Kendra is not totally afraid of water. She’ll spend all day in the pool if she can. She’ll also swim in any stream, river or lake she can get to. But she refuses to get within 10ft of any body of water that connects to the blue ocean. At the beach, she is nervous and under constant distraction from the incoming waves. And you can forget yachts. Absolutely none, nada, zilch on open water boating.
Thanks to the JAWS series of movies, Kendra is afraid of sharks. And since sharks inhabit the deep and the shallow blue water, she refuses to go near it. Her 10ft minimum distance is because of come mathematic calculation she has done that determined how far a shark can put itself out of water and onto shore using its momentum.
As you can imagine, this can lead to some very serious problems for a professional model. She’ll never be in the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated if she can’t put on the bikini and lounge in the surf, and SI is a goal for every model, so that is why she enrolled in my Hydrotherapy class.
Luckily for me, I get to go on a ‘field trip’ to the beach, just her and I.
Here we are at the beach house maintained by the Occidental Tush Institute. The cottage is mounted on stilts and the water actually flows underneath it as the tide comes in. This proved very challenging for her to even go near the front of the house on the first day of our stay. After about six hours of getting used to the sounds of the water, she eventually made her way out to the front deck and stood just like that for close to four hours before darkness fell.
This looks as though it may be a week-long job. So I’ll say goodbye to you all, for both Kendra and I, for the weekend and we’ll see you next Saturday with her results.