GSL Cleanup day

This morning I slept in till 7:30 and got up and got the kids in the van to do a service project out at the GSL Marina.  We met Jim, Stacey, Etsuko and all her kids at the marina where we spent an hour and a half picking up trash, and then another hour and a half weeding the gardens outside the the dock entrances.  Cathi showed up at 10:30 with the other kids and helped do more weeding.  It was fun talking and working together.

At noon we all got cleaned up, greased up and then swam.  My co-worker, Angela came to kayak.  The water was perfect.  It was a clear blue sky with no wind.  The water was calm as could be.  There was some carpet algae building up in the marina, but once I swam outside the marina it was totally clear and clean.  I could see the bottom 80% of the time.  It was cool seeing all the black coral "Tufa Rock" and then where there wasn't any of this coral, a light sandy bottom with ripples.  All that was needed were tropical fish.  Instead millions upon millions of tiny white brine shrimp swimming with me.

I swam north of the marina to the second red buoy and then noticed that the final red buoy was surrounded by multiple sailboats.  Instead of complicating the swim with navigating around boats I decided to take the course to black rock from that point.  About 10 minutes into that course, as I was swimming along and enjoying the diversity of the black tufa rock, I noticed two small holes in one part of the black rock.

These two small holes had bubbles coming out at a surprisingly fast fate.  It was a constant flow of air coming out.  The rock was about 6 feet down.  The was no discernable different in water temperature at that point, just air bubbling out of these two holes.  I stopped swimming and told Angela I was going to investigate.  I took a deep breath and then exhaled as much air as possible so that I could surface dive down that far.  I had to move my arms and legs to keep myself from being forced back up to the surface.  I took a close look at the hole.  It was white around the entrance to the hole.  I tried to look inside and the hole seemed to get narrow as it went further down into the rock.  The bubbles were constant.  I've seen this before in other lakes but they were much less dramatic and stopped after a few seconds.  I was there observing this for over a minute and there was no change.  It was very intriguing.  I was annoyed that I left my GoPro in the van.  I would have loved to have taken a picture of that.

We continued on to black rock and I swam until I could not longer keep my hands from hitting the soft sandy beach under the water which was about 100 yards from the shoreline.  Then swam back.  Total distance on the GPS registered 2.54 miles.  Time was 1:27

Got a little too much sun today.  First time I've got a little bit of a burn going.  Water temp also came up as being 69 degrees on my watch.  Didn't wear a cap today which was good cause I would have ended up with a goofy tan line right across my forehead.