I left my home at 11:00 and the conditions look perfect. No more trace of those Santa Ana winds. There is nothing above 3 knots forecasted all day. It is a beautiful cloudless day and the air temperature has exceeded 60 degrees and is supposed to rise above 70 by mid-afternoon. My biggest question is what is going on with the water temperature? After the winds we have had the last couple days, there is a good chance that we are in for a change. It’s hard to tell by the buoy data. There are a couple drops but these buoys are in north San Diego and south LA counties which are less affected by Santa Anas. Well there is just no other way to tell than to actually get in the water. How bad could it be?

Driving down the cliff on Palisades, the water in Capo Beach and south Doheny looks like butter. When I pull into the parking lot, I’m struck by the clarity of the northern view. I can clearly see buildings in what I think is San Pedro. I don’t know…might just be Newport. It’s at least past Laguna but whatever it is it is usually just a smudge in the distance. I’d expect things to look more hazy from the smoke given the fires along the LA coast.

I head down the stairs on this perfect late morning and things seem to get even more perfect when I reach the beach. The tide is quite low and likely below 0 feet. Lots and lots of beach here to walk on. I hike to the water line to get my feet wet. Hmm…is it my imagination or does it feel colder than Tuesday? I’m thinking it is colder. Well there is no turning back. What it lacks in warmth it abounds in beauty - that is for sure.

After I stash my pack up on the rocks and head back down to the water, I head into the gentle surf. There are some waves here. They are fairly small but silky smooth and blue and beautiful. The water right here is crystal clear. I can see the sandy bottom below scattered with small loose rocks here and there.

A wave approaches and I crouch down to attempt to get the “perfect shot.” Oops. Not so perfect. The shutter (or the digital equivalent) seems to kick in a few milliseconds after the wave passes over the camera. You can see just a patch of the wave face in the upper left corner of the image which is kind of interesting but not the majestic wave pic I was hoping for.

Well I’m wet now so I start swimming. The water is a lovely blue color and I can see the ocean floor all the way to the south end of the beach. I swim fairly inshore most of the way and I watch clouds of sand swirl and swoosh below me and occasionally they give way to a pure blue vista of dancing kelp on rock. And yes, the water is colder today. I’m going to give it a 56 estimate. Still I hold my own. I feel good all the way down the beach.

Just before I get to the end, the surf starts to break further out and I need to sharply turn seaward to avoid the waves. They are not of the size of my last couple swims but I’d still like to not deal with being rolled by white water.

My big rock stands super tall above the water in this low tide and there are a lot more rocks above the water as I look to the end of the point. I turn around and the cold presses in as I head north.

I try to just settle into the powerful energetic surge of the water around my skin. It’s a dark cloud-like blanket that wraps itself around me. I focus on completely surrendering every inch of my body to the cold. I want to float on the buoyancy of its energy and not sink in my mind’s reaction and craving for comfort.

I keep asking myself, “what is this I feel?” How do I possibly apply a label to it? Is there some familiar feeling I can associate with this? Is there a word in our language or any language that can describe it? It is different and unlike anything else I have felt on my skin. I took a cold shower yesterday and no it’s not like that either. It feels both so wrong and so right at the same time. The cold has a heaviness to it that seems to both slow the passage of time and also draw the future into the present as if the past never happened.

I can’t bring myself to take pictures between the two ends of the swim with the exception of when I literally get entangled in kelp and need to extract my camera from my trunks which has grabbed on to the vines and is rooting me to the ocean floor. I take a pic of these trees that appear to rise from a sky blue void.

I begin to see what looks like dark heavy clouds in the northern horizon. I’m pretty sure this is either smoke or haze deeply browned by smoke. Sometimes it looks so thick and heavy as if this entire ocean is going to be consumed by smoke from fires that are miles and miles away. It feels like all of southern California is on fire in this moment. I have no doubt that is what it must seem like to the residents of Malibu right now. My thoughts go out to them. We think we are so safe here living on the coast but one picture of a burnt lifeguard tower pretty much blows that theory out of the water - literally.

Over this entire north bound stretch of the swim, I hold the thought of ending the swim early as an option but here I am on the north end of the beach and I feel good. I stare down the beach to the asphalt road and head towards home. The water is beautiful here and soon the floor looks super close but yet I still seem a good ways out. It is probably at the trough of low tide right about now at a -0.5.

I’m just north of the estates on the Niguel Shores bluff and then in seconds it seems like I am half a dozen homes in. I’m sure this is an optical illusion brought on by me pivoting from a shoreward to a cross-shore trajectory. Before I know it I’m done. While I’m just at the edge of the surf, the water is only waist deep. I stand and walk all the way to dry sand.