Reservoir slog

For some time, I’ve wanted to do an open swim at a reservoir that hosts swims on Saturday mornings. Today was the day. I came very close to chickening out (the weather has turned chillier here). But off I went.

Imagine five buoys arranged in a rhomboidish shape. You swim around them and you cover nearly a half mile. You can swim two laps but I just did one. The water wasn’t as cold as I expected. The trouble I had was with visibility.

It reminded me of my predicament as a teenager. I did my homework at one end of a long living room. At the other end was a big piece of furniture with a stereo in it, which played BBC Radio One or Radio Europe while I studied. When I was done my work late at night, I would turn out my desk light, then traverse the living room in the dark to turn off the stereo. There was some efficiency to this that I don’t recall now. All I remember was how much I hated walking in the dark. One night, inevitably, I knocked over a tiered rack of china plates that was on the floor next to a chair near the stereo. To this day, I can be paralysed by trying to move in the dark.

The reservoir’s water was murky brown--so murky that I couldn’t see a buoy as I swam right by it. I found it very difficult to keep my head underwater and swim freestyle into the dark abyss. The only thing to give me a bearing was the flash of land I got each time I came up for air. I find that I pull to the left when I swim, so whenever I paused to doggie paddle, I found I was headed toward the shore, at 90 degrees from my course.

I probably swam about half breaststroke and half freestyle, as I couldn’t calm myself down and accept moving through the dark brown water. When I got out, I talked to a guy who was there for his second swim. He said he did much better than the first time, when he also couldn’t adjust to the lack of visibility. I will definitely come back. I really enjoyed the freedom of not being in a pool, the vision thing aside.
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