When I was younger I used to go to camp in the summer.
It was a sleep over camp and as you got older your living conditions got progressively more primitive. It’s kind of creepy to think about living in a hut with only 3 walls. I suppose actually it was so they could keep closer track of us.
There were all kinds of activities you could pick and choose from, like Arts and Crafts (enamel work is kind of fun) and Tennis (I suck). Being a swimmer of some accomplishment I gravitated toward waterfront activities like Boating (Row Boats), Canoeing, and Sailing (Sunfish).
My first boating experience was not very successful. I drew the one with open oarlocks and having no clue on how to work them the oars kept popping out. I’d call it a cruel joke on the counselor’s part except that they were pretty much given out on a first come first served basis.
The most desirable ones in my eyes were the open ones with pins through the oars because I didn’t like bothering with feathering. As I got into the advanced classes of course I had to demonstrate my mastery of the technique, but to this day I prefer the pinned ones if only for the fact that you don’t have to deal with the locks slipping down to the blade.
Likewise the Sunfish were tricky too. The lake was pretty much in a bowl and when you got in the lee of the hills and trees there was no telling which direction the wind would come from and you’d usually end up rowing yourself out with the tiller. One amenity they had that I missed later in life with my family’s own Sailfish was a beach to run the boat up on when you were done so you could stay dry (unless you capsized of course). We don’t have much of a beach at the Lake House so we have to moor the boat. You swim or you don’t sail.
I also took some of the advanced swimming courses like snorkeling. The big payoff for successfully completing that is they had a surface compressor with a face mask and tube that would let you go about as deep as the lake got. I never really got a chance to use it though, the mask didn’t fit me very well and I couldn’t deal with the water pouring in from the sides.
Another thing I never did was the Gold swim. If you were a good enough swimmer that they didn’t need to worry about you much you got a green tag to put up on the buddy board, but if you were especially ambitious several times a summer they’d take you out to a big sloping rock at one end of the lake and have you swim behind a Row Boat out to a stripe they had painted on a cliff face about a mile away. If you made it you got a Gold tag.
Special huh?
Monster swimmers would go for double and triple Gold (not nearly as cool because all you got was a white tag with a 2 or a 3 on it), but I never tried it at all even though I’d do swim practices in the winter that were up to 10 miles long when our coach was feeling particularly sadistic after we lost a meet.
I’ve just never liked swimming in open water that much. The darkness of it and not being able to see the bottom gives me the sensation of falling and I have terrible acrophobia. It’s kind of odd than when I was life guarding I’d get assigned to the most dangerous of the two natural water parks in town instead of any of the 5 pools. Oh well, at least I could shack up with my girl friend after work.
