An ism from my dad - kayaker extroadaneer:
Here's an ism about one of the exposure-to-chilly-water fanatics who swim at Aquatic Park. Last Saturday I was a kayaking escort for an elite cadre of such people in a round-trip race around Alcatraz.
The 50-or-so participants were a robust lot, who all looked like serious practitioners of the sport, so I didn't hesitate to volunteer as a "sweep" escort, figuring that the last of them wouldn't be too terribly much slower than the first. But, it turned out that one among them had a superhuman capacity to substitute dogged tenacity for absence of swimming ability. And, as I fell into pace with the guy, joining him in rapid recession from the pack, it soon became apparent that we were either going to set the way far end of the curve for finishers or I was going to have to flag over a rescue boat for a premature end to the ordeal.
The guy had a build much like governor Arnold, and, judging from his Germanic accent when he stopped churning briefly to lift his head from the water and say, "Tanks for staying wit me," he apparently had a similar ancestry. I don't know exactly what it was that made him so slow, but it may have had something to do with the breadth of his shoulders creating drag or the amount that he had to rotate them back-and-forth in order to get his face out of the water for a breath or perhaps his oddly disjointed way of kicking. At any rate, by the time the pack was rounding the far end of Alcatraz, we were just approaching the island.
The kayakers in this event have two major roles, keeping the swimmers on course and giving those who can't take any more something to hold onto until a rescue boat can arrive. My guy needed a lot of attention to the former, tending to veer widely from bearings toward Berkeley to the Golden Gate, and his lack of response to my shouted he ultimately saw my consternation and shouted to me, "I can't hear you." I thought he meant by this that his neoprene head gear was obstructing his hearing, but later learned that he was deaf. By the time we reached Alcatraz, however, we had arrived at a technique whereby I pointed the right direction with the kayak.
The leg of the race around the north side of Alcatraz, where the current was against us, was the most arduous of the event; and the absolute low point came as we rounded the bend at the northwest end of the island and I noticed that my swimmer was actually moving backward for a while. He finally prevailed, though, and in the home stretch his ability to hold his course actually seemed to improve or perhaps I got better at pointing the way. As we drew closer to Aquatic Park, the major impediment became the other kayakers who arrived on the scene (their swimmers having already reached shore) with extraneous words of advice, which fell on deaf ears, followed by frenzied concern that my guy's unresponsiveness was a sure sign of hypothermia. I became pretty possessive at this point, essentially telling the worry warts to buzz off.
Then, as we approached the breakwater at Aquatic Park, we received a truly amazing greeting - a sea lion burst from the surface of the water a scant fifteen feet or so in front of me, breaching and barking before arcing back into the water, then circling back on us, picking up a companion along the way. The two of them breached together - again a little too close for comfort, but not in a threatening sort of way, their bark seeming more a greeting than a menace. Were they congratulating the perseverance of a soul mate? I could only wonder.
