I was born near one and it's my happy place.

I nearly drown in the ocean some time ago and have always had a mild fear of it anyway.

I do like swimming in lakes but only after I've worked up a good sweat on my kayak.

I am fortunate enough to have a pool and am in it most days of the year for cold plunges in the winter and cool downs in the summer.

i have no preference to where i would have swam.

Central Florida has a number of springs where recreational swimming, tubing and canoeing are available

The water is clear and refreshingly cold. Unlike pools and beaches, I actually come out of it feeling clean.

One of the most popular is Itchetucknee where you can rent an intertube and float down a gentle river for hours.

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My heaven.

Ocean has sharks (among other things). Lakes, rivers and springs have gators. As they are much higher on the food chain than I am, I'll just avoid them altogether thank you. When I was younger and living in a gator-free environment, I preferred fresh water lakes/ponds.

I hope they never close! I know they are funding challenged all the time. They are part of the school system. Besides the exercise I have met so many nice people there.

Cold water is painful.

A good Riesling before a cold dip really warms you up! At least it worked in high School.

without a boat between me and it.

Wolf

Wild Willy's Hot Springs may be my favorite, along with more natural springs in the same Mammoth are.

I have not been in a large body of water since.

Some things need to stay covered up!

It doesn't matter what size I am but I generally always have a swimsuit called a tankini.

It has a flowing top that covers everything that it needs to cover including the tummy. I always have a swim skirt with built in shorts with the top too. They might not always be together as an outfit and sometimes I have to purchase them separately.

Just because if I did get invited somewhere I'm a little self-conscious.

Not that I swim much, but I also preferred a pool.
My parents had a pool, but it was only 28' across, so it was a pool but not much of a swimming pool.

around in and keeping cool. Swimming , not really.

...the front left tire of my dad's semi came off (a state trooper was an eyewitness) & his truck rolled over in the median.
As he got bounced around the cab, he broke his kneecap, so no vacation that year.
They took vacation savings, had an above-ground pool installed & paid it off (and then some) with the settlement from the maintenance company's insurance company.

The ocean shore is nice, but swimming in it makes me nervous.

Swimming pools, don’t have to worry about being attacked by sharks or water moccasins !

It reached 80 today.
Going for a swim after gardening.

But I'm a terrible swimmer. The ocean off Oregon is a big no no. Too cold and always rough.

Being in a body of water that has dead bodies, dead fish and both fish and human waste are not my idea of a good time.


It really depends if a pool is actually clean or not if I'll get in it.


I've gotten sick from swimming in a dirty pool as a teenager and I got sick from lake water about 20 or so years ago so I'm really funny AKA cautious about this type of thing.

Water.yuk

Pool. I appreciate your honesty. Love ya

We both went under. My silly husband was laughing pulling the dog out of the water and I grabbed the float. Our dog never did that again. I was so happy we didn't drown. A memory from the old days 💙

Have swam in swimming pools and reservoirs but learned to swim in wild and clean water because of where grew up and now live within Six Rivers National Forest. Many lakes in nearby wilderness areas: Marble Mountains, Trinity Alps and Siskiyous. Frequently backpacked and volunteered many weekends as wildness ranger in Trinity Alps when a USFS employees 40 plus years ago.

Skinny dipped but in private too.

Thank you very much for sharing your post with us.

A couple of decades ago a friend and I were swimming in the ocean in Galveston. After a while we noticed a crowd gathering on the beach maybe 100 feet away. We got out and walked over. A fisherman had pulled in a shark that was at least 12 feet long.

Galveston. Never worried about creatures, only worried about staying on the skies Would I do it now? no way. .

I love being around water. It always relaxes me & makes me feel better. I grew up boating & miss it so much! Before I depart this life, I want to live where I can see water every day. Ocean, lake, river... Nowadays I belong to the neighborhood swim club. A pool will do.

one in Wisconsin though!

...whichever one is paying me more to swim.

I probably started swimming about the time I started walking.
Very strong swimmer in my younger years.
Favorite place to swim was a place called Rainbow Pool, near Yosemite National Park.
There's a waterfall there, and you can swim behind it. The locals know that, but the day visitors have no clue. So all of a sudden you disappear behind the waterfall and they wonder where you went!
There's actually a perfectly formed rock cut out where you can sit. But you have to swim in behind the waterfall to find it.

We had a big pool about mile or less away in Washington Heights as a tween, young teen.

I used yo love to "dive down" and skim along the bottom.

Best experience was an organically shaped pool at a nice hotel in Puerto Rico (a gifted trip) instead of a boring rectangle! Palm trees all around.
Then I'd go, and lie in a hammock between two palm trees, watch, and listen to the ocean! Wonderful!
And of course that gorgeous teal, turquoise water! Even the deep waters further out were a dark but vivid blue.

I'll take the Atlantic Ocean in September.

The air has a hint of salt. The tourists are gone. The restaurants are still open and the locals are thankful for a good summer season.

I used to call it God's bathtub.

The ocean is a thousand miles away and salty and there are sharks and squids and stuff, though I've been swimming in the Gulf of Mexico (which is not the Gulf of America), and it was OK except for some creepy crab-things. Although Lake Superior is cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey I've been swimming there, in the Apostle Islands, though not for very long. Otherwise fresh-water lakes are great - the water is pretty clean and there aren't weird creatures in them except for regular fish. These days I don't swim anywhere, though; I'm too old and wrinkly for a swimsuit and I don't want to scare anyone.

If the sight of me in a bathing suit wasn't so frightening, I would like to swim in the Caribbean. The water there is so beautiful.

for the full figured woman. Just do it and bring out your inner child

But who knows? Someday I may throw caution to the wind and dive right in! I was never much of a swimmer but I did love splashing around in the water.

Water has always had a calming effect on me. That's probably why I love cruises and boat rides so much.

... I've tried cruises. By Thursday, I'm ready to get off the boat. Don't drink or gamble, avoid the buffets.

I have a bathing suit I've had for thirty years. I may have worn it twice. Maybe got it wet once.

... when I was fourteen and trying to sweep the pool, the wind kept rilling the surface and I couldn't make out where I had swept and where the dirt was.

Being clever and stupid at the same time, I came up with a plan: I'd jump in the pool with goggles and sweep underwater!

I needed air, so i got a hose. I needed to be less boyant, so I put a heavy steel stake through a couple of belt hoops. And grinning over my brilliance jumped in at the 12ft end by the diving board.

Hit bottom and tried to take a breath and had a practical lesson in the 8 pound weight of a gallon of water increased by the fact there was around 14,000 gallons in that pool. My lungs were NOT going to draw against that many tons of H2O. I could not get the the stake out of my loops. I had to walk up the incline out of the pool up into the shallows where I pondered while breathing heavy siting on the steps out: how ill thought out my plans were and how close I came to dying. How little traction my feet had on the concrete bottom. How I was never going to let people know stupid I was. What in the world people would think I had been up to when they had found my corpse.

I don't want to be young again. I want to be smarter.