Evanston, Friday, July 22

Joe, who works for a living, could not come with us on Tuesday and will not be around for our usual Saturday swim was jealous about not swimming with us at Evanston. He did have some time this morning early and Evanston was forecast to be relatively flat, which it was, so I agreed to ditch my usual morning outdoor pool swim and accompany him to Evanston. Again the concern was water temperature and the remote data was confusing so the best way to find out was to go. My guess was that nothing had happened since Tuesday to warm up the water but there were some wavy periods which would tend to mix the pockets and thermoclines making the whole swim somewhat colder but not frigid. I was right, we had a uniform 61, which wasn't all that cold, especially given the warm air.

The interesting thing was the fog on the water. There was about a 10 foot layer over the water, not the nearby land. We could see the partly sunny sky clearly as well as buildings and trees by the lake. But we could not see horizontally very far, even the near wall was hard to see. The far wall was invisible until we were almost there and from the beach it appeared that the lakeshore had grown into the lake overnight complete with large trees. We finally realized that this illusion was behind the far wall that was in the fog but the farther trees were high enough to be out of the fog making them look closer than they really were. Normally Joe is faster than me but with my magic pants and effort I was able to keep up with him the during the swim until almost the end so we would not lose track of each other in the fog.