Coupeville Sports

   So, if you leave wet shoes outside and it freezes, the shoes don’t stay soft and pliable? Who knew…

“Hmm … it appears to be a wee bit nippy out here.”

Well, that was … interesting.

Thursday morning, 10:15 AM, Penn Cove came for me. Hard.

Day 221 in the water started with a surprise. My “water shoes,” the hiking boots I wear to protect my toes from the rock and mussel-encrusted shoreline, were frozen.

Not just covered in frost. Frozen.

In between battles with Penn Cove, the shoes sit on my back deck. During the summer, they dry out. During the fall, not so much.

Today, with the windshield on my car still frozen over and frost on the ground, they were solid. As in hard to get on my feet and hard to tie the (also frozen) laces.

A smarter man would have called it quits at that point and gone home for the year.

I am not that smarter man.

So, into the water I went, after getting my usual weird stares from passing motorists as I waited to cross the road in front of my house and head down the Hill O’ Death.

You would think they had never seen a guy in a swimsuit before.

Was the water cold? It’s always cold.

But I generally don’t have frozen shoes, which means I generally don’t get 75% done with my underwater run only to have one shoe pop off my foot and head back to shore by itself. As I hop madly on one foot trying to catch it.

The guys on the mussel rafts could be seen in the background, nodding and mumbling.

“Yep. He finally lost that last piece of brain.”

But, the story ends well.

I got my shoe back. Didn’t cut my foot up. And my fingers only hurt really, really badly for several minutes afterward, even with a warm shower.

Tomorrow would be magical day 222. My brain says no.

But I just lost that last piece of my brain, so…