Adam so tugged on the imagination of Bowsprite with his April 22 Robin Knox-Johnson Day that we decided to plan a Swim Day. (I HAD to get “tug” into this post somehow.) July 1 got the honors as Swim Day because, other than being peak summer in the northern hemisphere, the month gets its name from someone known for his swimming prowess. Click here to find more about swimming, Julius Caesar, Plato, King Xerxes, and others. Here’s more interesting history and a foto of ancient Etruscan swimmers.
The weird foto below shows tugster about 45 years ago getting it wrong and about to learn the searing, stinging pain water can inflict if you attempt to fly over rather than dive into it. Kind of like Icarus. The location is the pier near where I learned to swim . . . Lake Ontario.
We are our own first boats. Thanks to my mother, I flourished as my own vessel before I was born, but I forgot how to swim after that. I almost drowned when I was three because someone twice my size shoved me off a bridge. My father dove in, wearing Sunday best, to drag me ashore. When I turned six, my parents enrolled me in Red Cross swimming lessons in Lake Ontario, but I failed the beginner class three years in a row, refusing to believe even the no-doubt beautiful high school girls instructing the classes, telling me to relax, breathe deliberately, and feel my own buoyancy. If we are our own first boats, then I was like the title of the Farley Mowat book: The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float. I didn’t float and hated water because it frustrated me. And I’m grateful that my parents never let me give up.
The foto below (Lake Francis in New Hampshire, circa 1997) shows my most utilitarian stroke, even now. I call it the otter. It’s also the Ben Franklin, explained at the end of this post.
I’ve swum over a mile at a stretch doing the “otter,” doing some distance on my belly before turning and swimming on my back.
Swimming exercises all parts of the body and refreshes the spirit. As my body floats, so does my mind, travels through its own medium. During an intensely difficult time in my life (See March 2008 post here.), I fought to get access to water, used swimming as a means to maintain fitness, swam as a mental preparation for a possible escape by water, and spend time under water imagining a less threatening location. Swimming there provided the key to my very survival.
The foto below was taken in Noank last weekend, and given the water temperature (below 60 degrees), I would not have lasted a mile.
Here’s Mage’s preliminary swim post. I suspect she may do more, maybe much more tomorrow.
Finally . . . Ben Franklin was an unrepentant skinny-dipper, as were John Quincy Adams and Teddy Roosevelt.
Did you ever suspect you’d see nude tugster fotos on this site? Summer’s here and I guess the mind turns to mush.
Seriously, if you know someone who does not know how to swim, encourage that person to learn, or you be the teacher yourself. It’s more than a case of fun, refreshment, exercise, and inspiration . . .. it could be a matter of life and death.
Dive in!! Tell me one of your swimming stories.
12 comments
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June 30, 2009 at 10:51 pm
Jed
I do NOT understand why some parents will not teach their children to swim. With ALL the things that a parent does NOT have control over…drowning is a death that can be prevented.
ALL my daughters swim. 8, 6 AND the 24 month old.
June 30, 2009 at 11:24 pm
Swimming « A Movable Bridge
[…] For more on today’s swimming posts, please visit tugster. […]
July 1, 2009 at 1:29 am
Chris
Great website! Thanks for sharing your pictures.
July 1, 2009 at 7:44 am
tillerman
Great idea. I celebrated Swim Day by writing http://propercourse.blogspot.com/2009/07/this-summer-i-went-swimming.html
July 1, 2009 at 8:59 am
Mage Bailey
I wrote about The Plunge Years today.
http://urban-archology.blogspot.com/
Lots of doodles and photos. Lots of fun to talk about this. Middle of July, some of the Guards and Aids during those years will be meeting for dinner and talk. What more could one want. I made a slide show of those swimming years and I’ll take it with me on the laptop to dinner where we will all laugh about how thin we were.
July 1, 2009 at 9:54 am
Free Diving White Banks Dry Rocks : Old Salt Blog - a virtual port of call for all those who love the sea
[…] Will at the Tugster blog suggested that a number of fellow water bloggers post on a common theme today. He suggested swimming. […]
July 1, 2009 at 10:11 am
Diving Bonaire - Southwest Corner and Bonaventura Reefs : Old Salt Blog - a virtual port of call for all those who love the sea
[…] honor of “Swim Day” here is are two short videos I shot of diving off Bonarie a few years ago. Bonarie, in the […]
July 1, 2009 at 11:02 am
Michael
I did not believe that I would float. One day after daycamp when I was about nine my father asked if I had learned how to swim yet. I lied and said I had. “Excellent,” he proclaimed, “tomorrow we’ll go to the pool at Jones Beach and you can show me.”
Didn’t sleep that night.
We arrive at the pool the next day. We get in. In horror, I realize I’d rather drown than face my father and tell him I’d lied, so I jumped forward and did what the instructors said to do for the “dead man’s float”.
As I expected, I sank, soon to die.
Then I felt myself start to rise back up to the surface! So I started moving my arms and legs, and swam about ten feet before stopping to gasp for air.
My father was delighted with my swimming, and proceeded to give me tips.
Ten years later, after being certified as a life guard, I told my dad the story of what really happened at the Jones Beach pool. He got a big laugh out of it.
(that wasn’t my post, but as close a story as I have to yours. I jabbered a bit
http://www.peconicpuffin.com/the_peconic_puffin/2009/07/sprint-swimming-and-the-twelve-hundred-dollar-wheel.html
July 1, 2009 at 9:05 pm
I love the smell of chlorine in the morning | Boats Blog
[…] Tugster and Bowsprite posed a great challenge: Make July 1st Swim Day. Getting into the water isn’t going to happen so I racked my brain for dramatic accounts of […]
July 1, 2009 at 9:05 pm
I love the smell of chlorine in the morning | 1800blogger
[…] Tugster and Bowsprite posed a great challenge: Make July 1st Swim Day. Getting into the water isn’t going to happen so I racked my brain for dramatic accounts of […]
July 2, 2009 at 1:29 am
Jenna
Hi,
We have just added your latest post “Swim Day” to our Directory of Sports. You can check the inclusion of the post here . We are delighted to invite you to submit all your future posts to the directory and get a huge base of visitors to your website.
Warm Regards
Sportstrove.info Team
http://www.sportstrove.info
July 18, 2022 at 7:14 pm
I love the smell of chlorine in the morning - Messing About in Sailboats
[…] Tugster and Bowsprite posed a great challenge: Make July 1st Swim Day. Getting into the water isn't going to happen so I racked my brain for dramatic accounts of […]