Just keep swimming.
Walking won’t help much.
Was up in the air on if I wanted to put a big pink emotive cloud behind Selkie's head, but I'm a little afraid of overdoing that visual gimmick the way the symbolic image cuss words got to be a bit overdone and tired. I think her expression works without it anyway.
I hope for Todd’s sake he already knows how to swim. We’ve never seen him swimming with Selkie, have we? I don’t think we have.
And that look on Selkie’s face in the last panel. <3
I assume most adults can swim. There’s a big difference between swimming and scuba diving though I imagine. 😀
Yes to both counts.
You ever read the Rowan of Rin series, though? There’s a plot point where one character who grew up with these… well, fantasy-style gypsies I guess is the easiest way to characterize them… he can’t swim, because by the time he joined the main group of people, he was old enough (still preteen, if I recall) that he’d’ve been laughed at unmercifully having to take swimming lessons with the babies. Because every person in the main group is taught ALL the skills, early.
And because of that fear of being laughed at, he lacked a critical skill when the group of them tried to accomplish the mission in the first book. It’s interesting because each member of the group is whittled away by a fear (the plot being “look at little scared Rowan, good-for-nothing who’s nevertheless more able to face his fears than all you big strong heroes”), and this character is not dealing with a current fear but with the after-effects of a fear he let fester his whole life, the fear of being teased or not measuring up to the rest of the group.
Good series. Emily Rodda’s writing is quite enjoyable. I wish she’d take some of her world-building (the Deltora series, primarily) and turn the kiddie stories into editions aimed at teens or higher, because as much as I appreciate books for kids and for Young Adults, I think her material gets a bit bogged down by the “only kids wouldn’t figure this out immediately” puzzles she adds all over the place.
Yea but isn’t that like a reflex thing? Drop someone into water and unless they have a panic freakout or there’s like huge waves, they’ll be fine.
When I was in college, I took a swimming course for the physical education credit. We had a girl in our class who had never learned to swim and was scared, but wanted to brave that fear.
I think the goal the professor gave her was to be comfortable jumping off the diving board by the end of the semester, but it may have just been going into the deep end.
Either way, even though she -wanted- to overcome it and was determined not to let fear stop her, it still took her that entire semester to get to the point where she could tread water in the deep end. Can’t say I’d really call that a “reflex.”
Dog paddling is what you end up with by reflex, not the kind of swimming you need to do if you’re going to do SCUBA.
You can learn to SCUBA in less than a week; many people do it on cruise ships and on trips to Hawaii (this is how my wife learned.)
Usually a couple trips to a pool, lots of indoctrination as to rules and procedures, a couple dives, and you’re openwater certified with PADI (which you need to buy air)
You don’t need to be a good swimmer to dive, but it helps and is a safety thing– most of swimming involves proper breathing and SCUBA kinda trumps all that unless you have an emergency. Underwater maneuvering is more like what Selkie does underwater anyway.
I grew up in a beach resort town in Michigan since I was 9. It was amazing how many people who were born and grew up within walking distance of a beach never learned to swim at all.
Dog paddling is a reflex thing. I learned that just by going in the water. Swimming well requires lessons, but they were low-cost or free, and only a short bike ride (about a half-mile) from home.
Yea by know how to swim I pretty much just mean able to get from one side of the poil to the other without drowning.
Erm… I do not believe all humans would be able to do that just by throwing them in. I can’t even say at least half would. We may look like and act like animals but instincts for swimming…? Eh… Let’s just say I’d never test that theory on anyone I know or any of my kids.
Oh, I tested it in a pool with my kids. Even the one year old went into maximum dogpaddle before Mom decided to “rescue” her.
We taught both of ’em early– my son is like a fish in the water, the daughter less so, but we didn’t worry about them swimming in a random lake or at the beach.
I heartily endorse randomly hucking them into the water (under controlled conditions) so you know what will happen when it happens accidentally.
My father thought the same thing. Threw me into a lake once to teach me to swim. Two kids had to jump in and pull me out before I drowned. Panicked flailing IS the reflex action!
I believe you. Just find it strange going by my own experiences, staying up for me is easy – could never figure out how to dive because I just could not stay under the water. 🙂
Ha!!!! I have the opposite problem! When I float, my buoyancy point is about 6″-9″ below the surface in salt, lower in fresh water. Always wanted to try the Great Salt Lake, because I heard EVERYone floats.
Until I met my wife I didn’t know that there were people who Didn’t know how to swim.
When I was young and skinny, my natural backfloat position was nearly vertical. My lungs were bouyant enough to keep the nose above the water, but the legs were definitely denser than water. My son, with much heavier muscles, can’t float at all.
It’s only a reflex if you start early enough. You can toss a six month old into a pool and have that as an effective method to learn how to swim. Our mental paradigms solidify fairly quickly though. If you weren’t exposed to something as a child, getting used to it as an adult is extremely difficult.
If learning to swim was a reflex then several years of trying to learn would have been enough for me.
It wasn’t.
I still can’t swim.
It only takes a few dozen hours to get certified by NAUI or PADI
In fact many adults, perhaps even most, can’t swim.
http://time.com/106912/red-cross-swimming-campaign/
My roommate can’t even float. He sinks like a stone… we need to get him swimming lessons at some point. He’s nearly 30.
I can confirm that over half of the people in my company in Navy Boot Camp could not swim, some even had to be pulled out by the instructors, before they drowned.
I was actually under the impression (read it somewhere) that it is not essential to know how to swim for scuba diving (at least, beyond being able to paddle in water), and that those two require two very different set of skills… but I could be way wrong as I have zero experience in scuba diving whatsoever.
This is correct! It helps to know how to swim, because a BIG BIG part of diving is being comfortable in the water, but you don’t NEED to know how. I got SCUBA certified a while back and I’m a strong swimmer and comfortable in the water, so I can’t speak from personal experience, but comfort level and trust in your equipment really seemed to make the biggest difference for the people I know who’ve tried it but can’t swim/can swim but are uncomfortable in deep water.
Basically, the safer you feel, the less likely you are to hyperventilate and burn through your air supply and have to cut your dive short. And you’ll feel less like holding your breath (which is a great way to rupture a lung if you’ve been breathing compressed air) or surfacing suddenly (risk of the bends). SCUBA is fun, but it is also dangerous. It’s all too easy to hurt yourself, and the risks only increase if you panic, so feeling safe and calm is vitally important.
Actual swimming ability is just bonus! 🙂
Underwater? Uhh…this is going to be interesting. I wonder what it looks like.
Todd should probably learn to SCUBA anyway, if nothing else to let him participate when Selkie gets her “water time.”
Finally, we get some information about that colony that Sai Fen mentioned!
I don’t see your curse word/expletive deleted novelty as tired at all. Sometimes it was hard to sort out what a character was saying but I found them to be neat:)
Absolutely agree.
If you’re tired of them, then by all means stop.
But if you’re stopping because of two or three complainers – don’t.
It’s super stupid. Especially when you have to try and guess what it was/is.
If he’s gonna do that, then he should just avoid swearing. I mean his characters already live in a fantasy world already, why not just go balls deep and suggest no one swears ever? It’d fit with the narrative perfectly.
It’s just #$@&%* or ******* really, I have no problem with curse words but don’t feel anything is lost by not spelling them out either.
Well, then Todd really can use some scuba lessons. Or need rewrite his own DNA for growing of his own gills. And because distorting your own body that way isnt a really fast thing, it would be better the first option.
Selkie just broke the squee-meter. 😀
It’ll be interesting to see how Todd has to communicate. Divers usually use writing slates and hand signals, but it’s hard to communicate entire concepts quickly that way.
I’m presuming the Sarnothi speech organs work underwater. Problem 1: Todd doesn’t understand Tensei. Selkie (who understands both) will have to translate. Problem 2: Todd’s speech organs require air to operate. A transducer could be used to make Todd’s speech intelligible outside of his mask. Casio made one about 5 years ago, it basically shifts the frequency of the speech downwards and uses a tactile speaker that is designed to send sound waves through the water. I’ve never used one but I understand they are mostly intelligible to human hearing underwater. I would assume Selkie would be able to hear it as well as she can hear in air.
Simple pickup and a bone conducting earpiece and a sub vocal mic and speaker out tuned to the right frequency works fine.
well, even though i´d never guessed it, it totaly makes sense that their refugee camp is underwater, they ARE an aquatic species after all…poor todd. whether he can swim already by human standards, by sarnothy standards he´ll look ridiculously clumsy.
i´m kinda worried though, on two accounts: how will the other sarnothi´s react to a human adopting one of their own? and not like brown, but a totally clueless one….and even potentially worse: what if someone recognise selkies pattern of spots or whatever passes as familiar features among them and correctly guesses her parentage? her mom is high profile after all…come to think of it, that might be the reason why selkie was chosen for this experiment (to live away from the refugees in a human orphanage) because she was in danger among the others?
Well, they presumably know about a Sarnothi MARRYING a Human, so I’m guessing that they will be ok with it.
I don’t think Plo Quar left Selkie because of some great experiment. I think she left Selkie because she personally feared for Selkie’s life. She certainly didn’t act like she wanted to leave her, nor was there ANY preparation on the part of the orphanage– they fed her peaches, for crissakes.
actually, brown clearly stated earlier that putting selkie in a human orphanage was a social experiment, to see how/if sarnothi orphans could be integrated into human society. i merely wondered if there was a reason *selkie* was the one chosen to be that first attempt
…Selkie? Can you please un-goggle your eyes? They’re scary. 😀