Beached in San Diego

So... Turns out it's hard to get into the blog game.  I have always been more of an "it's all in the delivery" kind of gal, so perhaps a blog isn't my best medium.  Regardless, I am making a second attempt.  Here it goes:

A few weekends ago I was down in San Diego to coach a lacrosse tournament with three of my coaching friends. The tournament ended on Sunday, but due to flight prices, we were flying out on Monday evening. So, we decided to head to the beach on Monday to catch the last rays of sunshine before plummeting into the dark raininess that is Vancouver winter.

So, here we are on Monday at Pacific beach in San Diego.  It is beautiful! Sun is shining, ocean is roaring, and we're all out there frolicking in the water when one of the girls finds a sand star! Then another, then another, until we have a total of 5 stars amongst us.  So, determined to find my own star, I start wading out into the water, head bent, straining to see the sand so I can pluck a sand star.  It seems totally easy since the water is about 2-3 ft shallow for a good ways out, but inevitably, I get bored and start swimming/splashing around in the water instead.  After swimming around for a minute, I get tired and go to stand up...

There is no ground beneath me...
In fact, the ground is far enough below me that when I submerge my head, I still can't feel the ground.

"Damn, (I'm thinking) there must be a shelf here." and when I look up, my friend, let's call her Sam, is literally 30 ft away from me, standing in 2ft deep water. So, I start casually swimming forward, holding my sunglasses and hair clip in one hand, keeping my head above water. Swim, swim, swim, swim.. try to touch the ground.

Nothing.

And Sam is still 20-30 ft away from me... So now I am thinking... I must have been further out than I thought.  It's pretty hard to gauge distance in the water anyway. So I start swimming a little more aggressively...

but still holding the sunglasses....
 (As an aside, I swam competitively for 8 years...so I'm not a terrible swimmer.)

So I'm swimming a lot harder until I'm pretty tired, and at this point I reach my feet down...and still nothing! Sam is STILL 20-30 ft away from me. Something is up, so to ponder the situation over I flip onto my back to do some kicking. I'm still thinking: I must not be swimming very hard, and I must have been further out than I thought.

Then I flip over to re-evaluate the situation, when I see there's a commotion on the beach. A lifeguard truck is tearing across the beach, sirens ON. I'm thinking: Crazy! I wonder what's going on over there!
but then...
The truck stops at the edge of the water and a lifeguard jumps out baywatch style: shirtless WITH the buoy, and starts running into the water.

Oh no...

it's for me...

the lifeguard is running out to save me... and I probably need to die of embarrassment now... but wait...there's more.

He runs about 10ft away from me off to the side and yells, "SWIM TO ME" with big hand motions.  I take two freestyle strokes, and BAM, there's sand 2 ft under me. So I stand up, and shame-walk the remainder of the way to mr. baywatch...still holding my sunglasses... and appearing to everyone on the beach as a girl who pretended to drown...

Baywatch: "You did a really good job of not panicking out there"
Me: "haha...yeah... I didn't really know I was in trouble..."
Friends on the beach: dying of laughter, video taping the whole thing.

Turns out that the whole beach dipped down close to where we were goofing around, which caused all the waves crashing in to go toward this dip and then back out to the ocean in the equivalent of a river.  At the neck of this river is where I ended up; where the waves kept me forward, but the river kept me back.  Turns out the lifeguards like to call it the "hole," and apparently, during this whole ordeal, the lifeguard tower had been making overhead announcements over the whole beach:
"SWIMMER IN THE HOLE, SWIM PARALLEL TO THE BEACH"
Little did they know, I WAS IN THE OCEAN, and couldn't hear their wimpy PA system, but if I could hear them, then we wouldn't have this gem of a story...
When I almost unknowingly drowned in San Diego...