This swim was a concept by Kevin Buckholtz who worked with Sylvia to plan and make it happen. Kevin wanted to be able to swim from near a bar in Sausalito to Aquatic Park. Kevin invited a few of us along (total of six swimmers) for the ride.

So on a Friday morning we went for it. Sylvia had two boats: she piloted one and Bryan piloted her other.

We got repositioned quite a bit (hence the disjoin sections of the course below, I stopped my watch while we were on the boat). We started riding a flood, out towards Point Belvedere, then headed south. We caught a bit of the ebb, riding out towards the Golden Gate, and then the goal was to swim across the bay and have the flood sweep us nicely in to Aquatic Park. The flood ended up being very strong and we would not have made it, the course clearly shows us not making it south of Alcatraz.

Once we were repositioned, our instructions were to swim directly South. But the swim line on the map for that second section is clearly at a diagonal (because the current was so strong). Even then, we were still slightly too far from the entrance to Aquatic Park so we had to be repositioned a second time to be able to make it.

Luckily since this was a for-fun, swim, nobody’s day was ruined by having to be repositioned. My watch’s GPS glitched a bit so I cleaned up the map, but the approximate swim distance was 7 miles, and we spend about 3hr15min in the water.

It was a gorgeous morning on the water and I’m glad I got to try this!