When I was a kid I was watching Tarzan with my dad one Saturday. I was quite a swimmer at that time already but not very bright evidently. In one particular scene Tarzan was swimming in a swamp and I say "that guy doesn't really know how to swim!" Dad replies, "That's Johnny Weissmuller, an Olympic gold medalist in swimming!" Things got quiet.
This is relevant to SM because…I wonder how many kids are being taught how to swim these days? What about treading water or just floating on your back? I could pretty much do that forever by the age of 5 or 6. Yeah, swimming.
My granddaughter is about 5 1/2 now. She would like to play in the water, but not deep. We kept saying we were going to teach her to swim but she was nervous about it . Then one day at the pool , she walks over to the edge looking at it ,, and just jumps in , and starts padding. She's a pretty smart little girl ,, I think she just watches stuff a little bit,, then jumps in and tries it herself.
My grandkids all go to swimming lessons starting at 3. The class makes it really fun for them. Of course, they spent a lot of time in the water supervised before that.
I never learned to swim growing up, weird me being a Floridian and the beach being a short drive away. But our rivers, lakes and ponds are always likely to have a big gator nearby. Not conducive to wanting to swim. And I was a skinny kid, negatively bouyant, so I tended to sink. Later in life I got fat, and bob like a cork. I learned to swim, and have trouble diving as I'm very positively bouyant. And we still have gators.
I have a buddy from Miami that says the same. He almost drowned as OPFOR at Ft. Polk and was assigned swimming training.
When I was very young dad built a swimming pool in the back yard using 8"x8"x16" cement blocks. The pool was 3' high 4' wide and 12' long. I learned initially to swim in that pool and later I got to get life guard training which I really loved. Fortunately, I never had to use it, but it was nice to have the training. Of the many jobs I had one of my favorites was working on boats and wave runners right on the lake. one of the favorite jobs was retrieving things lost in the lake, I took great pleasure in. Funny thing about fish. above the water they are afraid of us but in the water with them they are very curious about us.
During my OSVET (Other Service Veteran) training in my Navy enlistment, we had to jump into a deep pool, simulating jumping off a sinking ship. We nonswimmers were told "just jump in, the Navy Swimmers will haul you out!" So, taking a literal "leap of faith", we did so. Sure enough, the Swimmer grabbed me and hauled me out, like a soaked puppy.
When Pops dropped me off at the pool he’d say “You got your jockstrap boy?” I was like “nah, nobody wears one.” That pool was cold anyway, ice cold. No jock necessary.
You'd figure the liberals, especially, would be hot on this....seeing as any moment, the ocean levels are going to rise a few yards, due to all those melting icecaps and glaciers, and put all those coastal cities they love so much underwater!!
I grew up on the Yadkin River, don't really remember learning to swim, just always did. So many I have met over the years that never learned though. I used to watch the Tarzan TV series with Ron Ely everyday after school with my Dad.
If the Gulf Stream stops, the local water level will rise 5 feet. Study will examine whether a slowing Gulf Stream could bring more Florida flooding (tampabay.com) land in Fla would get pretty cheap.....at low tide.
I saw a goldfish in the pool once. (No, I wasn’t the one who released it.) No Baby Ruth bars though, none.
When my Drill Instructor told me to get to the other side of the pool he didn't say how to get there, so I took a deep breath and jumped in. I went straight to the bottom and started walking to the far side of the pool. We'd also been told that if we saw a weighted rope in front of us we were to grab it and hold on. It bothered me that I had to grab the rope, since I was almost to the other side of the pool. I have almost no natural buoyancy, even with my lung full of air. I managed to leave Boot Camp as a Class 4 swimmer. It wasn't until I got to The Basic School that I had to really learn to swim. I spent a couple weekends in the training pool while everybody else went home, but became a Class 1 swimmer before graduation. I'll never glide through the water, but I'll get there. My kids grew up on surf boards, so they taught each other how to swim like fish.
I learned to swim around age 6, just jumped in the deep end one day and started paddling! Got talked by the coaches in grade school to join the junior league swimming team, so I did and did 8 years in the swim team, came within a 1/4 second of the U.S. Olympic teams qualifying time for joining, but enlisted instead! Used to Helo out to sea and have to swim 5 miles or so back to shore, I had the teams record for years till some young punk came and took it, I'ma buy him beers if I ever catch his ass!
@hot diggity , when I went thru Navy basic training, one of the requirements was to jump in the pool (using the correct method, as just jumping in, from the height of an aircraft carrier flight deck will HURT if you do it wrong), float/tread water for a minute, then make your way down to the other end, utilizing whichever swimming stroke you wanted. And some guys were definitely dog paddling! Never made much sense to me, why someone would join the Navy, and NOT know how to swim? Of course, it never made much sense to me, either, why we had to be able to run a mile and a half in a certain amount of time, when I was on the longest ship in the Navy....1110 feet long, on the flight deck. Hell, that's just a smidgen over 2/10's of a mile! The officers and senior NCO's didn't like it much, though, when I voiced my opinion that it would make a LOT more sense to be able to SWIM a good 500 yards.....so the ship won't suck you under, when it sinks!
