Former competitive swimmer.
I taught sailing lessons in Wisconsin for years. My trademark was being the real life man overboard, as early as April in cold water.
And I’ve taught scuba for several years.
I’m confident I could swim 100 meters in cold water. Really cold water. Not fun, but I’d get to shore.
Yes. Swimming is one of the only sports that I have been good at my entire life. I can swim in any reasonable body of water from the biggest ocean waves to the dirtiest ponds. I always found swimming to be perfectly natural and have never been afraid of the water.
I really do hate cold water but I know I could make it. I have swam further out than that in Maine in water that was barely 50 degrees. It is painful but I knew it wasn’t going to hurt me permanently. That is just extra motivation to get to the shore.
Yes I can swim. I am also fat, so I have excellent buoyancy.
I’d guess yes.
Swimming lessons from age 4 - 9. Diving lessons age 8-11 - which I hated - only stopped when I gashed my side along the board whilst diving and bled a fair amount in the pool.
Mile-swim as a boy-scout - kind of boring, as I recall, but no problem.
I’m not in as good as shape as I was as an adolescent, but I remember how to float and I’ve got more fat now to do it. And the basic breast-stroke was always very easy and energy minimal for me to do. I do remember how to crawl too, though I never liked that. If I couldn’t do 100 m with all that, I probably deserve to drown
I think just “freezing” would be the most common reaction unless one is trained and ready for it. Its one thing to be in a pool with lifeguards handy but another when you suddenly find yourself alone and in danger.
Not everyone is like that. I have been as comfortable in the water as I am on land since I was about 3 years old. I absolutely do not get scared of swimming anywhere and I can literally swim for hours at a time if I need to without any special effort. I once swam so far out into the Caribbean that my party felt the need to send a boat out to find my body but I was fine and perfectly capable of swimming back on my own. I am not a good boater though. I have capsized or been thrown overboard because of inattention four times in Louisiana, Texas, Colorado and Hawaii. It isn’t a big deal even if you aren’t wearing a life jacket. I just take a few seconds to get my bearings and then try to figure out if it is easier to try to board the boat again from the water or just swim to shore.
Here is my favorite swimming beach in the world - Sandy Beach (not nearly as kind as it sounds. It is the spinal injury capital of the U.S. just outside of Honolulu. If the lifeguards let you stay in the water there, you know you are a good swimmer).
You betcha. Every year for work I have to do a swim test of 100 meters in boots, flight suit and uniflated vest in some chilly water, then after the swim I have to blow up the vest orally and float for a while. I’ve been through periods of being in awful shape from recovering from surgery and still it wasn’t a huge deal.
Also attended Navy Dive School (scuba) years ago - and it made me very comfortable in the water.
Yep.
More than anything my survival would depend on the water temperature or the possible situation where I would have to drag somebody with me.
I’ve learned enough techniques for water survival that I wouldn’t be concerned about exhaustion if I could stand the water temperature.
I’d lose the shoes immediately unless I thought I would need them at shore.
Long Pants? Take them off and tie a quick knot in the bottom of each leg. Hold the waistband and take some deep breaths and dip my head under and "inflate the pants. The pants aren’t air tight but they will hold air long enough to add some buoyancy. Repeat breath inflation as needed. For 100 meters I would doubt that I would do this. A pants float is more like something you would do to try to stay afloat for as long as possible if you couldn’t see the shore.
Long Sleeve shirt? Lose it.
Getting tired? Lay on my back and do a back stroke. Or breast stroke at a slow pace.
Getting cold? Crawl stroke. Try to increase speed.
Getting hungry? Swim towards the weeny roasters 200 yards further up the shore. Apologize for lack of pants when I arrive.
Sure, if the water isn’t life threateningly cold, I’d make it. At the very least, i’d lazily back float and kick my way to shore.
If you evaluate my swimming technique, I am absolutely horrible. I never figured out how to breathe between strokes, for example. I’m not slow by amateur standards, but I’d never even qualify to compete.
However, when it comes to endurance, I’m often puzzled by what other people consider challenging. Maybe I’m just buoyant? But it hasn’t changed much with my weight.
In one swim class, we were asked to tread water for as long as possible. At one hour, everyone else had dropped out and the instructor said I should just stop now. I didn’t feel particularly tired; I suspect I could have done four hours, no problem. I honestly have no idea how some people were dropping out at 20 minutes.
For that matter, I can tread water for short times (15+ minutes) using only my arms or only my legs. So, again, I’m a little puzzled by movie plots where someone sinks like a stone just because they have handcuffs on.
At summer camp once, a bunch of friends were taking a row boat out around a lake. There wasn’t enough room in the boat for everyone and I decided I’d swim alongside. We were mostly talking and goofing off rather than trying to make much distance, but we did about three miles (judged by the hiking trail beside the lake) over about two hours. Honestly, I felt no more tired than if I’d walked the three miles (and I’ve walked as much ten miles in one day on flat terrain).
As far as temperature goes… that could be an issue if it’s cold enough. But I grew up swimming in the California oceans and Lake Tahoe, so I’m used to cold. The lake in the above example was a Sierra Nevada lake filled by snow runoff. It was probably 55-60 degrees or so.
You need to learn my Road Runner method, explained above.
How did you know it wasn’t going to hurt you? Water at 50 degrees can lead to unconscious and drowning, heart attack, and something called cold shock.
To answer the actual question: “No. I’m not a particularly good swimmer.” Not sure I could swim to save my life in that scenario. Maybe on the backstroke I could do it and if the water wasn’t super cold. But no guarantees…
Because it happened to me in real life before. I grew up rural Louisiana and was never adverse to swimming in any body of water no matter how nasty or alligator infested it was. However, my best friend almost managed to kill us both when we were 18.
We had extremely heavy rains like they are having in Texas right now that caused extreme flood conditions over the river bottoms (river bottoms are very large floodplains that are forested). People can’t build anything permanent on them because they flood completely every few years.
We were seniors in high school when a really large flood affected the area and the waters rose up right to the edge of his family’s pasture land. You can’t let a good opportunity like that pass you up in my mind even if it February and the water is extremely cold by any standard.
We decided we would take a small boat that he had and ride it from the edge of the pasture, through the woods and then hit the river channel proper even if it was turbulent and dangerous. Everything seemed to go well at the launch site until we got deep in the woods, the currents got completely unpredictable and the boat started taking on water. We couldn’t stop the boat from hitting trees and filling up with water so it eventually capsized and we had to abandon it.
It was getting very dark at that point and the water was freezing by human standards. I don’t know exactly how cold the water was but it was winter and the air temperature was in the high 50’s F during the day. I had no idea where I was but my best friend kept reassuring me that we could swim or walk out of the whole thing in just a few hundred yards. It is a good thing that I believed him because I truly don’t believe we would have made it otherwise. The average water depth was only about 4 feet deep but not consistently. You couldn’t see anything below you and when the terrain dropped, so did you straight underwater. There were also stream beds and deep channels in our path. We had to swim across those in very fast moving water.
We were stuck in that mess for more than 3 hours from early evening until well after nightfall. My best friend constantly collapsed and went under as he got weaker. I grabbed him and pull him up again to keep him from drowning or freezing to death. The only thing that kept me going was his fortunate lies. He always insisted that dry land and help were just right up there - somewhere - and I believed him.
It finally turned out to be true. We saw a distant light and forced our way to it. My legs were also giving out at that point and both of us lost almost all muscle coordination. Somehow we found our way to the edge of the floodwaters and there was mobile home not 200 yards away from it. We forced our way towards it as best as we could and gave the loudest knock that we could before we both collapsed on the steps.
An old widow women answered the door, took one look at our dire situation, and brought us inside. It was obvious that we were in dire straits but she was pretty savvy. She thought about calling an ambulance but there weren’t any close by and the nearest decent hospital was over 35 miles away. Instead, she did the right thing and resorted to frontier medicine. She fired up her bathtub with moderately warm water, stripped us down and put us straight in the tub together (don’t get any dirty thoughts, hypothermia isn’t sexy in the least). That worked to some extent but it took a couple of hours for me to warm up enough so that I could go home. My best friend didn’t fare quite as well. He got true frostbite and couldn’t feel his toes for a few months but he eventually recovered on his own.
We eventually called his uncle and had him pick us up without any elaboration from us. I borrowed some clothes and went home that night. My parents didn’t know anything about that incident until years later.
As a funny aside, a hunter found the boat about two miles deep in the middle of the woods about 4 years later. It still had some of our stuff in it and it didn’t make any sense whatsoever to him how it could be there at all.
I definitely couldn’t do it. I never learned to swim growing up. I tried a few times, but I don’t own a pool nor do I live near a public pool that I don’t find disgusting. For that reason I’m also slightly afraid to go near water at the beach. I don’t like the waves to come up higher than mid-calf for fear of it dragging me in & me drowning.
I know I should really learn; I can’t even float or dog paddle, because it is a very useful skill to know. Even if I have no intentions of being near water one day I might be stuck in a dangerous situation that happens to be near water.
Some time ago there was a thread about how we you can float. I posted that I’ve always been able to float really, really well even when extremely skinny (like, 17 BMI) and many disbelieved me even though some heavy people were saying they couldn’t float well. I’m heavier now but still not overweight. Obviously I’m only an example of one but my floating can’t be down to my weight.
Perhaps it’s actually a beneficial side-effect of asthma - on X-Rays my lungs are permanently 60% inflated, so that could help with bouyancy. Or perhaps it’s just a kink of my body stucture or something. Weight isn’t the end of the story.
I can actually read a book while floating. Perhaps I’ll have someone take a video this summer to prove it!
I learned to swim in a 25 yard pool (just under 25 meters). I swam on the swim team for a couple of years because my parents made me do it (I had zero interest, and was lousy at speed). But breaststroke or sidestroke or elementary backstroke, I could certainly do 100 meters as long as speed is not an issue and the water isn’t too choppy.
I can manage a float for a pretty good length of time (this is probably helped by the fact that I’m packing more lighter-than-water body mass than is generally healthy :D).
I had one practice lesson of swimming with clothes on, back in Year 9 of school. (Whatever that equated to in the US schooling scheme, I do not know.) It was quite tough then, and that was just a few widths of the swimming pool.
However, back in year 6, I was able to swim about 50 meters or so.
Could I swim myself to safety? Depends on the distance. 50m or less? Probably. 50-200m? Possibly? Above 200m? Who knows?
I’d probably be in trouble. I am not a strong swimmer, I do better froggy swimming than any other stroke. Not sure if that’s an actual swimming stroke but it’s just as described, swimming like a frog. I don’t mean dog paddling because that’s not a very effective means of swimming, you kick up a lot of water and expend too much energy. I was nearly drowned in a swimming class when I was a kid in Ohio so I quit the class. Then we moved to Florida and lived near the beach so I essentially taught myself to swim. I do not like to have my face in the water, I don’t like the feeling of water going up my nose and I always choke so I can only swim strokes where my head is out of the water.
In addition to my poor swimming, I am also not in the best of health and fitness and probably would not have the endurance to swim that far. I am also sensitive to the cold so if that water was chilly that might be too much for me.
So basically, I probably wouldn’t be in that boat in the first place.
I refuse to use** tapu**'s swimming method. 
Salt water no problem, a fesh water lake I would be iffy. At 50 I feel pretty certain I could have done it. At 67 and not good at treading water I am not so sure. I had to swim about 1/2 that distance two weeks ago and I scared the shit out of myself. I panicked a little bit and got out of breath stroking too hard. Luckily I made it far enough to tough bottom with my feet. I was totally out of breath for a few minutes.