~130 swimmers ready at the start line. All the swimmers (~130) line up for the traditional group photo. Next we'll be broken into groups of 20, each with a color coded cap. Then we'll be started 5 minutes apart for each group. In the photo below, our red hatted group gets ready to swim out to the start line. (I'm in the silver sleeved wetsuit.) The swimmer on the left edge of the photo is going to have a tough swim (& lose a few pounds.) Great guy that he is, he finished, toweled off then headed off to an out of country flight later on in the afternoon. The Red Wave gets ready to move out to the start line. Lynn and I get ready to round the turn to the finish line. (My arm is the splash to her left and below the light blue kayaker.) The route we swam and that Lynn flawlessly navigated. Meanwhile, my oldest grandson is looking thru his camera's viewfinder trying to spot my arm and Lynn's kayak, while Dad, on the right, is using ...
I've had the privilege to honor the following fallen Navy SEALS over the past three Tampa Bay Frogman Swims: - 2016 HMCS (SEAL) Theodore Fitzhenry - 2017 CDR (SEAL) Job Price - 2018 SOC (SEAL) Chris Kyle And this year is even more special. Why? First off, there's a bit of pertinent family history. I joined the Army in 1972 to become a cryptographic technician. (The Army Signal School produced about 200 Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine cryptographic techs per year during that time frame. And the technology has evolved very rapidly since then.) After I got out of the service, my sister Kathleen joined the Army and became a "ditty bopper", slang for a Morse Code intercept operator (think Military Intelligence for radio communications). After a long-ish while in school Kathleen wound up in Berlin, when it was still East/West. One of her buddies was Diana Pike. Diana had a son, Christian Michael, born the day before Kathleen's birthday in 1981. Christian would, like ...