Making Waves
ON AN ABSURDLY picturesque Thursday evening at Encinitas’s Moonlight State Beach, a stretch of white sand on the coast of Southern California, 50 of us circled up under a 100-foot-tall palm tree. Bryan Mineo, an enthusiastic 37 year old with the abs of a Marine and sleeve tattoos that reflect his dual passions in life—the ocean and music—gave us our brief. Sprint to the ocean with buoys, swim for 500 yards, exit to pick up beach trash, dive back in the water for another 500 yards, and emerge to pick up more litter. Rest, then repeat.
For the nonprofit One With the Ocean (OWO), the world’s largest open-water swim group, it was just another Thursday night “SLOG,” or what Mineo, OWO’s founder, described as the swim version of the Swedish fitness trend of “plogging”: jogging plus (picking up) trash. A random
