One Head Too Many

When we have swimmers in the water for our weekly Marathon Swim, the support folks are constantly counting the number of heads.

Today, I thought it would be easy... We had five swimmers coming back from the Island (1.6 km. away), and six staying inside the bay to swim to the Point and Back. We had lots of boats. I was pretty mellow about the operation, knowing that we had strong swimmers, and lots of support boats.

Until I kept coming up with the wrong number count. One, two, three, four, five.... One, two, three, four, five, six... Hang on here... That's one head too many!!!

The culprit? The young loon chick was with us, hunting on her own. Swimming fast, and diving often, she kept popping up in the midst of the swimmers and confounding my mathematics! She surfaced right next to my boat, and then popped up beside David's kayak. Next time, she was right in between two of the swimmers. She treated us to a display of her stretching and flapping her wings, and also to a demonstration of how she can get up on tiptoes and run, wings flapping, across the water. She can't fly quite yet, but that will come.

A great blue heron drifted across the bay above the swimmers on the Point swim, so we were in excellent company out there.