Seal Torpedo part deux.

It was pouring like crazy this morning so I turned off my alarm and stayed in bed. I've got to pack and get myself ready to head to D.C. today. I'm going to take the bus to the airport because my flight is at noon, which is an obnoxious time to get a ride from anyone who has a normal 9 to 5 job. My fellow fellows are taking the bus too, we all talked about it. I'm taking the 8 to the 37. Hope it goes well...the Miami busses are notoriously bad, so I'm going to give myself lots of extra time.

I want to expand on my post from yesterday because I don't think I really did justice to the whole experience that swimming in the ocean is. It's not like swimming in a pool, obviously. There are no lines on the bottom and no walls on the sides. It's super easy to get off course, so I try to be really careful about sighting land marks when I pull my head out to breathe. This means that my actual stroke is different in the ocean than it is in the pool. I always feel a little like I'm flopping around out there because I pull my head up so far sometimes to see where I'm at. The little glimpse of the horizon with a blur of palm trees is enough to keep me on track, usually, but it's hard to judge distance in the split second that I'm gasping for air and trying to avoid getting a mouthful of the dirtiest beach water in Miami. In the pool I can pretty much swim with my eyes closed and adjust my track every 25 m when I hit the wall, in the ocean sometimes I head towards Cuba for a while before I realize that I'm like 20 m outside the buoys. I have a feeling that everyone else can swim in a straight line where as I'm like Billy on the family circus (I'm embarassed, but it's an apt reference) If you could follow me I'd have a white dotted line doing circles and zigzags behind me. Whatever, it just means I get more distance in. I guess I need to imporove my sighting techniques.

In the ocean I get tossed around by waves and lose track of where I'm headed and have to stop every once in a while to spot the little black arms and yellow caps of my fellow sharks bobbing around in the great expanse. In the pool it's much simpler, but in the pool I don't get to watch the sun rise over the palm trees, or get sea sick....
Ignore the mountains...this could be us..