Hard To Fathom

Check out this video for a montage of these photos set to the piano music I had in my head.

First swim of 2026. I can’t believe it has been so long since my last swim. That was New Year’s Eve and it was pretty much the best swim of the year. Then the rain came. The general guidance is to wait at least 72 hours after rain before spending time in the water. From what I can tell, surfers largely ignore that but it seems like as a swimmer, one would need to be more cautious since you are constantly submerging your head the entire time you are out. Technically that would make yesterday the first ok day to swim. I had too much going on yesterday and one could say I have too much going on today too but I went anyways.

It’s a beautiful day out - sunny clear skies. It was pretty cold earlier this morning but by the time I leave just after 10:30, it’s almost - almost - 60 degrees out. In the sun it feels quite nice - as in ecstatically wonderful. I rise over that last hump of what we used to call the Dana Dips on Selva Road just between Blue Lantern and Chula Vista and Catalina Island comes into view in all of her glory - crisp and clear, so beautiful. The water is blue blue blue.

I get to the parking lot and the ocean surface looks relatively smooth. There is an offshore breeze this morning making for clean conditions. Boy you should have seen it yesterday. We had a solid north west wind that added all sorts of wonk to the water. The sun feels so good walking down the stairs. I can’t believe it is January and I can still head to the beach without needing to carry warm clothes for the walk back up. After yesterday’s northwesterlies and the frigid morning temps, I thought ocean temperatures might take a bit of a drop but the buoys are still in the lower 60’s. Sometimes what the buoys say and how the water feels can vary but I figure it can’t be too bad.

The beach looks absolutely beautiful. Unlike the calm we had the last week of December, there are waves today but nothing significant at all. It all looks very forgiving. The tide looks lowish. There is lots of beach to look at here. Sand level has definitely dropped over the last week. I can see probably over half of the beloved Jupiter rock here below the concrete ramp.

I put my feet in the water and I’m trying to compare it to my last couple swims and the data must have been archived because I just can’t find a reference to compare this to. Is this colder? The same? Who knows. I do feel rather confident that it is not warmer - just a gut intuition. It does feel cold enough that it is hard for me to fathom that I am about to submerge myself in this for the next hour. However, I also just know that I always have difficulty fathoming this fact but it really doesn’t matter if I can fathom it or not, because it is going to happen and if past experience can serve as any kind of guide to the present, it is going to be great. This is all another reminder that there is often quite a gap between what we imagine things to be and how things actually turn out to be.

I start to walk into the water and the reality hits me that this is actually happening right now. I am nearing the small surf. A wave rises right in front of me and I lean right into its face to surrender to whatever it is on the other side. The wet side. It’s good. It does not kill me. I am alive and feel like I have just leveled up to whatever that next level might be. Who am I in this water? It feels like a different person than the one who was here last. I had a tooth extracted yesterday so indeed part of me is missing. I cut my hair last week so even more is missing. Perhaps every time I enter here, it is a different person than the one I brought before.

As I swim south I feel a slight “ice cream headache.” Ok, it must be colder because I have not felt this for a while. Still I’m good. I can definitely tell a difference in my mouth. That missing tooth feels kind of weird. After several minutes I feel the water grow warmer. I have no idea how much of this “warming” is happening in the water and how much is happening in my mind but regardless, I like it.

Oh it is so beautiful. As I lift my head with every breath, the beach in front of me looks so crisp and clear. Miraculously my goggles are not fogging up today. I pass a small pack of surfers who are patiently waiting for the next set of waves just a few feet in front of me. Soon I am almost at the south end of the beach and some larger, but not necessarily large, waves are breaking right on top of my “turnaround” rock. This is quite a contrast to the last time I was here when nothing, and I mean nothing, was breaking on or around that rock.

The vision before me is amazing. The late morning light shines over the headlands and causes the whitewater around the rocks to glow and the surrounding water to shimmer. I can see a fine mist emerging from the blow hole up just ahead at the base of the cliffs. After the waves break over the big rock here and the water begins to recede, there is a second rouge wave that breaks northward perpendicular to the main break. I’ve seen this before but not often and it is fun to watch. It looks so out of place - a wave that breaks to the north and not east.

I spend some time hanging out and watching these waves and then cursing my camera housing for fogging up and then removing my camera from the housing to take more pictures and trying with all of my might not to drop the camera. Then after a few minutes I head back north up the beach.

I lose myself in the horizon which is a fine place to be lost. I sort of know where it was that I left myself so I’m not afraid that I won’t regain my bearings. My bearings are right here but I make a conscious choice to lose track of them. I certainly do not need them here - not on this day. It is good to lose our bearings every now and then. Our spirit needs to roam free sometimes. Mine is grazing upon the fields of blue forever that rests in front of my eyes. That blue is dark and crisp and can hold whatever it is given. Just above I see these ever so light and faint clouds that lend the sky some texture. My spirit floats in circles around these hazy masses of vapor.

In my mind’s ear I hear music playing over the entire swim. It’s music from a piece I have been playing the last couple days. It starts with a D major cord and ends with some G minor variation that I don’t know the name of. The melody rises and falls and carries me across the water and summons up visions of people and events that perhaps are trying to contact me from the future.

Then I am abruptly thwarted and completely in my body once more and my eyes are obstructed by some sort of dark material and I feel this material surround my skin and restraining my arms from completing their stroke. Oh…I’ve swam right into a big tangle of kelp. Well isn’t this its own sort of delightful. I stop and have a 360 degree look around me. I am a little past half way up the beach and it looks like there is not a single bad thing here. Where did all the bad things go? They must be somewhere. Well, they are not here.

I continue and proceed to swim the remainder of my usual south to north route, turning around in front of the bathrooms just south of the Salt Creek lifeguard tower below the Ritz. I swim the last 100 feet or so just at the edge of the surf. It’s delightful. I get back to the beach and up the stairs. I have a ton of work to do for the job that feeds me even though I feel like I have just been fed something that no money could never buy.