I’d say that qualifies as a pool 
I can not remember being unable to swim.
I went with 3&4 and I don’t know for sure.
All 7 kids and parents can swim including all bazillion relatives around the country.
Should be mandatory IMO unless a mental health excuse.Babies don’t really have many of those and infants learn real easy.
I have my PADI SCUBA license and have been in/on the water one way or the other all my life, several ‘almost drowned’ cases but I still don’t fear it. Lucky I guess.
There was a swim school at a local person’s house that was on a lake. It was certified by the Red Cross and it was great. The had a pier that sectioned off a swim area into beginner, intermediate and advanced.
My earliest memory is of being in the pool at my grandparents’ house. I also remember taking swimming lessons at the community pool and being in the “Guppies” class and graduating to “Tadpole”.
I checked “the ocean” in the poll, but technically it was Long Island Sound. Still ocean-style salt water, but much less turbulence and wave action.
It’s actually hard for me to decide where I actually learned to swim. I took lessons at the YMCA as a kid, but I think I could actually swim before that, having learned when we went to the beach on the aforementioned Sound. Crescent Beach, in Niantic CT. Some of my favorite childhood memories.
In the ocean, I was born on Cape Cod and according to my parents, could swim before I could walk.
I live in NSB now, still very sharky.
When I was little I swam in “The Lagoon”, which was an excavated inlet on the Jersey shore. They gave me a kapok-filled life vest to paddle around in.
My Uncle: Is he okay out there, swimming alone?
My Dad: Of course! He’s wearing a life jacket!
After I came out, my Dad threw the life jacket in to show hoiw buoyant it was.
It sank to the bottom.
The pool in my Jr. High School. I wanted to learn to swim, I knew the theory of doing it, I just never really got the chance to practice it until 7th grade.
Cliche: My dad, who was my troop’s scoutmaster, threw me in the drink during a Camporee. “Oh, how fun everyone. Look at my son crying and drowning.” Jerk and a half. :mad:
Sorry, the ocean is a completely different area where I grew up, and no one learned to swim there (too much surf). Southold Bay is no more part of the ocean than South America is part of North America.
We had a pond out back on the ranch learned to swim there after almost drowning there.
My mother took me to infant swim classes at a pool in the basement of a Methodist Church. Yes, they had a real pool, not just a baptismal.
I don’t remember not knowing how to swim.
Lake Michigan and lessons at the Y. I spent more time in Lake Michigan as a kid so I chose that option. I did spend a large amount of time in the Pacific Ocean growing up as well, but I’m pretty sure I kept within wading distance until I knew what I was doing.
Mostly.
Outdoor public swimming pool at 7:30am on Saturday mornings with some college age instructor, Calvin & Hobbes style.
The ocean? That’s freakin’ hard core, man.
The university I work at used to have a swim test - undergrads couldn’t graduate until they’d passed. They stopped doing it in 2006. I think it’s kind of a shame. While there’s nothing academic about it, it’s an important life skill that I think everyone should know.
I was really shocked when I found out that you can join the Navy (at least as enlisted personnel in certain rates) without really knowing how to swim. If you can float for 5 minutes, you’re in. WTF. Shouldn’t that be a requirement for everyone, regardless of your job?
When I was 5, my mother signed me up for swimming lessons at the local community pool, but when she took me there on the first day, I was so afraid that I refused to get in the water. A year or two later, she signed me up for a summer day camp which included swimming instruction; for some reason I was less fearful then and learned in the pool there.
I can swim in the sense that, if thrown into the deep end, I won’t drown, and I theoretically know the various strokes; I learned in the pool. In practice, the fastest way I travel in water is the doggy-paddle. And my doggy-paddle isn’t very fast.
I have no idea. I’m guessing lake or river. Family did that kind of shit when I was tiny.
I learned at Angle Lake, near Sea-Tac Airport, back when that area was practically in the boonies. We rented a house on the lake, not too far from a county park on the same lake, so we swam both there and at home. We used to beg to go swimming as soon as the weather permitted us to shuck our coats.
We also went out to the ocean several times, and despite the fact that I nearly drowned there once when the undertow got me, I still love the water in all its forms.
We moved from Angle Lake when my youngest sister was still a baby. She was afraid of the water for some years but now participates in the New Year’s Day Polar Bear Swim by jumping off a pier into Puget Sound with a bunch of her friends and kids, too.