Ha! No kidding. Long ago, we were having a nice summer and in the middle of a La Niña, which supposed increased the water temp. somewhat. So my wife and I went swimming off the ocean side of the peninsula. Just bathing suits. Even then, it was brutally cold.

Before that, I used to board sail in the bay. I gave up on the wetsuit and went with a dry suit.

BTW, I drove through Carmel about 20 years ago with my youngest daughter visiting colleges, and we drove by my grandmother’s just so I could show it to my daughter. Turns out some city organization had bought the house and turned it into a public museum. So we parked and walked through it. Dolores & 8th St, if you’d like to look it up. The Carmel Foundation, maybe? My grandmother had that house built in about 1952. It was something to walk through it almost 50 years later. Smaller than I remembered!

When you consider physical size, the difference is rather great. At age 16, I was about a foot taller than I was at age 10. (all I remember is my recorded height at end of 6th grade, and my final height, around age 16.) And about twice as much in weight at age 16 compared to age 10. I imagine those differences are around the average.

Which reminds me of taking swimming lessons at age 8. During the time I was taking swimming lessons, I went to a pond with family friends. When I overestimated my swimming ability, a teenager rescued me. Fortunately, a placid pond had no wicked tides to overcome.

Santa Cruz has more sandy beaches, and we have some in the Monterey and south area, but there is much more of our shoreline covered with big, jagged rocks. This means that once a person is swept off, they run a strong probability of being knocked unconscious.