Yes; all strokes (although my butterfly is terrible and I never do it); no*; yes.
*I do hate diving boards, so you could argue that I am a little scared of the water.
I didn’t end up getting stung, thankfully. I’ll explain the scenario. We were in the Keys, swimming and snorkeling and scuba diving in some cases (my brother let me try scuba diving for the first time that trip, yay!). I was swimming sans snorkel or scuba gear, and my brother called to me from the boat letting me know he’d put up a dive flag indicating that there were divers in a certain geographical location and not to swim out of that area. So I’m swimming forward, looking back over my shoulder at my brother to tell him I understood, and when I turned around squish went my face into the basketball-sized bell of a jellyfish. I freaked out and pushed the jellyfish away by the bell.
Scared the beejesus out of me but I was none the worse for wear.
Yes, I know how to swim.
yes
freestyle, backstroke, butterfly
no
yes
You’re welcome.
What monstro said.
Yes I can swim. Freestyle, Backstroke, doggie, and Butterfly I think, the froggy looking. I always confuse it with Breast… But I can’t do the crazy one that Phelps is good at.
I dislike the water. Just… don’t really like it. Loved it as a kid though, and was on the swim team.
Then I got fat and embarrassed of my body. So yeah. That stopped the Pool stuff, and then I just kinda realized I didn’t like being IN the water, but I like being AROUND water. Like I enjoy looking at the beach, or a lake, but not SWIMMING in it per say. But I could probably still freestyle across the short end of the pool. Backstroke probably the full thing lazily if you’ve got the time. 
I loved the “float on your back” style.
Yep, I can swim well.
I’m not quite Silenus, but that’s more due to my high school having swim practice at 6:30 am in a heated outdoor pool in the winter than any ability to swim. I said “fuck that!” when they told me about the pool, and stuck with football and track.
But yeah, I did swim somewhat competitively until I was 14 - several of my peers went on to the Texas 5A finals and quarterfinals, and one actually got a swimming scholarship to a Big 12 school.
Anyway, I can do all 4 competitive strokes, complete with racing turns. Growing up from about 7 onward (7 was the age that the pool allowed you in without your parents) me and my friends spent about 7-10 hours a day at the local swimming pool, with about 2 of that being swim practice and the rest being general child silliness.
I enjoy swimming and could swim across a pool. I never learned how in any formal setting so I have no idea what my swimming stroke is. No fear of the water although I recall I was afraid of swimming when I was a young boy.
I can literally swim, bob, float forever, especially in salt water (well if it’s not too cold or too choppy). I can do what I call the upside down turtle even in fresh water: Head, hands and feet above water while floating on my stomach. It took me years to understand how people could actually drown in still water.
When I was a kid I liked to just grab onto something and sit on the bottom of the pool for as long as I could. Bliss.
I can still swim three of the four competitive strokes (my butterfly always sucked). I grew up at the beach, swimming in open water. When I was 12 and 13, I was a part of (at that time, at least) one of the best junior lifeguard programs in the US (City of Huntington Beach, CA). I could do 1 mile open water swims, long run/swims, and we jumped off the end of a VERY long pier or swam around it every week, if not every couple of days.
I could still swim as far and as long as I needed to, I think.
My kids learned to swim when they were very young. I think it’s an imperative, especially if you ever plan to sail, motor, fly or even drive (bridge) over water. Imagine surviving the plane crash but drowning because your mom didn’t sign you up for lessons at the Y… :smack:
I can swim. All four of my sons can swim. Both grandchildren can swim. My husband cannot swim. He did the sinking thing as a child.
I can do all the strokes, although I’m not too proficient in butterfly*. Not afraid of water, will put my face in the water and open my eyes (if wearing goggles so my lenses don’t float away).
*My inefficient butterfly is used only when I sense someone coming into the pool area who might want to share a lane. So far it’s discouraged everybody from asking to share mine.
Sure. I couldn’t do anything in any sort of formal swimming competition, but I go in the pool almost every day from May-October. But, I’m mainly playing around, swim underwater for a while, spend some time just kicking, tread water for a while, then swim crawl.
To answer the poll:
I can swim across an Olympic sized pool. I’d prefer to do it swimming underwater, I’d come up in the middle for air, then swim the rest of it. I could do it with the crawl or backstroke.
Afraid of the water? Heck no. I’ll go in anytime you want me to.
Put my face in? Sure, name the time and place. As long as the weather is warm and I’m not at work, I"m likely to be hiking or at the pool.
Yes. In my high school, you weren’t allowed to graduate unless you knew how to swim (naked for the boys).
Can swim pretty decently, not particularly quickly but can swim underwater, even upside down under water, crawl, breaststroke, sidestroke. Don’t like chlorine, don’t like not being able to see a damn thing (very bad eyesight).
Yes, I swim laps for exercise in the summer. I do the crawl, backstroke and sidestroke. I can do the breastroke but I don’t like it. My butterfly sucks. I wear goggles and put my face in the water. I swim a half olympic pool, but I assume I could swim a full olympic without a problem. I usually do a mile in the half-olympic.
I was just thinking the other day that I miss swimming and ought to go again.
When I was in grade school, summers were practically lived at the pool. My mom or one of our friends’ moms would drop us sprogs off at the pool and come retrieve our wrinkled bodies at the end of the day. I did swim team for one summer, but I wasn’t very fast and I generally preferred tooling around to being forced to do crap like the butterfly. It took me a while to get over my backstroke phobia, but I came to enjoy it in still water (I hate being splashed in the face when floating on my back).
I can do the crawl, breaststroke, backstroke, butterfly (barely), and some sort of sidestroke. I can do a backflip if I hold my nose, but I never got the hang of front flips, let alone flip-turns.
I am not at all afraid of the water in the pool. I was pulled down by the undertow and knocked against the bottom by unexpected waves enough as a kid to have a healthy respect for the ocean.
I don’t swim very much anymore. I suppose there’s a pool at the gym, but I’m self conscious about being around people I might know in my bathing suit these days and frankly the thought doesn’t cross my mind very often. Besides, most of the pool is reserved for lap swimming. At my childhood pool, there was plenty of reasonably deep water (4-5 ft) where I could just bounce around, hold my breath and drift, etc.
That’s about the percentage he quoted. So far, in our inquiry, out of 55 people only 3 say they can’t swim. One other added a non-swimming spouse so 4 out of 56. Math-in-my-head isn’t one of my talents, but I think that’s about 93% who swim.
I didn’t mention how I learned. I lived near a lake. I failed swimming lessons 3 years in a row.
Over one winter, I’d think about the movements one has to make to move through the water as I fell asleep each night.
The first trip to the lake in the spring, I ran down the dock (About 8 feet deep) jumped in and swam back to shore. My guardian was half way down the dock, ready to jump in, fully clothed, to save me when I stood up in the shallows.
I was not allowed past the kiddy rope for the rest of the summer, not because I might drown, but as punishment for scaring everyone.
I used to tell people I dreamed how to swim.
No, I can’t really swim. I took several lessons as a kid, but it never really stuck. I am a little scared of the water. My brother and I almost drowned when we were little, while playing in the river. My mother, who was on the shore, watched helplessly, as she can’t swim either. Her boyfriend at the time saved us. But my brother, who took the same lessons as I did, eventually learned.
Can’t really swim, no. I have a fear of deep water caused by an unpleasant childhood incident, and although I can float and can physically do swimming strokes, I struggle with breathing with my mouth/nose right above the waterline. It’s a psychological problem, not a physical one. I’m working on it.
I can do crawl, backstroke, and breast stroke. My husband does a breast stoke with his head up out of the water but I can’t quite get the hang of it. If I’m going to swim, therefore, it’s going to be backstroke, so I can breathe. That’s the only stroke where I could make it across a full-sized pool.
I am afraid of water I can’t stand up in. I have no problem putting my face in the water.
The flodkids are good swimmers, we made sure of that. We live along the Oslofjord and water is a big part of the summer experience here.
I can swim. I don’t know the different strokes, I do the backstroke and the regular old swimming where you kick you feet and swing your arms, turning your head to get a gulp of air.
I guess I’m very much in the minority. I can’t swim at all. Not a lick. If I fell in the water, I guess the laws of physics suggest I would float eventually, but who knows.
I’ve never been a big fan of being in the water, particularly immersing my head. As a result, spending time in a pool has never been much fun, so I just don’t do it. I had some swim lessons as a 4 or 5 year old kid, and might have had some basic swimming ability at some point. I’ll be 41 this summer, and I think I’ve been in a pool twice in the past 25 years.