Truly. Asolutely unacceptable!! If your eyes are supposed to be on the water, there's no excuse for them to be anywhere else. There aren't a lot of things that I'd make a fusd over but that would definitely be one of them - a BIG freakin' hairy deal!.

After reading that, my philosophy will be to employ my own lifeguard for my group. That would be me or some other capable swimmer in my group. If I made a stink about everything on that list, I can only think of ONE public pool that comes close to being halfway OK.

When I was about 10-years-old, we'd jump off bridges into slow moving rivers in Yosemite. My brother (12) was the designated lifeguard. Nobody wore suitable trunks. Whatever was deep down in the water, nobody knew. Today, I'd be scared out of my mind to allow my kid do what we did.

Good info, by the way it was posted here about one year ago ( http://forums.equipped.org/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=205385
) I'm not saying this thread is redundant though, the opposite is true. This is too important info to be lost in the archive of the forum.

I've witnessed a quite opposite situation once (the later recollection of things happened). A small group of teenage and smaller kids from one family were playing in the lake and were behaving extremely laud. Fooling around like jumping up and down in the shallow water with their hands up and screaming like crazy, including a drowning imitation play. People on the beach were kind of trying to adapt to this noise for an hour or so (we've moved farther from the water with our little baby trying to get a nap). There were no LGs on duty at that evening time. Nobody, even children in the water in close proximity of the drowning boy were understanding that something wrong is going on with one of the older kids, perhaps because his behavior has changed very little when he has started to drown for real, until one of the younger kids came out of the water and told his parents that his cousin has disappeared. When parents started to search for him asking other children and calling his name it was a quiet moment when the boy has managed to jump to the surface for the last time and scream indistinguishably. Then his head disappeared forever. Several men jumped in the water immediately. The boy was only around 50-70 feet from the beach. However, only after about 5 minutes of searching the water one of the men has finally managed to locate the boy and take him to the shore. Someone has called the ambulance. One of the men has immediately started the CPR, but of course it was too late already.

My triathlon team swims a couple times a week at a nearby lake. Its an open invite for the team but we are pretty careful about their skill level to swim at least 500 yards straight. Plus most new people will use a wetsuit for buoyancy. We've moved location a few times to be as accommodating as possible to new open water (OW) swimmers so the route has as many bug outs as possible to shore and no motorized boats.

As there are many people coming into triathlon or need experience with OW, every other weekend we run a much larger group and put as many kayaks in the water as possible to help out. They have to wait for that kayak support weekend if they are nervous but many of us are training for our own races and can't waste our training time by being personal sitters for new swimmers. We have to get our distance in too.

Its about as safe as you can get in OW minus personal responsibility.

Slightly off-topic but still relevant I think, the Province of Ontario has this program, which would be nice to see in all schools:
http://www.lifesavingsociety.com/default.asp?PageId=795

As valuable as the program is, it doesn't eliminate the need for intensely focused eyes on dry land.

I view lifeguards as similar to the Police. They are nice to have around and can certainly be a great help when there's trouble, but they are not personal bodyguards.

When my family is swimming, I'm constantly counting heads, keeping track of my own kids. Lifeguards can't keep track of who's in or out of the water and know when someone is missing.

I've seen guards do a search of the water in a lake swimming area several times, once was a drill and the other was a false alarm. They line up shoulder to shoulder and sweep parallel to the shore line, starting at the shore and working their way out in successive passes. When they reach deep water, they dive, swim along the bottom, back up a bit and repeat. It struck me that unless there was a point last seen to start searching from, the real thing would most likely be a body recovery.