The lake stabilized slightly after this week’s heavy rain and warm weather, giving us a 35F water temperature reading by L1. This is was much preferable to the 25F air temp at 7:00am, so I wasted little time getting in for a swim.
I’d done a fair amount of pre-swim prep to blunt the impact of the cold water, so I was able to acclimate fairly quickly and get swimming right away. There were some smaller high volume swells that were breaking visibly at Oak Street Beach, but I didn’t really notice them in swim.
I stuck with my usual routine of hugging the shoreline to the 1/8 mile mark before turning around and doing a long loop back to L1 – so just over 1/4 mile. Once out, I changed as quickly as possible to stave off the cold. I didn’t really have a bad afterdrop, but my hands were constantly getting painfully cold during this process. Fortunately, I still had some hot water in my thermos which helped restore function to my fingers.
Happy 2026!
