No. I am a land-based mammal ONLY. I had swimming lessons when I was young. Putting my head underwater was no big deal, but I was never able to open my eyes underwater. I hated the lessons so much, I never finished with them.
Decades later, I foolishly went rafting on the Rogue River in Oregon with a friend who knew how to swim. Our raft went over a small waterfall (maybe 3 or 4 feet high?) The raft dropped and, separated from it, we went flying into the river. I plunged into the drink and did what came naturally: panic. I sank slowly, paralyzed with fear, waiting for my life to flash before my closed eyes. My worst fucking nightmare was a reality and I figured I was dead.
Needless to say, we were both wearing life jackets, but it took me several seconds to remember what someone had told us: lean back like your lying on a recliner. I did this and within a few seconds rose to the surface. I wasn’t nearly out of breath, but the current was strong enough to drag me back under. No panic this time, just a resumption of reclining. Lesson #1: just because you’re wearing a life jacket doesn’t mean you will be saved.
Someone in another raft came and fished us out. Still in shock, I did not want to move once we got to shore. Lesson #2 isn’t “never get off the boat”; it’s “never get on the damn boat in the first place.”
Yes. After a near-drowning experience when I was 7 or 8 years old, I was determined to learn how to swim.
I took all of the Red Cross swimming lessons from ages 9-12, from Beginner to Advanced Beginner to Intermediate to Swimmer. I also went to the local pool just about every day in the summer growing up. I remember being required to swim across the deep end in order to be allowed to swim there and use the diving boards.
In Boy Scouts I got the Swimming merit badge, Lifesaving merit badge, and BSA Lifeguard certification.
In high school I joined the swim team and was a competitive swimmer for 3 years. I also got my Red Cross lifeguard certification. In college I got the Red Cross Water Safety Instructor (WSI) certification. This summer I plan to renew my BSA Lifeguard certification once again—I’ve kept this certification current for the past 16 years or so.
I’m also a certified scuba diver with over 60 logged dives.
After my separated shoulder due to a ski accident last year, I’ve recently started swimming laps again 1-2 times a week at the YMCA near my office. I’ve also done some distance swimming: my longest was 2 miles across Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island for the annual Save-the-Bay swim. I’ve done this swim twice.
I can swim passably well with a slow breaststroke, keeping my head above water if not wearing goggles or coming up for breath every 3 strokes with goggles. 20+ laps of the pool is no problem and I like to think that if I fell off a boat in good weather I could keep myself afloat and swim a short distance to safety. But I’m a sinker, so always have to expend effort just to stay at the surface.
No, I cannot swim, not in any meaningful way. I can dog-paddle in an emergency but that’s barely swimming.
I had a similar experience, with the opposite effect. When I was 10 or 11, my family was visiting the ocean coast; I was climbing around on the jetty, and got washed off by a freak wave. I spent a couple of minutes being thrashed and battered by huge waves against the rocks, until I very fortunately was thrown within arm’s-length of a fisherman who was able to grab me.
Before then, I was a decently functional swimmer. After that, I was unable to go into water any deeper than a bathtub without triggering a severe panic reaction. So, no more swimming for me. I repeatedly tried to overcome it, but nothing doing. The traumatic experience was just too severe: paralyzing flashbacks to being helplessly tossed like a terrified cork in the unforgiving ocean.
I now have two kids. Here in the Luxembourgish school system, swimming is a mandatory sport activity, with regular visits to dedicated pools and an actual teaching curriculum. Both girls can swim like dolphins. On holidays, I am able to go into the pool to supervise their play, but my feet have to be able to comfortably touch the bottom. If it’s deep enough that the water is starting to touch my chest, the phobia-panic begins to overwhelm.
Sucks, but that’s the way it is, and I don’t see it ever changing.
In principle, who could disagree? But here in the UK, there are always over-confident (or over-refreshed in the pub) people who think it would be fun on a hot day to swim in the nearest river, oblivious to tides and currents and obstructions under the water, or simply the shock effect of cold water. Not seen again until they’re fished out in the estuary.
As for me, well I can swim, badly, having never really been taught much technique (but I did once manage a day’s snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef). These days I just potter up and down the small pool where I live, using my own back-sculling stroke that was the only comfortable position I could find when I had a sciatica. I suppose that tots up to about 5-600 metres at a time.
Yep, Mum sent me for lessons from the age of 4, but also, everyone learns at school from the age of about 5-7 in the UK, it’s part of the national curriculum. I don’t know anyone who can’t swim.
As a kid I’d spend summers at our country cottage near a lake and that was undoubtedly where I learned to swim at a young age, though I have no recollection of how I learned. Good thing, too, because I once fell in the lake while running across a dam that forms one of its boundaries. It was a non-issue other than getting wet.
That was me. Except I did it more than once, and also had an attraction to just about any pond or body of water nearby. Which is why the family started teaching me to swim at around 3 or 4 in an informal manner. There was never a problem of fear - if anything, the opposite and I had to be taught caution around the water.
Never had formal swim classes. I did learn some named strokes just cause I thought doing so was fun but really enjoyed just swimming entirely underwater. Caused a bit of a problem at summer camp one year where, because I didn’t have a fancy certificate, I was deemed unable to swim and not allowed to go further than knee deep and strapped about with flotation devices. I don’t remember how that got straightened out exactly, somehow I got permission to demonstrate my ability to swim and did so to the satisfaction of the camp director. One camp counselor still couldn’t believe one could swim without fancy official certificates but at least I was allowed to actually swim.
Did try out for the school swim team at one point - the coach said my technique needed work but I could have joined. The problem was that the coach was an advocate of using diet to improve performance in a manner where I would have had to eat entirely different than the rest of the family for the season and my parents were highly suspicious of the altered eating habits, fearing it would set me up for an eating disorder so nope, didn’t join the team.
My parents taught me (and my sister) how to swim when I was seven in a nearby lake. Later that summer, we went on vacation to the coast of North Holland, the first time I saw and swam in the ocean. The surf from the Northern Sea on the Dutch coast usually is very rough, even on calm and sunny days, so this was a good lesson for me as a beginner, and at the end of the vacation I swam like a fish. I never had problems with putting my head underwater, just the opposite, my parents still use to joke about the fact that I was more underwater than above, because I liked diving so much. A short time later, we had swimming lessons at school in the communal pool, but I was one of the kids who already knew how to swim and was allowed to have fun in that class.
I’m still a good and persevering swimmer, but I only can do breast or backstroke. When I try butterfly or freestyle, I look like a drowning dog.
No. Never been more than waist deep in the ocean, only been in a swimming pool maybe 3 times in my life. (Last time I was that deep in the ocean was around 35 years ago, last time I was in a swimming pool on a similar time frame). Swimming is not something that has had any relevance in my life.
Yeah, poor form, but I can swim. SCUBA diver, sort of have to know the basics of staying on TOP of the water too.
My wife is an excellent swimmer. We’ve done a number of ‘beach’ vacation, but mostly hang out around the pool. We might play in the ocean a bit, but like just hanging at the pool and reading.
Yes, I can swim. Swimming seems as natural as walking to me, and I don’t have any memory of learning to swim. Or learning to walk, for that matter. I suppose I first swam in the creek behind our house, or a nearby stock pond. When I was maybe six years old we moved down the road a couple of miles and my parents got an above-ground swimming pool so I probably swam more often then.
Yes I can swim, and quite well. I swam for two years in high school, and for the last 24 or so years as a Masters swimmer. I have a couple of Masters top 10 times, mostly for the 200 butterfly.
I recently swam the Strait of Gibraltar, which was about 10 miles. I have a 9 mile swim coming up in July.
Swimming is the only exercise I actually enjoy doing.
I never learned butterfly, and have never tried. I hate the splashing around my face with the crawl, and i just don’t do the strokes that are even splashier. When i was younger and had less sensitive eyes and ears, i liked to swim completely underwater for extended periods of time. And i guess i still enjoy snorkeling. But when i don’t have fins, i do sidestroke for speed, backstroke to relax, and a modified breast stroke or even a dog paddle when i want to see where i am going.
That’s not to say that you can’t swim in any of them – and I have swum in all of them, and live to tell the tale. But you have to respect the fact that they’re not swimming pools; that currents can kill you, even currents you can’t see; and that currents in what you think of as small streams can be much stronger than you are, and if you lose your footing in knee-deep water you may suddenly be moving downstream entirely out of control and unable to get your feet back under you. Also that bottoms may drop off suddenly and put you out of your depth entirely within a step or two of wading areas; and that the water may be much colder than you expected just below the surface, or in patches, and that cold water can also kill you really fast.
They fish people out of the Finger Lakes every year who thought that they were swimming pools. Or they don’t fish them out; sometimes the bodies are never found.