Seymour Butts

If you think the features on your iPhone™®© and Lady Gaga©®™ change at a lightning blur, clearly you have never owned a Butt Buoy®™.

This is my third such inflatable orange creamsicle-colored swim-safety device, and it's remarkably different from the second, which had changed from the first. As with computer software, consumers pay for corrections to product design flaws.

But as the kids used to say, allegedly, it's all good.

Your standard Butt Buoy©™, the facts will bear out, lasts a year and a half. Though to be honest, Butt Buoy™® No. 2 needed babying and $4.75 worth of vinyl patching to keep it floating at the year-and-a-half mark. Barely.

A Butt Buoy™© is a flotation device that open-water swimmers can tow as they work out. Not only does it help boaters see swimmers better and maybe not run over them, it includes a dry bladder for storing valuables during a swim. I didn't deem the dry bladder useful at all, until the day after someone broke into our cars while we swam at our beloved Lake Natoma.

Officially, the Butt Buoy™© goes by more genteel descriptions, such as "tow floats" or "swimming safety devices." Mine, for example, is officially known as the International Swimming Hall of Fame SaferSwimmer™ Float.

I am helping change that. With the fervor I should be spending on adult literacy or world hunger, I am convincing fellow swimmers to call these things "butt buoys.®™" A triathlete who used to swim with us offhandedly coined the off-putting name, noting how the orange blobs drooped over one's butt, like a saggy DayGlo™ diaper, as we waddled to the water, and floated above our butts as we swam. Offended at first, I soon embraced the name — give me a better descriptor! — and promulgated it to the swimming masses.

It has worked. Some other swimmers on other continents, with whom I correspond on the facebook™® "Did You Swim Today?" page call them "butt buoys©™."

(Yes, by Googling®™ "butt buoy™" — if you haven't already — you can link to a company that has trademarked the name for a line of boat marker buoys. They are literally representations of a presumably white, presumably woman's thong bikini-clad butt. Just her butt. You may choose from a variety of colors and fabric patterns — Leopard print! Checkered! — for the bikini panties.

(I'm still trying to figure out what the buoys represent. A woman frozen in mid-jackknife dive, perhaps? Someone drowning? If so, why? My first thought, though, is that this is what the bloodless, disembodied pelvic girdles will look like, bobbing in the water, when Disney®™ eventually remakes "Jaws" as a computer-animated musical. "Here's to swimmin' with bow-legged wimmen …"

(But I digress.)

No. 2 was a Butt Buoy®™ design laboratory regression, I must say. It had brittle seams, which split shortly after I bought it (though by folding down the top of the dry bladder and clipping it closed, water managed to stay out for a year and three months). From buoy no. 1 to buoy no. 2, its makers replaced the sturdy handle that tethers the waist belt with a strap welded in place with rubber grommets. Gone are the words "SWIM 4 HEALTH" and "SWIM SAFELY" in bold black letters across the top.

My new one has a small warning instead, "NOT A LIFESAVING DEVICE," and "FOR USE ONLY BY A COMPETENT SWIMMER."

The International Swimming Hall of Fame never asked me for proof.

Hoping for a sturdier version, I came upon the Hall of Fame's TPU model, which stands for thermoplastic polyurethane and sounds ominous.

A long time back, I asked the International Swimming Hall of Fame to make Butt Buoys™© brighter, maybe neon yellow instead. I may even have suggested they call their products Butt Buoys®™ instead and watch sales soar.

No answer.

Then my SaferSwimmer™ Medium TBU arrived and — so orange! I'll need my mirror tinted goggles at all times, lest my corneas peel out of my head. Do they make welder's swim goggles? Rower would see me easily if they didn't have to avert their eyes from the brilliance.

All the seams are internal, so maybe they aren't subject to cracking and tearing.

Product review: I like it. I'm anxious to see if it's hardier than the last two.

My mentioning the new Butt Buoy™® on facebook™® launched an unexpected discussion, more than the usual "likes" and two-word encouragements. One British swimmer I talk with frequently, for example, worried that such buoys would embolden people to swim in conditions for which they are unprepared.

I get her point, and have begun to understand that swimming is serious business among the general population of the United Kingdom, where many schools make swimming part of students' curriculum.

But Butt Buoys®™ and their ilk don't show up on the average consumer's radar. I was swimming open water for a year before I ever heard of one, and few swimmers I know want them because, well, they look stupid.

I'm keeping mine. One week of swimming, so far so good.

Here are a bunch of Butt Buoys®™ in action, at a lake in Florida I'd like to swim someday. The doctor here invites swimmers from around the world every day to jump in from his backyard. You have to watch it: Doc Lucky Meisenheimer is a trip.

how do i love facebook™®? let me count the way

From Dave Mulcahy, all the way from Fermoy, County Cork, Ireland!
Photo taken far from there, calm Lake Natoma, Sacramento County,
California, United States of America.

For all its faults — of which we need blame ourselves; it's only the monolithic messenger, after all — facebook™© is wonderful for one reason:

It turns my world into one well-knit neighborhood of swimmers.

The virtual neighborhood became real last month. More on that in a bit.

I belong to a facebook®© group with one simple purpose — to share each member's swim that day.

(Technically, the page asks members to tell whether they swam that day, but thank goodness few are so terse.)

My daily routine includes checking the page to learn the latest.

A small number of posts are lists of pool sets (distance, number of repetitions, type of stroke or kick, intervals between repetitions, target time, etc.) Those reports look something like this:

200 Choice Swim
200 Pull
200 Choice Swim
200 Kick
6x50 drill w/:15 rest (1 Sailboat/1 Catch-up/1 Fist)
1 x 100/200/300/300/200/100 @ 2:00 per 100 (First 100 is always FAST!, pull second half of ladder)
300 w/fins (50 Kick/100 swim, repeat)
*2600 total*

I don't really understand what they mean, but I "like" them anyway, to acknowledge "Hey, that's your thing and right on! Swimming is swimming®."

"Swimming is swimming®™" is a registered trademark of the aforementioned facebook™© page. All rights reserved.

Most posts, though, describe vividly swims from across the globe, no matter the water. On a given day, the group will share about a summer swim in the now-frigid, now-warm waters of Lake Ontario … the winter threshing of surf off New South Wales, Australia … another tarn (mountain lake) "bagged" in the Scottish Highlands … and an exploratory swim of St. Johns River in Jacksonville, Fla. as part of the fight to save it.

We read reports of swims in Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, England, Ireland, Greece, South Africa, American Samoa, New Zealand, Russia, Tunisia … Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, Washington, Utah, Florida, Hawaii, and up and down California. Pool, lake, river, ocean and sea.

Every once in a while, the group talks of swim caps.
Here's one of my proposals. dyst? is the acronym,
"Did you swim today?"

That's a woefully incomplete list. I left out Zane Hodge, for example, an English instructor in Greenwood, Miss., who swims in swarms of catfish for his open water experience, then raises diabetes research money each year by swimming 14-plus miles of what appears to be an ancient bend of the Mississippi River.

Group members are treated to photos of storybook cottages in England along little smooth green rivers in which swimmers splash with their orange "butt buoys" floating along behind … the hyper-real Technicolor®™ of sharks and fiddler rays and creatures from a Ridley Scott movie swimming beneath swimmers off Manly Beach near Sydney … garibaldis (California's state fish) and tide pool denizens just below the daily swimmers off Laguna Beach in Southern California … and swimmers laughing above the froth with Coney Island swirling and whirring behind them.

A doctor in San Diego swims the ocean at 5 a.m. and reports the sea life he finally can see when the sun rises.

No fewer than 70 swimmers (and usually about 200) meet each morning at Manly Beach in neon pink gear under the rubric Bold & Beautiful. The Laguna Beach crowd, calling themselves the Oak Streakers, make sure to dress appropriately for all the big holiday swims and festoon themselves with glow sticks and blinking lights for full-moon swims.

Almost left out the Seabrook Seals of Dorset and Big Ricks Swim Team. So many to mention and this list is still so incomplete. 

We share it all each day, like sitting down at a collective kitchen table and recounting concisely our concurrent days of swimming. When a swimmer bemoans his/her loss of mojo or gets stung by jellyfish, others quickly provide advice and condolences. New swimmers get encouragement and virtual back pats. Congratulations bloom immediately when swimmers reach major goals, whether a 25-mile race or

Here's another design proposal. The discussion on this topic
has gone dormant, as it does from time to time …

their first mile, whether by a globally renowned open water swimmer or a schmo like me.

Our communication is instantaneous, another thing I like about facebook™©®.

We also commiserate with one another. A swimmer named Jonathan Joyce, a Web entrepreneur whose energy and love of life shone through the tiny windows of facebook©® posts, died on a swim in June. An English Channel swimmer named Susan Taylor died last month in her attempt. Swimmers on the group page mourned their loss. Many wrote the swimmers' names on their arms and photographed their arms, posting the pictures on the page.

Swimmer and St. Johns River advocate Jim Alabiso even created another group page, celebrating "vicarious swimming" in which swimmers write others' names on their arms, for various reasons, and celebrate them on their swims. 

All these reports send me to Google's map function, to find their swimming holes, and someday to go there. Places named Sonning on Thames, Buttermere, Wastwater (though I proposed changing that name), Allerthorpe, Lac Memphremagog, Loch Lomond.

Great Britain's pools are often called lidos (pronounced Lie-dohs, I believe), where many of the posters swim. I found it funny that one British swimmer demurred at my calling tow floats "butt buoys" when she and others find it perfectly unfunny to call one of their swimming pools Tooting Bec Lido.

Their reports also send me to slang dictionaries to learn that brekkies is breakfast and cossies are swimwear in Great Britain, and "knackered" is bad and "I'm gutted" is about the worst one can feel, probably from missing a swim. Several of the British declare their swims "cheeky."

We have our own slang this side of the pond. More and more posters are describing their swims as "pootles," easy and un-exercise-like.

I add my almost-daily report from Lake Natoma and try to describe the something new that each day's swim brings, and I do so in the spirit of self-deprecating humor most of the swimmers use.

(We forgive the swimmers who report, "Not today (did I swim), but yesterday I swam to France in 14:32." English Channel crossers earn their cheek. 'Tis the season now for the famous marathon swims, the 21-mile English and 20-something-mile Santa Barbara channels, across Lake Tahoe, and elsewhere.)

Yesterday, for example, I noted the turkey buzzards overhead, who missed their chance at getting me for leftovers. I always describe the water and list the temperature, in Fahrenheit and celsius, just in case someone besides me cares. The compendium of reports lets me know the arcing rise and fall of Lake Natoma's temperature as we swim it year 'round.

I seldom post photos, and when I do they're swim buddy Doug Bogle's. I'm terrible with cameras, and one would soon be at the bottom of the lake, joining two of my car keys, if it were left to me.

Which is why I was so surprised that two swimmers came to visit last month, based on my mini missives.

Suzie Dods, known well in the open water community for competing in some of the longest races held, and the one who led me on my first swim of Aquatic Park in San Francisco, came over with a friend to swim the chilly upper part of the lake. We wandered upstream against the current, past three bridges, feeling tiny amid the giant granite boulders through which the water coursed.

Then a man named Dave Mulcahy, from County Cork in the south of Ireland, let me know he'd be traveling to California and would like to join me at Natoma. I've come to know the Irish as fiercely passionate about open-water swimming, in some of the most challenging conditions.

OK, let me know when you're in town, I wrote back. See you when I see you. Out of sight, out of mind. I didn't really think it would happen.

But after a long hot day of work three weeks ago, resolving to skip my swim for the day, I got home to a text message.

I'm in town, Dave said in the message. Are you still up for a swim?

Someone really came all the way from Ireland to swim with me! I grabbed my stuff and headed out, finally finding Dave and his family in the labyrinth of roads at upper Natoma.

Dave's family had planned a trip from San Francisco south to visit relatives, and carved out a side trip to see the lake I described.

But almost everything in Ireland is a three-hour drive away at most, said Dave's wife, Brigid, so it was a culture shock to realize how far from San Francisco their side trip would take them. But they came anyway, even got lodging nearby.

After a tour of upper Natoma, our zigzagging courses crossing each under under the new bridge and back, Dave pronounced the swim "lovely."

Think of it: A swimmer with whom I share words about a shared love. And from those few words, half a world away, we came together. To swim.

Dave presented me with a hat from his swim club, which I'm wearing in the picture. A perfect host would have worn the hat on the swim, but I am a perfect oaf instead. I wore it next day and posted the picture.

Dave and his family made their way down the coast, Dave to swim in all the places I have yet to get to — and I live here! This week I saw another post from Dave swimming near his Fermoy home, and noted his safe journey back. I have a new urgency to make it to Ireland.

Today, as always, I check the world's swims by the world's swimmers. Their joy is best captured by this post, from a swimmer in England who goes by Plum Duff:

"A delicious dawn dip in a blissful French river. Soft water, stillness, birdsong, raindrops; followed by a simple riverbank breakfast eaten to the sight of a pair of kingfishers and their reflections rolling and tumbling across the mercurial surface of the water.

It is fair to say that not all swims are created equal. This was one of the finest."

Swim on!

All float on OK**

With daily care, your butt buoy should give you a year and a half of useful service.*

Actual mileage may vary.

My mileage didn't — almost all of it came in the flat, calm water of Lake Natoma. The only stress on the device was me, tugging it through the fresh water behind me, 1.3 to 2.4 miles at a time.

Swimmers who use the Safe Swimmer®™ (the actual, far less interesting name) in fierce rivers or in the ocean may have to replace their devices more frequently. I don't know; I'd like the opportunity to find out.

As pictured, the SafeSwimmer™© is a bright orange inflatable bladder and dry sack designed to enhance a swimmer's visibility in the water. Some open water venues require swimmers to use such devices.

Mine finally sprang a leak, tearing at the welded vinyl seam. The bright orange web strap has yellowed with sun and use, but is still strapping.

Forty bucks or so later to the International Swimming Hall of Fame and the fine folks who drive all over dropping packages on your doorstep, and I have a new one.

It's different from the last one. Instead of a sturdy blue plastic handle kinda thing that attaches the bladder to the leash around my waist, the new one has two small plastic tabs that the leash is stitched to. Nor does the new one encourage me in bold all-cap type to "SWIM 4 HEALTH" and "SWIM SAFELY."

The new one just has the clip art-inspired SafeSwimmer™©® logo. Encouragement? I'm on my own there.

Given how few people in the world even use these things, I can see how the International Swimming Hall of Fame wants to pare production costs per unit.

Believe it or don't, it's not the only swimming safety device on the meager market. You can buy a belt with a flag on the back, that rocks with your rhythm and lets boaters know you're in the water. My long-lost swim friend Stacy has a boogie board fitted out with stretch cargo netting, a deep plexiglass fin and a foam-noodle arch and a flagpole for visibility. It'll sustain a swimmer on a 500-mile journey, as long as no wind blows to knock the thing over.

This swim bladder is the best in my narrow opinion. It floats benignly behind a swimmer, like another head, bright orange, on the water. The makers say you can use it to rest on in a swim, but I don't want to stress it more than it endures already.

"Does it cause drag when you swim?" is the question almost everyone asks right away. Not at all — though I should say yes and use it as an excuse for being so slow. It bumps against my butt, which I take as a sign I'm keeping my hips high for proper technique.

In the dry-sack pocket you can store keys, clothes, whatever — a feature I began using the day after our cars were broken into during a swim.

Buoy, I hardly knew ye … Me: "Can you take a picture of my swim device for a blog
post?" Son: "What kind of picture?" Me: "I'm getting a new one because this one died.
I'll leave it up to you." His solution!

Believe it or don't, the International Swimming Hall of Fame isn't the only provider of such devices. Some swim organizations sell them as fund raisers, and a United Kingdom group called Chillswim  (promoting what else? My kinda folks!) sells a large variety of similar devices.

Chillswim calls these tow floats, which is better than Safe Swimmer™©. But not the best name, not by far.

I used to call it rower repellent, because I swim by myself a lot in the flat lake, a mecca for many rowing crews.

(Who move backward through the water, so the device really doesn't do me that much good. It's false comfort …

… though it did stop a wayward rower from plowing over me last week, because he saw the orange blob in the rear-view mirror clipped to his ballcap.)

But I'm convinced the sudden proliferation of these devices in facebook photos of swimmers from around the world owes to the genius of a woman named Kirsten Bratti Lewis. She's a triathlete I swim with sometimes.

At first sight of the day-glo®™ bladder swinging from behind me like a rabid inflatable pitbull with jaundice as I waddled to shore for a swim, Kirsten said, "You brought your butt buoy!"

I've used the phrase ever since, and ever since, more and more swimmers have shown up in pix towing their own butt buoys.

I'll gladly accept a cut of the promotional fee. You're welcome.

* Yes, the narrowest of niche declarations. You have the power to make it more commonplace: Swim the open water and get yourself a butt buoy.

**