Few rowing crews make it all the way up here, most staying on the 2,000-meter race course at the lower lake.

We're the few who swim Natoma year-round. Most swimmers on the meetup.com site prefer the lower lake during the evenings (too warm, too crowded) or what's left of dwindling Folsom Lake, where gather the three forks of the American River that release into Natoma.

I've met so many meetup people on my scheduled swims, whom I see once or twice more and then never again. They either decide against open water swimming, or figure out the group's not competitive and I certainly am not going to give them much of a race, or join the Folsom/lower Natoma/evening swim crowd.

It got me thinking of those who stuck out the cold water with me in the four years I've swum Natoma:

• Jim, whom I met at one of my first meetup.com swims, a Polar Bear event in mid-February. I forgot my goggles, my wife urged me to ask Jim for an extra pair, and we struck up an immediate friendship. Jim's the one who showed me not to take the open water so seriously, to revel in the realization that few people enjoy this or want to.
  
  When I first hit the winter choppy water of Folsom Lake I wanted to quit for good, and Jim's the one who told me to swim 10 stroke at a time, get my bearings, swim 10 more, and keep going — to let time get me used to the new adventure. I think of his help every time I swim through heavy water with confidence and a semblance of ease.
  
  We swam together most of two years, and many times he brought fast Kathy, a champion open water swimmer, which was a commitment since they had to come from two counties over. I swam in several open-water races with them that first year.
  
  Jim got a different job and different obligations, and Kathy's life changed around. I haven't seen them in a long while, nor have I raced since then.

• Brad, whom I still see, though he's more rogue than us, preferring mostly to swim on his own, and swim great distances. I first saw Brad at one of the Polar Bear swims four years ago. All of us huddled at the shore in our wetsuits, tentative penguins, when suddenly came Brad in just swim briefs and goggles, diving in and swimming away into the foggy chill while we stood and stared.
  
  Until that moment, I thought it may have been illegal to swim without a wetsuit. But I soon resolved to swim that way since I hated wearing my neoprene, and weaned myself out of it, shedding it for five, then 10, then 15 minutes in the cold water after each group swim.
  
  I still swim with Brad on occasion. It feels weird to drive home after my swim knowing he'll still be in for a couple of hours more. He's swum the length of Tahoe, and a mile in freezing water; whatcha gonna do?
• Stacy and I were the first long-term rogues, swimming off the meetup.com grid and venturing northeast to upper Natoma. It was exotic water when we first tried it out. Few boats and of course no swimmers, the only noise coming from the aggressive domestic geese that had been released to the wild to cadge visitors for food.
  
  Every swim was discovery and serendipity as we learned where the water was deep and where shallow. We learned to endure the cold water for longer and longer distances, and swim against current. We established routes under the new bridge, and downstream to Texas Hill, a little island where once Texas miners had come to dry-dig for gold.
  
  We swam many times when Stacy wasn't running or doing cross-fit workouts. We even swam the length of the lake one Fourth of July, me with my inflatable butt buoy and him with a modified boogie board he called his party boat, sailing behind him. It had a flag and a foam noodle arch and a stretch net to hold his food to the board. Even with a long fin below, the party boat capsized in the wind.
  
  Stacy once left for Tennessee to run a 30-mile race with his sister, and never really came back to swimming.
• Ryan made the fastest ever transition from heavily wetsuited swimmer to skin swimmer — 10 minutes. He's a concert organist from Canada who showed up one day in a thick wetsuit with some sort of shirt over it, gloves, booties and what looked like deep-sea diver's cowl.
  
  You don't need all of that, we said. Or, really, any of it.
  
  OK, said Ryan and in one swim he became a skin swimmer. He was just about the most joyful open water enthusiast, but he disappeared after a couple of months.
• Susie, her hair and smile dazzlingly white, also loved to whoop and holler and express on our behalf of the wonder of open water swimming. I think she sticks to the evenings and lower Natoma swims these days.
• Helen, whom I met in the early days. I don't think she swims much anymore, but she probably doesn't have time, seeing how she now runs races of 50 and 100 miles regularly.
• Myron, who was running the meetup.com group and cheerfully organizing Polar Bear swims and other activities, but who moved on to other things.
• Patti, who runs the group now and puts a lot of energy into keeping the group going.
• Special guest stars: Dave came all the way from Cork, Ireland, to swim in Upper Natoma last summer. Suzie, an ultra-marathon swimmer who launched the 24-hour relay swim in San Francisco Bay, last summer brought another marathon swimmer, Roxie, to explore upper Natoma. They laughed as they swim in too-shallow water past the first bridge and had to stand up on the slippery rocks.
  
  Lisa made a great arc through the northwest last week and stopped by my lake on her way home to the Bay Area. Lisa and David and Karl and I swam as part of team at Suzie's 24-hour relay swim in February.
  
  Nejib came from Tunisia swam lower Natoma last year, cold but not cold enough swim for peace in the Bering Strait. It didn't matter: He swim four kilometers in 39-degree water along the International Date Line. for his eventual 4-kilometer swim in the frigid water of the Bering Strait, a swim for peace.
• Kate, completing her residency at a nearby hospital, swam almost every day with us for five weeks. We'd met at the 24-hour relay swim. She pushed our distance a bit to get her ready for a swim across Tahoe later this summer.
  
  Late in our swims, she said she didn't like swimming under the bridges. Lisa said she didn't like the shadow the bridge cast through the green water.
  
  We've come to know the scary plants are just plants, the shallows just riprap, the current just something to relax in and pierce through for half again as many strokes, the chop just a fun reminder of being present in the water.
  
• I'm forgetting or misplacing some names, I know. The various Dans, Steve, Sean, all fast. Haven't seen them in a long time.

We've come to a happy peace about our relative speeds. If anything, I give the other swimmers a harder time for being fast than they do for my sloth. We collect at the shore, no matter our arrival times, and leave to drink coffee at the "adjective" Starbucks™® (so named because we sit outside next to the drive-thru and count how many descriptors drivers use to order their drinks), or good beer, or the occasional meal. Usually a going-away meal.

The only thing I could beat Doug at is cold-water endurance. Fortified with bioprene, I'd keep going while he'd turn back, and if we'd planned it right I'd leave my Thermos® of boiling water in his car so he could fight the intense shivers with a cup of cocoa. After winter swims it takes us a good 40 minutes of jumping up and down in the parking lot and sloshing hot cocoa all over ourselves before we're even ready to drive for hot coffee.

These days, though, with even the coldest water hanging in the low 60s Fahrenheit, Doug would swim well past our turnaround point and double back to meet me when I hit that point. The Thermos™ of hot water is more reflex these days; I pack it but we don't use it.

A go-getter whose actions speak louder than words, Doug has already created a meetup group in his homeland, New England Open Water, and has a swim already planned next weekend in Thoreau's Walden Pond. Twenty "BigWataSwimmas" have already joined.

The core group at upper Natoma has changed and shifted. Though I've been lucky of late to swim with someone else, I'll probably end up swimming by myself again many times. I know I'll swim many, many times with David and Sarah and Patti, and that a new swimmer or two will show and join our group. Most will leave after awhile. A precious few nuts will stick around for long run, and we'll keep on swimming, finding new routes, new swim adventures, different lives to talk about over coffee or beers.

That's the way it's been, the way it will be.

A logo surfaces

This bitty one kept popping up.

Persistent. Prankish — she made as if to disappear for good, even stayed away for the longest time, until suddenly arising in another spot.

Whatcha doing? she asked, or seemed to. Can I play? Can I, huh? Huh?

I tried to ignore her. This was serious business, designing the artwork that would go on the swim caps for the 24-hour Swim Relay in San Francisco's Aquatic Park. I was swimming in it, and director Suzie Dods asked me to come up with something.

Artist at work. Do not disturb. No fun allowed.

I made lists (sometimes the same list redone in different ink and decaying penmanship), checked them thrice. What was legible became pegs on which to hook ideas.

The solution had to say, "This is the first attempt of the craziest damn swim in one of the most beautiful places on the planet!"

It all but bellowed "TIME and SPACE and NOVELTY!" like few others could.

Would I hear it?

Regardless, the solution had to be different, and swimming is a prickly client. Photography may do it justice, but graphic design often fails. Swimming is all slash of arm and splash of water and sliver of rubber-swathed head. Most it it happens out of sight.

Swim logos, as a result, often look like the ransacking of traffic safety signs: Round head, zig-zag line for an arm, two or three wavy lines for water — presto! Logo.

The swimmers in these logos by necessity display bad form — for freestyle anyway, they're almost vertical — to show the head and sometimes facial expression or features.


This event called for something different. Now, to work.

First, time: That's the marrow of this shindig, a 24-hour grind, day passing into night and back again, the feel of it. How to convey it? The movement of sun and moon, an ever-widening whirl? A watch? A Dali watch? Literally the words "24 hours?"


All of the ideas sketched, considered, set aside.

Now, place: A marvel to us outsiders, San Francisco is just as much a jewel to its swimming locals. The City must glimmer in the art.

Next, novelty: Since Herb Caen, late great columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, called The City Baghdad by the Bay, I tried that for a bit, dipping into visual history and mythology to make visual links to the sophisticated city The City is.

Leander, swimming across the Hellespont each night to be with his lover Hero. Assyrian bas-relief, swimmers prostrate and flailing, fully clothed and behatted, as if seen from under water.

So began a spate of sketchy sketches, suggesting the rough hew of the ancient artist. Swimmers formed a circle, suggesting the passage of time and completion of laps.

Nah, I decided, too esoteric. Too far away from crazy damn swim, the unforgettable place.

I was going around in my own circles on this, getting nowhere.

Then look who showed up! The wee sea lion, wanting to play. Up she rose, I realize, from my subconscious.

The sea lion suddenly answered everything for me, time and place and novelty. It's wild, like this swim, and welcoming (not that I'd like to cross a cross one). Sea lions dwell on San Francisco's piers and roam Aquatic Park.

I saw one from afar on my swim of the park; one day I hope to see a sea lion pop up close from the green murk of the Bay, as other swimmers tell, watch it watch me, then watch it swim away.

She became the hook for this idea. I built The City around her, the water and waves and tides.

Ultimately she had come to play with the swimmers.

The water in the final art played multiple roles, surface and volume and sky and night.

I managed to fit in Coit Tower, the TransAmerica Building (a useful landmark for swimming the homeward route that weekend), the Golden Gate Bridge, the sailing ship Balclutha tied up next to Aquatic Park — even the flag buoy known well to swimmers there.

Circles became slash and splash and sun and moon. Swirls suggested a timepiece, a stopwatch, the endlessly circling crazy damned swim — I dunno, I might have enshrined a cliché on that last bit.

On the cap, the sweeping shape is meant from a distance to suggest  horns or Hermes' wings.

At least the sea lion seems bemused.

Addendum: I reacquainted with an elementary school classmate, Jim Bock, at the 24-hour swim. He's a lively member of the South End Rowing Club now, living lifelong dreams in San Francisco. When I introduced myself by social media, he sent me a copy of a chart he had made way back in 5th grade, written on pulp lined paper. It lists the class' and teacher's birthdays. Each student and teacher recorded his/her data, and Jim somehow kept that paper all this time. He and I just happened to have signed on subsequent lines:

We were adamant about adding fractions to our ages. Even then, I notice, I was playing with a logo for my name.

Come again another day

Don't be fooled by the ferocious sea: It was rocky, but this is from a low angle on a wave just
about to crest on the beach, between the South End and Dolphin Clubs' docks. I'm about
to hand off the next leg to Lisa Amorao, who shot the day-long adventure with a GoPro™©
camera mounted over her swim cap. The masts of the Balclutha, a 19th-Century
cargo ship, loom in the back.

By noon the day after, the floor finally stopped heaving.

Unseen forces finally stopped pitching me forward whenever I stood still, and stopped nudging me off my gait down the hallway.

Now I miss that gentle vertigo, an unexpected souvenir of what I'd just done: Joined a team that swam 24 hours straight in San Francisco Bay.

See exactly what we did here, a rollicking video by teammate Lisa Amorao.

The 24-hour Swim Relay was Suzie Dods' crazy idea back in November. At least, that's when she unleashed the proposition upon the swimming world. Maybe it brewed in her brain long before.

Looking back, I probably had no business taking part. The 54 swimmers who flocked to Aquatic Park in the Bay last weekend, to the quirky, cozy confines of the South End Rowing Club and Dolphin Club's complex at the edge of the water, are channel swimmers (English, Catalina, you name it) and big-lake crossers. They swim great distances, fast. They direct and organize distance swims of their own. Google their names and their epic exploits top your list of choices — and Suzie is a channel and distance swimmer extraordinaire. She also guided me on my first Bay swim three years ago.

It was an honor to design the cap logo, which I filled with landmarks and the wishful
thought of safely encountering a sea lion. Several asked what the shape on the lower
left is. It depends on your attitude: It's a watch marking time, or a circling drain.

Many of these swimmers who took part dart through the green silty salty waters of the Bay regularly, know the tides, know the dangers.

I swim cold and flat Lake Natoma, have swum its length on three separate summer occasions, and swim Aquatic Park maybe once a year. So end my credentials.

But I brought them, some chutzpah I didn't know I had, and three friends — Lorena, David and Karl — with whom I swim at Lake Natoma, to join the team.

Through a Lake Natoma swimming connection, we gained two San Francisco Bay veterans from the south Bay Area — Lisa and Fred — and during the swim were able to add another veteran, aptly named El Sharko, to the team.

(Two Natoma stalwarts, Doug and Patti, got sick right before and couldn't come. All the more reason to do this again next year.)

The name is everything! Option 2 was
Team Curglaff. Lisa Amorao photo

We became the Fogheads, as new Bay Area friend and teammate Fred dubbed us.

Chutzpah took a hit the night before the swim, when Suzie told the gathered swimmers, "Watch yourself: The first swim will feel great, the second and third will feel fine. It's the fifth, sixth and seventh swim, swimming in the dark, when you will really feel it."

Fifth, sixth and seventh swims? I hadn't really considered them. What had I done? I'm gonna have trouble, and now I've talked several people into getting into trouble. The Bay's 51-degree water wouldn't bother me; we swim in colder water near Sacramento. But swim after swim — seven in all for me over 24 hours, most of them 1.5 miles each — was not something I had necessarily trained for.

I'm used to swimming our Lake Natoma once a day, 1.3 miles or so at a go, dancing in the parking lot to exorcise the shivers, swilling hot cocoa until warm again, and driving home. That being that.

This event was so. Much. More.
 
Too late to doubt. Time to strap up. In all, I swam 10 miles — the Fogheads must have logged in at least 60 miles together. In the end, we smiled; throughout, we smiled. This was a strange and wonderful journey we were taking together, that we were somehow accomplishing. It was hard not to smile.

Each swimmer was to complete at least one 3/4-mile clockwise triangle of Aquatic Park lap at a go — along a buoy line parallel to shore to a floating "wedding cake" buoy with a flag atop and a thermometer dangling by a tether into the water, near the Maritime Museum; then through a collection of moored sailboats out to the end of two jetties marking the bay entrance to the park; then back to the clubhouse past the historic ships Balclutha and Thayer tied up at the Hyde Street Pier.

The next swimmers had to be at least shin deep in the water to high-five their incoming teammates, calling out their numbers, before starting their turns.

I usually swam two laps. We heard of at least one swimmer who swam five laps at a go.

Throughout, miracles happened, big and small:

• It rained.
• and rained.
• and rained.
• It never stopped raining (an unconfirmed source alleges that rain stopped between 5 and 6 a.m. but I'm inclined to doubt, having picked one of those hours to sleep in a corner of one of the South End Club's handball courts.)
• We'll take any credit cast our way for putting a dent in the horrible drought. Bright calm unseasonable skies heralded us — until the night before the swim, when winter began making up for lost time. Wind blew throughout, sometimes hard. Swimming became our salvation, our way out of the misery of standing on South End's pier awaiting our turn or checking in on incoming teammates.
  
  The gray boil of sky matched the green roil of water.

• I met a man named Jim Bock. Met a man, I say, because when last we met, he was a little skinny kid with me in fourth grade during our former lives in the little Air Force/diatomaceous-earth mining city of Lompoc, Calif.
  
  In the event's early planning and flurry of facebook®© and email communications, I came across Jim Bock's deceptively unusual name. One and the same? One and the same! And somehow we are reunited 43 years and six hours away from our hometown by an avocation neither of us had imagined back then.
  
  A nice dinner with him as he met Nancy, our son and his girlfriend, was not enough conversation. I was busy swimming, he busy watching over us as a volunteer guardian and South End denizen, so we'll have to make future excuses to continue the talk. Good thing he swims in such a beautiful pool.

• A sea lion did not eat me. More important, a sea lion did not nibble on my kneecaps, which was the irrational fear I carried into each swim. It didn't help that on my second round trip, mid-afternoon Saturday, I saw a sleek black shape surf the green waves out toward the opening of Aquatic Park, where the water begins to get rough.
  
  The shape was so big, it occupied two waves. Just as quickly, it disappeared.
  
  "Did I see what I thought I saw?" I asked the kayaker/guardian angel posted at the opening.
  
  "Yeah," said the angel, "but I saw it chomping on a fish a while back, so it won't be interested in the swimmers."
  
  Night presented a different story. Just when I had let my mind wander in the dark sensory deprivation of the water, my safe cocoon, I felt a smooth shape slide right into me. After a big swallow of water, I stopped to see — another swimmer! Somehow in all this water, each of us lit up like little Christmas trees with our blinking lights and glow bracelets, we crashed.
  
  'Round midnight, lulled by the relief of reaching the dock — it loomed like a torii gate silhouetted in the clubhouse's orange lights — another shape crashed on my head. An aggressive sea lion declaring territory? No, another swimmer doing the butterfly. We smiled in shared relief.

• Virtual swimmers became real. I have before sung the praises of a facebook™© page called "Did you swim today?" (dyst?) The relay provided opportunity to meet some of the swimmers with whom I have shared daily stories of swims from around the world.
  
  There came peripatetic Londoner Jackie Cobell, a member of swimming royalty, a cheery ambassador of open water swimming, known now as much for the extreme cold-water swims she's made as for holding the record for the longest time taken to cross the English Channel, 28 hours, 44 minutes.
  
  I met Mark Spratt of Indiana, a dedicated distance swimmer and dyst? poster, and Amanda Hunt from Australia by way of Chicago. Globetrotter Bruckner Chase, a long-distance swimmer from New Jersey and American Samoa whose livelihood advocates for ocean health and access to the ocean for all people, was there too.

• No one went hungry. No one had a chance: Food filled a big table in the South End dining room, and food never stopped filling the table. At 4:30 a.m., fresh pepperoni pizza suddenly appeared. Imagine how good pepperoni pizza tastes at that hour after a disorienting swim!
  
  The modest entry fee and the generosity of swimming cooks went far — loaves-and-fishes far. Who could not get fuel was a fool.
  
  I drank cup after paper cup of hot water, until the cup could no longer hold its shape and I'd get another. I was driving off cramps as best I could, and took electrolyte tablets swimmer Bruckner Chase had provided right before each swim.
  
  Lisa Amorao's delicious couscous dish tempted me to skip a rotation and scarf it all instead.
 

• The world in the wee hours became magic.
  
  On my second night swim, around 3:30 a.m., all was dark save for lights along the shore and the gargantuan Ghirardelli chocolates sign (gleaming for whom? I wondered). It was much darker than it had been 'round midnight. The water this time fizzed as I entered, so loudly it hissed through the wax ear plugs I wear to ward off cold and keep from getting dizzy.
  
  As my arms drove the fizzing water below me, bright green balls of light rose from them, up and past me. Another Bay veteran swimmer had told me about the bioluminescence given off by tiny creatures — were they making the fizz? — but I was sure he was mistaking it for bubbles that caught the ambient light of The City. Of course he knew better, and I swam along enjoying the gift of sight and sound and sense. Suddenly I became very calm, and in that calm grateful to God for this opportunity, and deep in thought for my wife and son to be able to see some of the event, and my late mom, whose birthday was Saturday.
  
  Heading for the showers and another twitchy cycle of warming up, I heard Jim Bock on the South End dock, clad in a yellow sou'wester as he checked off the swimmers, singing "Greenland Whale Fisheries" into the sideways rain.

• Fogheads came through. "King" Karl helped South End folks move a sailboat and almost missed one of his rotations. David helped warm up a shivering swimmer in the middle of the night. (Normally in a wetsuit as an Ironman™© triathlete, David went several go-rounds without.) Lorena staffed the kitchen when our team's time came, and summoned the grit to go out each time in the foreign waters, emerging strong each time.
  
  Lisa continues to provide inspiration with her photos and video and cheer, resolving to swim in the dark without an escort, as she had first planned. Her Karl (different from our "King" Karl) kayaked even though he was sick.
  
  Fred and "King" Karl worked the walkie-talkies from midnight to the end so that weary swim teams could know their turns from the comfort of the South End dining room.
  
  Modest Chris "El Sharko" Blakeslee, a South End veteran and heralded as one of the oldest swimmers to cross the English Channel, joined our team midway as his team was dispersed, and at every turn did what he could to make our team go.
  
  I'm overjoyed to have been among them.

Most of the Fogheads: David, Fred, Fast Karl, me after the final lap, Lorena and Lisa. In the hullabaloo,
we lost track of Chris "El Sharko" for the photo. Nancy Turner photo.

Suzie Dods had it pegged: The first swims were a fine and relatively easy. "King" Karl, our youngest and fastest, led off the rounds 9 a.m. Saturday. It was the only lap that felt like a race, all of the nine teams seeming to send off their fastest.

By 11:30 p.m., three or four go-rounds into it and 13 1/2 hours later, the clocks seemed to stop, and missed naps were widely regretted. Nine teams had collapsed to seven, smaller teams dispersed to medium-sized teams.

By 11:30 p.m., my underarms and neck chafing and stinging, I began to think this endeavor folly. Teams fell to sleeping when and where they could — sometimes all but the swimmer in the water was asleep, and the next in line had to be found and roused so the teammate could officially leave the water.

Early-morning swims (the fifth and sixth go-rounds) required extra deep breaths, extra smidgens of motivation. Each round required swimmers to know the tides and how they changed. Failing to adjust meant more work at best or swimming into hulking breakwaters and historic moored ships at worst. Even the buoy line near shore was dodgy in the dark — one swimmer returned with a cut forehead from swimming into a buoy.

When I relayed Suzie Dods' announcement that teams who were tired should just all take a break for one or two swimmers' rotations — "It's not a race, we're not keeping books," she said —  "King" Karl (aka Fast Karl) was incredulous.

"That would be cheating!" he said. "You couldn't say you swam 24 hours straight, then." None of the Fogheads even considered it, I gather.

Right before dawn, the clock sped up. Light shone in the darkness. Strength returned.

Karl, Fred and me, never quite dry. Lisa Amorao photo.

By hook or crook or conspiracy, I had the privilege of swimming the last leg of the last go-round for our team. The big triangle route, closed off in the early hours when visibility and conditions worsened, was reopened with sunup. I tried to make two laps as before, but wasn't fast enough to come in on time. I settled for one lap around and one lap along the buoy line next to shore, as leisurely as possible, before heading back in.

Swimmers who had earlier gathered on the dock to cheer Suzie Dods for her last swim (she came in towing a kayak with her teeth) were back on the dock cheering the last swimmers and our shared accomplishment. A wave lifted us onto the beach for the last time.

Many of us weren't even dry before we were wishing aloud to do this impossible thing again next year.

The year in liquid form

My my my, it's a beautiful world
I like swimming in the sea
I like to go out beyond the white breakers
Where a man can still be free — or a woman, if you are one
I like swimming in the sea
— Colin Hay, "Beautiful World"

Flag buoy, Aquatic Park, San Francisco, Dec. 26, 2011. (Note Santa hat
where flag usually is.) Water temperature 49.7º F. Bring it!

What an enabler, my wife! With a cheery heart, a smiling voice and, I'll wager, more prayer than I'm aware of, she causes worlds to open up, and bids me explore.

With trepidation, for example, she resigned to the idea it was OK this year for me to stop looking for a job in the closed and collapsing teaching profession, and to spend my energy rebuilding my illustration business. It's a tenuous — OK, often stupid — choice requiring faith and calm.

So, too, with another new world this year, swimming open water.

At first, Nancy accompanied me for this strange and new pastime, and still serves as ground support for races and big events. Since then, she has accepted the low odds of my getting chomped in two by a shark — or, in fresh water, by whatever aquatic pet some kid released into the lake to become a monster fattened on swimmers' flesh — and does her own thing while I swim.

And swim and swim and swim, five or six days a week, usually in Lake Natoma, where I plan to stay through the new year.

As I might have mentioned before, I never really thought it would be this way. Sure, I set sights on Alcatraz long ago, but never truly believed, not entirely anyway, that I'd do more than see the island through pay binoculars and wonder what might have been.

Still, moving toward that goal I joined a Sacramento-area swim group through meetup.com, which got me to an introductory clinic on swimming San Francisco Bay last November. Suzie Dods, a legendary member of the South End Rowing Club near Fisherman's Wharf, led Myron Dong (our meetup.com group's chief cheerleader and organizer) and me on a short swim around buoys in the water. I decided at the last moment to swim without a wetsuit, and felt great.

Then began the discombobulation.

Not all parties have weighed in, but I'm guessing this is the logo
we crazies will adopt for ensuing adventures …

The meetup group started swimming February weekends in Lake Natoma, in horribly chilly, thought-numbing water. I floundered in frustration, making the mistake of believing all those laps in the pool would steel me for open water. Cold trumps all. Now I warn new open-water swimmers against similar hubris.

I started in a wetsuit because I thought that's the only way a human being could swim winter water.

Two events changed that:

1. I look like a manatee in a wetsuit, except less dainty and curvaceous, and with a DayGlo® dome. Not usually vain, I draw the line at wetsuits, and swim without mostly because I'm stupid and stubborn. Plus I hate the constraint of a neoprene straitjacket on my arms and shoulders.

Wetsuits welcome, of course. We skin
swimmers just like to poke fun.

2. Wearing just a cap, goggles and jammers A guy named Brad Schindler sliced through our wetsuited group and disappeared into the winter mists, returning less than a half-hour later, having swum around an island I had yet to see but have circumnavigated dozens of times since. Before summer ended, Brad became one of only a couple of dozen people to swim the 22-mile length of Lake Tahoe without a wetsuit. Until Brad hit the water that February morning, it never occurred to me that I might be able to swim without a wetsuit. For the next month, for increasing periods after every swim, I splashed about without my wetsuit. After that month, and ever since, I've gone without.

On one of these so-called polar bear swims, I had forgotten my goggles, and was ready to drive home and call it a morning. I solve problems with expeditious caprice, and have to talk myself into taking a moment to think of better alternatives. This time my wife thought of it for me.

"Just go ask someone," she said, through gritted teeth. When I finally did, a guy named Jim Morrill lent me a pair, and I was able to swim.

In quick time I found Jim my opposite in people skills, joining in any and every conversation, meeting new people without a whit of hesitation. Without any evidence that I could swim more than 100 yards, he was excitedly inviting me on swims months and miles from that date. I was willing, but not sure how able.

This is a distant second … first off, we don't confine our
lunacy to Nimbus Flat at the south end of the lake.

On our first rough-water swim of the season in March, I got a third of the way out into a Folsom Lake cove before a wave, and then another, and then another slapped me in the face. I stalled, unable to breathe, then puked water and decided immediately that open water swimming wasn't for me. I had tried, dammit, but it was time to sidestroke back to shore and go home. Then Jim swam back to where I was, asked if I was OK, and said, "Let's just swim 30 strokes, take your time, and see how you feel." I did, and felt better, in control.

"Let's go another 30 strokes," he said, and off we went again. "See?" he said. "No problem, you're doing great." Thirty strokes by 30 strokes, I finished the mile swim. Maybe I'll be back after all, I thought.

I think of that every time I swim, now often by myself in 50-degree water: Here I am, piercing the green, cold peaceful waters, the forests quiet on either side of me, the water a vast sheet of glass, gulls and buzzards lofting overhead, and someone made sure I didn't miss out on this by not letting me quit.

Now Jim is the one with whom I swim most often, when we get the chance. We've swum Aquatic Park, Treasure Island and Keller Beach in the San Francisco Bay.

I swim almost as often with another new partner in lunacy, Stacy Purcell, who's a scientist by heart and profession. Curious what the cold water is doing to us, he has us taking air, water and body temperatures to track trends as the temperatures fall.

I like this, but acknowledge its weirdness. I embrace its weirdness.

This new watery world has brought a lot of new friends. In short time, for example, I'm sure to see, somewhere in the middle of a swim, a body coming toward me at high speed. That'll be Kathy Morlan, one of the fastest open-water swimmers in northern California. She's taking a winter break, having donated a kidney to her son over the Christmas weekend. On top of all her swimming medals, she wins Mom of the Year.

With friends and alone, I have swum from Alcatraz, the nearly three miles of Donner Lake, the nearly five miles of Lake Natoma and long portions thereof, and have swum just for swimming's sake an average of five days a week. We have swum in broiling sun and in sideways rain and in opaque fog. We've swum before dawn and long after the evening sky has reddened and purpled. We have endured rowing crews who can't see us, and ski boats who refuse to. I regret to say I have only gone out beyond the white breakers once, with a group out of Avila Beach. But I plan to change that, and soon. The open water has only made me want more.

Honestly, I enjoy coming out of the water on a December morning and someone on the shore asking, "How can you do that?! How cold is the water, really?"

Next year, I'd like to swim from the Bay Bridge to the Golden Gate Bridge, about six miles with the tide. A couple of events have added 10k swims, and I'd like to be able to complete those. I'll swim Alcatraz again, at least once, and the length of Lake Natoma again. Crossing from Catalina Island to the mainland no longer seems impossible. Not next year, but who knows? Someday.
 

Feelin' groovy …

Just not today. I'm home from a 7 a.m. swim in which the surface temperature was 50 degrees F. The swim is never really so bad; it's the uncomfortable shivering after that I can do without. After another cup of hot water and a shower, I'll retrieve my bravado. My goal of swimming Lake Natoma year 'round remains the foremost challenge.

"I want to get stung by a jellyfish," I told Jim, meaning that if I did get stung, it'd be because I'd been swimming in the ocean long enough for the law of averages eventually to attack me. People, learning I'd been stung, would say, "Well, it figures, considering how often you swim in the ocean."

"Trust me," said Jim, a surfer since childhood, "you don't want to get stung by a jellyfish." But he takes my point.

Happy 2012. Find your adventure.

Alcatraz awaits …

Though I don't look anything close to the überswimmer on the right, I don't look like the dude on the left anymore, either.

Swimming longer distances more frequently, nearing the end of my quest to swim from Alcatraz Island to terra not so firma in San Francisco, has changed my shape to something in between.

Saturday, I reach the goal I set some seven years ago, swimming in Sharkfest 2011, weather willing (a friend planned to swim last year's event, which was canceled as the swimmers were ferried out to the starting line at Alcatraz).

Even four months ago, this seemed like a really stupid idea. I was swimming a bit more than a mile most days, but my open water experiences were exasperating tragi-comedies as I sputtered and thrashed in the cold water, and beat myself up over not being able to transfer my pool practice into the chill of lakes Folsom and Natoma near Sacramento.

But steady open water opportunities with the Sacramento Swim Enthusiasts, and encouragement from my newfound friends in that group, has closed the gap. I swim longer distances and practice against all those open water obstacles (no lines, no walls, no clear water) that can throw pool swimmers.  I decided back in February to figure out how to swim in the cold water without a wetsuit, and now I'm accustomed to it and plan to swim Alcatraz that way, in the tradition of the South End Rowing and Dolphin clubs at Aquatic Park in San Francisco, the finish line.

I'm also swimming for Team Hydro, raising money to find cures and treatments for hydrocephalus, a debilitating and life-threatening disease that affects more than 1 million Americans. I'm helping raise money. Wanna donate? Go to teamhydro.org, or my own Team Hydro Web page just for that purpose.

Alcatraz awaits. I can't wait.