Harbor Springs Coastal Crawl

On August 13th, I ventured up to the lovely town of Harbor Springs, Michigan for the 24th annual Coastal Crawl.

MI map — Here’s the lower peninsula of Michigan. It kind of looks like a hand with the thumb by Flint and the pinky just west of Traverse City, doesn’t it? If not, humor me… Harbor Springs is under the pin.

There was a 1/2, 1, 2, and 3 mile option and I chose 3 mile because, well, I’m me, and because I drove 8 million miles in the dark to get there, probably should get my money’s worth.

The weather was amazing–the days before had been windy with a small craft advisory keeping boats in–but the morning of the swim was calm, sunny, and warm. Even the water–reportedly 68 degrees, felt much warmer.

The swim course went from the end of the bay and out and around the peninsula (picture above) and then back. Swimming along the coast in super clear water was amazing… the bottom of the lake would drop away into dark blue nothingness and then get shallow with cool ripply patterns on the sand. It felt like I was flying over sand dunes. The huge old houses and sailboats along the shore were pretty. I got so caught up in the scenery, I nearly forgot what I was doing until I came around the peninsula and the waves knocked some sense into me. It was such a nice place, I could have kept swimming past the finish but the flamingos (picture below) told me to get out.

Me with a few of the Traverse City Masters swimmers

There was a small snafu with the timing system. It seemed to reassign all of our times and gave a few people some superhuman times. My time, about 6 minutes slower than I expected, caused me a minor existential crisis but I kept it pretty well hidden. I think. We stopped at a brew pub on the way home, maybe that helped. The final results were unscrambled and posted a few days later.