What's New Swimmers Guide

March Activities

March was devoted to responding to user "Edits" (checking suggestions made by you all, when you click on those Edit buttons in the listings), following up on leads for new listings, and working on the new site. We did manage to review and update 66 of Washington State's 214 listings, but we've only just gotten into King County, home of Seattle, without having touched any of the listings in Seattle, yet.

Sites That May Interest You:

We use Google and Google Maps to find new listings, but among the other sources that have been helpful, we've been particularly happy with several of the Facebook swimming groups we follow. We follow Did you swim today?, Lap Swimmer of the world, Swimmers United, and Swimmers Over 60 (yes, we qualify). In addition to some wonderful hints for new pools to add to the site, these groups provide members encouragement, reinforcement, and a sense of camaraderie. If you're on Facebook, check them out.

The New Site:

At this point, we're 99% done with the programming for the new site – now we have to do the wrap-around text – About Us, FAQ. The Stats section is done, as is the Add-A-Pool section as it made sense to integrate the programming of that tool with the "Edit" (now "Suggest Change") features of the detail listing page.

At first blush the changes won't appear significant. There's a bit of a face-lift, fonts, colors, etc., and we made some tweaks to the listing details page. The biggest change you'll see is that when you zoom in or out, or drag the map to see a different area, the maps will populate with pins for the new areas displayed.

We've also moved the "50 closest listings" table from the home page to a separate one that will be able to toggle back and forth with the map page. The data displayed in the lists will also repopulate when the map is changed.

The changes you won't see are that we have removed seven layers of background coding that didn't always work smoothly and often required coding patches to make the site work at all; and that the underlying data has also been ported to a new database format that is more flexible and robust than the 2012 edition of SQL Server that we're using on this site.

The new coding and database format will allow us to add the "bells and whistles" to the site that we've been wanting to add for years. One of the first things we hope to do is add sections on the detail listing pages that have notes regarding things you may want to know about the swimming environments in the cities, counties, states and provinces, and countries. These can be as simple as links to government sites that tell you where the seasonal swimming pools that we don't list can be found or unusual customs at pools in some countries that you will want to know before you go – the French aversion to boxer-style swim trunks or the Japanese rules against wearing a watch in a pool there, as examples. 

Database Statistics:

We added 43 new listings to the site in March, but had to delete 14, for a net gain of 29. 

As of March 31, 2024, the database includes 26,257 facilities in 211 countries and 14,690 cities and towns. In total those facilities have 28,865 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ). There are 24,876 listings (94.7% of all listings) with hypertext links to their own, official websites (or to non-official sites that we think may be helpful to you). 

In the site's "Top 10" countries there are 19,306 listings, broken down by country as follows: United States 7,756 (+6 since January), United Kingdom 2,207 (no change), France 1,641 (no change), Germany 1,569 (no change), Spain 1,478 (+3), Italy 1,178 (+1), Canada 1,002 (+1), Australia 954 (+4), Japan 900 (no change), and Poland 621 (-1).

February Site Activity:

Our trip to Patagonia, Buenos Aires, and Santiago was fabulous! We traveled without our laptop, without accessing any of the hotel business centers, and for five days we couldn't even make or receive cell phone calls. It was a "trip" in both senses of the word!

But when we got home … Katie bar the door! It took almost two full weeks to catch up on your edits, additions, deletions, and reviews. We were able to complete our review of the listings in Idaho before we left. And we managed to review eleven of the 218 listings in Washington state. But there's a lot of work to do there, still.

The New Site:

We're down to the short-strokes on finishing up the new site – it could conceivably go online before the end of March, but we're not making any promises. You'll know we've made the changeover as soon as you bring up the site.

Pool(s) of the Month:

The Paris 2024 Summer Olympic Games are only 147 days away, so we thought you'd like to get some idea about the venues for the aquatic events. Although neither of the pools being used for the games is open to the public yet, and we don't have telephone numbers for them, we thought you would like to know about the center of the aquatic universe in July and August of this year. The finals of the swimming and diving events will be held in the Centre Aquatique Olympique. The finals of the water polo and artistic swimming events will be held in the Centre Aquatique Départemental Annette-Kellermann. We'll pick up more information about them when they open to the public, but you can get a good idea of the venues from the websites and Google Map linked photographs in the listings.

Database Statistics:

Given the limited time we had available in February, we added only 16 new listings to the site and deleted ten, for a net gain of only six. We should be able to do better in March.

As of February 29, 2024, the database includes 26,228 facilities in 211 countries and 14,672 cities and towns. In total those facilities have 28,832 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ). There are 24,846 listings (94.7% of all listings) with hypertext links to their own, official websites (or to non-official sites that we think may be helpful to you).

In the site's "Top 10" countries there are 19,292 listings, broken down by country as follows: United States 7,750 (+1 since January), United Kingdom 2,207 (no change), France 1,641 (+1), Germany 1,569 (no change), Spain 1,475 (no change), Italy 1,177 (no change), Canada 1,001 (no change), Australia 950 (+1), Japan 900 (no change), and Poland 622 (no change).

January Site Activity:

Well, we did get the review of the listings in Wyoming completed, but we still have six listings to go in Idaho – and we didn't even get into Washington state, yet. The reason?

We're headed on a two-week vacation to Patagonia via Buenos Aires and Santiago. Planning, purchasing, and figuring out the details that needed to be addressed put us behind on everything. And we're leaving in a couple of hours, so we couldn't put in the time and thought that usually goes into this section of the site. We even cut the month off on the 30^th so we could get this done.

Next month we'll have only two weeks of time to work on the site – we're not taking our laptop on the trip with us – so we'll finish with Idaho and get started on Washington state.

Database Statistics:

We added 43 new listings to the site in January (the same as December) and deleted 17, for a gain of 26; we reinstated one listing that had been deleted a few months ago, so the difference in the number of listings is 27.

As of January 30, 2024, the database includes 26,222 facilities in 211 countries and 14,664 cities and towns. In total those facilities have 28,823 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ). There are 24,840 listings (94.7% of all listings) with hypertext links to their own, official websites (or to non-official sites that we think may be helpful to you).

In the site's "Top 10" countries there are 19,289 listings, broken down by country as follows: United States 7,749 (+14 since December), United Kingdom 2,207 (no change), France 1,640 (no change), Germany 1,569 (-1), Spain 1,475 (no change), Italy 1,177 (no change), Canada 1,001 (no change), Australia 949 (+1), Japan 900 (+1), and Poland 622 (no change).

December Site Activity:

Given the holidays, a death in the family, a dose of COVID, and a trip to the emergency room, we got more done in December than we expected we would. We completed our review of the listings in South Dakota, went through all the listings Northern Ireland, North Dakota, Montana, and got a good start on Wyoming.

Next month we'll continue with Wyoming and move on to Idaho and Washington State in the U.S. and continue on with Ireland (the southern part).

Unfortunately, we're still not ready to put the new site online…

Pool of the Month:

Our Pool of the Month selection for December is the The YAWA Aquatic Centre in Rosebud, Victoria, Australia. Rosebud is on the Mornington Peninsula, about 60 km. (37 miles) due south of Victoria.

Why did we pick this pool over all the others we came across this month? OK, we all like those clean, 50-meter pools kept at good (read "cool") temperatures, but this center stood out for having a variety of pools and temperatures to choose from – check the "Facility Notes" in the listing. And, in addition to being a great facility, the YAWA Aquatic Centre's website is filled with the kind of information we and all swimmers (we think) want to know. The pools are fully described, with dimensions, including depths, and water temperatures. There's a schedule on the site that shows when the main pool is operated in long-course format; when it will be set up in short-course format, how many lanes will be available to the public during every hour of the day, and even when the pool will be unavailable due to the changing of the layout!

After thirty years of collecting information about swimming pools to share, we are so tired of pool websites that spend all of your time pitching memberships, swimming lessons, personal trainers, etc. without supplying any details about the basic equipment. We're beginning to think that the YMCAs and private gyms in the United States are trying to drive yours truly crazy – many limit the descriptions of their pools to the fact that the pool is "indoors" – no dimensions, no temperatures, just "indoors". So, it's hats off to the YAWA Aquatic Centre both for its terrific pool set-up, but also for its information loaded website.

Database Statistics December v. November and 2023 v. 2022:

We added 43 new listings to the site in December but had to remove 21, for a net gain of 22. For the full year, we added 446, but dropped 260, for a net gain of 186.

As of December 31, 2023, the database includes 26,195 facilities in 211 countries and 14,649 cities and towns. In total those facilities have 28,790 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ). There are 24,811 listings (94.7% of all listings) with hypertext links to their own, official websites (or non-official sites that we think may be helpful to you).

In the site's "Top 10" countries there are 19,274 listings, broken down by country as follows: United States 7,735 (+9 since November), United Kingdom 2,207 (-5), France 1,640 (no change), Germany 1,570 (+1), Spain 1,475 (+1), Italy 1,177 (no change), Canada 1,001 (+2), Australia 948 (+1), Japan 899 (no change), and Poland 622 (no change).

Some Final Observations.

After three years of COVID hesitance, in the last half of 2023 we've noticed that people are breaking out of their cocoons and getting back into the water. Will this hold past the recent JN.1 variant that decked half of our family and friends in December? Will everyone ditch the preventive measures that we've all grown so tired of and give free rein to this ever-so-annoying disease? Time will tell.

In the last couple of days, we have come across a couple of Life Time gym locations that qualify for green pins on the maps, because they sell day passes to unaccompanied non-member visitors – but the charge for a single visit is $100! Life Time definitely has an upscale product, but we can't imagine a lot of people willing to pop that much for a swim – even if they can get a nice sauna or steam room session afterwards. (The chain prices each location differently – they're all at the top of the range for day passes, but swimmers visiting smaller markets may find the prices there more acceptable.)

We've observed the impact of the post-COVID inflation on prices almost everywhere but have been surprised to find that most swimming pools in Japan appear not to have raised their prices in ten years!

What can we do to get you more engaged with this site? We do the best we can to keep the listings up to date, but we need your help. Those little "Edit" boxes in the listings are there for you to let us know when something has changed. While traffic to the site is still strong, feedback from users is actually declining. We need your feedback to keep things current.

Next month's "What's New" entry will either be a bit early or way late, as we're headed for a two-week vacation beginning at the end of January.

And, lastly, have a Great New Year!

November Site Activity:

In November we completed our review of the listings in Iowa, polished off Nebraska, and moved on up to South Dakota.

We continued devoting time to testing the new site’s user feedback tools, and we're hopeful that we can bring the new site online in the beginning of January, 2024. The new site will look and operate much like the current site, but the database is being converted to a new format ("Drupal", [I think], instead of MS SQL) and the programming for the display of the data is being done in a way that will allow us to: a) keep the site working seamlessly in an ever-changing Web browsing environment; b) hang a number of planned "bells & whistles" onto a more robust programming structure; and c) create an app for smart phone users.

Pool of the Month:

On November 30, while we were still scratching our heads in search of a good candidate for the pool of the month, in one of the swimming Facebook sites we follow we found mention of a facility outside of Hanoi, Vietnam. It's an outdoor facility, associated in some way with a huge housing development in the city of Hung Yên, but it has two competition-style swimming pools: one 50-meters x 25m with 10 lanes; the other 100-meters x 25m with 10 lanes. We don't know whether it's open year-round or accessible to the public, all of the information we've been able to find about it is a promotional site from the housing project's developer HERE,which boasts that the facilities will "attract millions of visitors", so there's some hope of accessibility, and the opening was to be in October, 2023, which augers well for year-round operation, but we just don't have enough information to add it to the site - yet.  You can see it in an aerial view Google Maps photograph HERE.

Database Statistics November v. October:

We added 24 new listings to the site in November but had to delete 22, for a net gain of only two.

As of November 30, 2023, the database includes 26,173 facilities in 211 countries and 14,641 cities and towns. In total those facilities have 28,759 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ). There are 24,777 listings (94.7% of all listings) with hypertext links to their own, official websites (or non-official sites that we think may be helpful to you).

In the site's "Top 10" countries there are 19,266 listings, broken down by country as follows: United States 7,726 (-10 since October), United Kingdom 2,212 (+4), France 1,641 (no change), Germany 1,569 (no change), Spain 1,474 (-1), Italy 1,177 (+3), Canada 999 (+2), Australia 947 (no change), Japan 899 (+1), and Poland 622 (no change).

(Note: This report has been corrected since its original posting,)

October Site Activity:

In October, we continued reviewing listings in Iowa, but a lot of our time was spent testing the new site’s user feedback tools, you know, the programming behind the “Edit” tools in the listings where you tell us we got something wrong or that we need to add something to a listing. The only thing more tedious than reviewing listings is testing software – but it has to be done, and we’re doing it.

Pool of the Month:

In October, USA Swimming announced that Cary, North Carolina’s Triangle Aquatic Center had been chosen as the domestic training site for the U.S. Olympics team before the squad heads to Paris in July. That makes this fabulous facility a natural for our October, 2023, Pool of the Month selection.

 Database Statistics October v. August:

We added 34 listings in October but had to delete 18 for a net gain of only 16.

As of October 31, 2023, the database includes 26,171 facilities in 211 countries and 14,634 cities and towns. In total those facilities have 28,754 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ). There are 24,772 listings (94.7% of all listings) with hypertext links to their own, official websites (or non-official sites that we think may be helpful to you).

In the site's "Top 10" countries there are 19,267 listings, broken down by country as follows: United States 7,736 (+10 since August), United Kingdom 2,208 (-+2), France 1,641 (+1), Germany 1,569 (no change), Spain 1,475, Italy 1,174, Canada 997, Australia 947 (+2), Japan 898, and Poland 622.

September Site Activity:

In September we wrapped up our review of the listings in Minnesota, while also continuing with Wales and Ireland. In Wales, we have only four counties with 22 left to review; in Ireland, we’re less than half-way through County Dublin, with 180 more to go – that’s going to take some time. We dipped our toes into Iowa’s 110 listings in September, but still have 104 to go through.

Progress in October will be slow: As we continue reviewing listings, we’re also devoting a good amount of time to making sure that the next edition of the site works properly. For the last few years, we’ve been working with our programming partners to transform the site’s coding and its database platform into more modern forms and formats. Almost everything in the sections where users provide feedback is having to be rewritten and every rewrite has to be tested and retested, to make sure that it does what it’s supposed to do.

The only thing more tedious than reviewing listings is testing software – but it has to be done!

Pool(s) of the Month:

In September, Parramatta, a suburban community in the Sydney Metropolitan area in Australia inaugurated the Parramatta Aquatic Centre, a facility with a 50-metre, outdoor pool and a 25-metre, 8 lane, indoor pool. Although Google Maps’ aerial view photographs haven’t caught up with the new construction, you can see a really neat drone photograph of the facility in the rotating shots on the centre’s home page.

Also of note, the Swiss city of Bern, opened the Schwimmhalle Neufeld, which has a 50-metre tank and <u>two</u> 25-metre tanks. But what makes this facility really interesting is that the 50-metre pool has a bulkhead that can be deployed across half of the pool - and the planned default layout of that tank will have ten 25-metre lanes and five 50-metre lanes – apparently year-round!

A Disturbing Internet Trend:

We have noticed that geographic website blocking is becoming more common on the Internet. In an apparent hope to protect against foreign-based hackers, some operators are making it difficult for users in other countries to access their websites.

If it appears that you have been blocked (some sites will actually tell you that you’ve been blocked), you can get around the blockage with virtual private network (VPN) software that may be included in your anti-virus security program tool kit. Some VPN programs include a tool that allows you to pretend you’re located somewhere close to the home country of the website you want to see by selecting a different VPN Region.

It’s not difficult to do if you have the necessary software – it’s so easy that it’s hard to imagine that the bad guys don’t have it themselves!

Database Statistics September v. August:

We added 36 listings in September but had to delete 23 for a net gain of only 13.

As of September 30, 2023, the database includes 26,155 facilities in 211 countries and 14,621 cities and towns. In total those facilities have 28,734 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ). There are 24,757 listings (94.7% of all listings) with hypertext links to their own, official websites (or non-official sites that we think may be helpful to you).

In the site's "Top 10" countries there are 19,252 listings, broken down by country as follows: United States 7,726 (+3 since August), United Kingdom 2,206 (-2), France 1,640 (+2), Germany 1,569 (no change), Spain 1,475 (+4), Italy 1,174, Canada 997, Australia 945, Japan 898, and Poland 622; the last five all unchanged in September.

August Site Activity:

We took a week off in August, traveling up to Massachusetts and Rhode Island to visit family. If I haven't done it before (and I know I haven't) I encourage our Rhode Island and southern Massachusetts site users to check out the Little Compton branch of the family's Sweet & Salty Farm for some of the best artisanal yogurt and cheeses you've ever eaten.

OK, enough with the family "plugs"… When we weren't traveling, we continued to work on the listings in: Minnesota (US), where we've gotten through Goodhue County and have dipped our toes into Hennepin County; Wales (UK), where we've cleared Newport (County and City); and Ireland, where we're through County Donegal, getting ready to start Dublin.

In September we'll continue work on Minnesota, Wales, & Ireland.

A New Health Club Chain in the U.S:

While perusing one of the Facebook groups we follow, we saw a mention of a health club chain that we'd never heard of before, Chuze Fitness. We found their website the home page is HERE& and managed to find 21 new listings spread across Arizona, California, Colorado, and New Mexico. Nice!

Pool of the Month:

We found two pools that tickled our fancy in August: The first, Sea Lanes Brighton, in Brighton, England, is a 50-metre, outdoor, year-round, "heated" pool (if you call 15º - 19ºC [59º - 66ºF] heated), located right on the beachfront in Brighton, England. It has been designated as a "national open water training pool", if you're into oxymora…

The second is an "ocean enclosure" in the Venetian Road Settlement on Providenciales Island in the Turks & Caicos. It's at the Wymara Villas + Beach Club. The resort developer, who's Canadian, spent several years in Australia and fell in love with that country's unique "ocean enclosure" pools or, simply "ocean pools". When he developed his oceanfront resort on Providenciales, he brought the concept to the Western Hemisphere, where he built a pool we describe as "130f (39.61m) x 30f (9.14m), rectangular, unstriped, 3f - 6f depth (add 2f or 3f at high tide)". Its water is replenished by the ocean tides.

Database Statistics August v. July:

We added 53 listings in August but had to delete 13 for a net gain of 40. We hadn't added that many listings in a month since last December.

As of August 31, 2023, the database includes 26,142 facilities in 211 countries and 14,612 cities and towns. In total those facilities have 28,713 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ). There are 24,742 listings (94.6% of all listings) with hypertext links to their own, official websites (or non-official sites that we think may be helpful to you).

In the site's "Top 10" countries there are 19,244 listings, broken down by country as follows: United States 7,723 (up 20 since July), United Kingdom 2,207 (+2), France 1,638 (-1), Germany 1,569 (+1), Spain 1,471 (+1), Italy 1,174 (no change), Canada 997 (+1), Australia 945, Japan 898, and Poland 622; the last three all unchanged since July.

July Site Activity:

In July, we finished reviewing the listings in Wisconsin, and got started (barely) in Minnesota. We did some more work in Wales and Ireland, too, trying to make sure the listings in English-speaking countries don't get too far out of date.

In August we'll continue work on Minnesota, and continue reviewing the listings in, Wales, Ireland, and Italy.

Country #211:

In July we found our first listing in the African island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe (officially the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe). We thought we had run out of countries and were surprised when we found this one. See the Hotel Pestana Miramar São Tomé.

Pool of the Month:

Last month we bemoaned the fact that so many schools in the U.S. have pools that are never available to the public or whose availability is so restricted that nobody could develop a swimming routine during the few hours that the pool was open to them.

So, our choice for pool of the month for July, 2023, is the Mercy Health – West Clermont HealthPlex> in Batavia, Ohio.

It has a 25-yard, 8-lane tank kept at 82ºF. (28ºC) – a nice setup, nothing special.

What is special is that the HealthPlex is located on the campus of the public West Clermont High School, and members have access to the high school's swimming pool before 10 AM and after 5 PM. At $10, a day pass will set you back a good bit more than the drop-in fees at most public high schools (when available), but the HealthPlex offers memberships and unlocks an otherwise closed-off community resource to local residents on a daily basis.

Database Statistics July v. May:

We added 27 listings in July but had to delete 23 for a net gain of only four.

As of July 31, 2023, the database includes 26,102 facilities in 211 countries and 14,593 cities and towns. In total those facilities have 28,664 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ). There are 24,703 listings (94.6% of all listings) with hypertext links to their own, official websites (or non-official sites that we think may be helpful to you).

In the site's "Top 10" countries there are 19,220 listings, broken down by country as follows: United States 7,703, United Kingdom 2,205, France 1,639, Germany 1,568, Spain 1,470, Italy 1,174, Canada 996, Australia 945, Japan 898, and Poland 622.

June Site Activity:

In June, we finished reviewing the listings in Illinois and moved on to Wisconsin, where we got through 137 of its 214 listings. We did some more work in Wales and Ireland, too, trying to make sure the listings in English-speaking countries don't get too far out of date.

In July we'll wrap-up Wisconsin and start work on Minnesota, and continue reviewing the listings in, Wales, Ireland, and Italy.

What's a "Review"?

We write about what we're "reviewing" at the beginning of every "What's New" entry; you may be curious about what we mean by reviewing the listings in a particular area, so we'll elaborate:

We keep an Excel spreadsheet of the listings on the site. When we decide to review the listings in a particular location, we sort the data in the spreadsheet by Country, State, County/Region, City, Postal Code, and Pool ID.

We then go down the selected area's list, one-by-one, checking and accessing the facility's website, name, complete address, telephone number, email address, and Google Maps link. You would be surprised to see how often facilities change names; street names change, too. Website URLs are the least stable of these datapoints, and telephone numbers change often, as well.

After checking the "Facility Overview" and "Location" data, we try to update the casual/drop-in admission price. For listings in the US, if we can't find a current price on the pool's website, we call the facility on the telephone and ask. For non-U.S. listings, we have to resort to email – often using the Google Translation website to compose our message in English and translate it to the language of the country where the pool is located. We've sent emails in just about every language that uses the Latin alphabet and a few in Hebrew, Chinese, and Japanese.

We don't ordinarily do checks on the "Pools & Boards" data, which in 99% of cases is stable over time but, as we're reviewing the facility's website and the photographs associated with its Google Maps link, we do occasionally find bits of data that can be added to the listings to improve the descriptions.

In the "Teams" section, we check every link to every team listed. If a link has gone bad since our last check, we look for a replacement. If we can't find a new link, we delete the team from the listing.

Then we go into the "Facility Notes" section. Most of the time, the notes don't require much work, but we often include helpful links in that section, too, so those also need to be checked. In addition, we'll look for information about seasonal, non-qualifying pools in an area so we can add that to a listing. Many facilities have taken to using Facebook as a way to keep their members/users apprised of up-to-the-moment developments and schedule deviations so, if we find a good Facebook page, we'll add a note and throw a link to that page in this section.

As we review the existing listings, we often come across other facilities that are not included on the site; that necessitates interrupting the review process to collect data for a new listing to be added later.

The whole process is slow and not particularly exciting. From January 1 through June 30, we've checked 1,877 listings and there are probably a couple of hundred that we've "tweaked" without marking them as fully reviewed.

(When we retired in 2012, we never expected we'd end up spending our "leisure years" sitting in front of a computer screen for eight hours a day – but that's how it turned out…)

Pool of the Month:

Our choice for pool of the month for June, 2023, is the Racine Unified School District Aquatic Center in Racine, Wisconsin.

It has a 25-yard, expandable to 25-meter, 10-lane tank with a connected 25-yard, 6-lane diving section kept at 80ºF. (27ºC).

Aside from the dimensions and temperature, what we most like about it is how accessible they have made the school district pool to the general public. In Wisconsin, in particular, we're coming across a lot of individual schools with swimming pools that are either not accessible to the public, at all, or open for only a few hours a week. The pool in Racine serves not only the schools in the district but also the citizens who have paid for it. And that service isn't just half-hearted, it's full-throated. We like that!

Database Statistics June v. May:

We added 33 listings in June but had to delete 14 for a net gain of 19.

As of June 30, 2023, the database includes 26,098 facilities in 210 countries and 14,579 cities and towns. In total those facilities have 28,654 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ). There are 24,701 listings (94.6% of all listings) with hypertext links to their own, official websites (or non-official sites that we think may be helpful to you).

In the site's "Top 10" countries there are 19,227 listings, broken down by country as follows: United States 7,706, United Kingdom 2,206, France 1,642, Germany 1,568, Spain 1,469, Italy 1,175, Canada 996, Australia 945, Japan 898, and Poland 622.

May Site Activity:

In May, we continued working on Illinois – we're now through 326 of the listings, with only 31 listings to go. We did some more work in Italy, too; where we skipped over some provinces and cities to check-out the situation for one of our long-term supporters, who will be spending three weeks in Florence, this summer. And we dabbled in the Welsh portion of the database, as well.

In June we'll wrap-up Illinois, start work on Wisconsin, and continue reviewing the listing in Italy and Wales.

Pool of the Month:

Our choice for pool of the month for May, 2023, is the FMC Natatorium in Westmont, Illinois, just over 20 miles west of Chicago.

It has a 50-meter x 25-yard main tank with two movable bulkheads, a 25-yard, 8 lane warm-up/cool-down/auxiliary pool, and 1-meter and 3-meter diving boards.

It is a facility created to be a premier venue for age-group and senior swim meets in the Greater Chicago Area, Illinois, and the central Midwest region.

But it's not just a competition venue; the facility offers memberships, day passes, Masters and youth swim teams, and a diving team.

Database Statistics May v. March:

We added 39 listings in May but had to delete 26 for a net gain of 13.

As of May 31, 2023, the database includes 26,079 facilities in 210 countries and 14,567 cities and towns. In total those facilities have 28,631 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ). There are 24,684 listings (94.7% of all listings) with hypertext links to their own, official websites (or non-official sites that we think may be helpful to you).

In the site's "Top 10" countries there are 19,215 listings, broken down by country as follows: United States 7,695, United Kingdom 2,207, France 1,641, Germany 1,568, Spain 1,469, Italy 1,176, Canada 996, Australia 944, Japan 897, and Poland 622.

April Site Activity:

In April, we'll continued working on Illinois – we got through 178 of 367 listings there, including all of Cook County, which includes the City of Chicago and a lot of its principal suburbs. And we got all the listings in Prince Edward Island and in Newfoundland and Labrador cleared up, too. In a burst of optimism, we went back to Italy; where we were actually able to collect some current data and add a few new pools, to boot. We've also done a little work in Japan, where we're happy to say that places and prices are amazingly stable after ten years of neglect.

Our plan for May is to continue with both Illinois and Italy

Pool of the Month:

This month we have two "Pools of the Month" for your consideration:

1)      In Tokyo, the $530,000,000 Tokyo Aquatics Center, the 2020 Olympics swimming venue, finally opened to the public. Its two 50-meter pools and 25-meter by 25-meter diving pool are all open to the public for ¥700, the equivalent of US$5.00.

2)      In contrast, the 2023 Hungarian National Championships were held in the new Csík Ferenc Versenyuszoda, which is located next door to the Virágfürdo Kaposvár, whose indoor/outdoor 50-meter pool had been "outgrown". The Virágfürdo Kaposvár has also has a 25-meter indoor pool, but its 50-meter pool is open to the public only in summer. The new indoor pool will likely open lanes to the public in the outdoor pool in summer (we doubt they will continue to "bubble" it in winter), but it appears that the Csík Ferenc Versenyuszoda will not be open to the public, at all.

Database Statistics April v. March:

We added 53 listings in April but had to delete 22 for a net gain of 31.

As of April 30, 2023, the database includes 26,066 facilities in 210 countries and 14,548 cities and towns. In total those facilities have 28,620 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ). There are 24,674 listings (94.7% of all listings) with hypertext links to their own, official websites (or non-official sites that we think may be helpful to you).

In the site's "Top 10" countries there are 19,216 listings, broken down by country as follows: United States 7,700, United Kingdom 2,207, France 1,636, Germany 1,568, Spain 1,468, Italy 1,178, Canada 995, Australia 944, Japan 898, and Poland 622.

March Site Activity:

We took a week off in early March to visit friends and family in Florida. Der Führer DeSantis' cautions notwithstanding, our "woke" survived intact.

On our return, we wrapped up working on the municipal pool listings in Istanbul, where we had received some good information about accessibility at the end of February. We finished up the review of Nova Scotia; we checked all of the listings in Indiana and Kentucky; and we've gotten a start on Illinois.

In April, we'll continue working on Illinois and try to get all the listings in Prince Edward Island and in Newfoundland and Labrador cleared up, too. If we're feeling patient, we may take another stab at Italy.

Pool of the Month:

Rather than select a single pool of the month, this month, we're going to aim you to a "Location of the Month". During the course of the month, we came across a mention of the 21^st FINA World Championship to be held in Doha, Qatar and decided that we needed to check to see if we had the event's venue listed on the site. It turned out that we do but while we were checking out the information about the Hamad Aquatic Center / Doha Family Activity Center we noticed that the Aspire Academy located right next door also has a 50-meter, 10-lane competition pool complete with an adjacent diving pool with a full complement of diving boards and platforms. Although it appears that the Aspire Academy pool isn't open to the public, we still find it remarkable that, within about 150 yards you can find three, 50-meter, Olympic-standard competition pools, two, 25-meter pools, and two diving pools, each with platforms up to 10-meters high.

Database Statistics March v. February:

We added 25 listings in March but had to delete 16 for a net gain of only nine.

As of March 31, 2023, the database includes 26,035 facilities in 210 countries and 14,523 cities and towns. In total those facilities have 28,583 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

In the site's "Top 10" countries there are 19,190 listings, broken down by country as follows: United States 7,693, United Kingdom 2,207, France 1,633, Germany 1,568, Spain 1,468, Italy 1,164, Canada 998, Australia 944, Japan 893, and Poland 622.

February Site Activity:

In February, we continued to review listings in Italy, completed our review of listings in Indiana, did a few in Japan (whose prices and website links are surprisingly stable after ten years of neglect by yours truly). We also began working on Nova Scotia, where we've been able to review about half of the listings.

Our scheduled reviews were interrupted when a site user informed us that on the first of the year, Croatia converted its official currency from the kuna to the euro. There are some things that we feel we can let slide, but not a currency change – particularly from a less-well-known denomination to one that most Europeans and even a lot of Americans feel familiar with. So Croatia got a Swimmers Guide going-over a little out of sequence.

We also tripped across a site in Cali, Colombia that allowed us to add sixteen new listings in that country.

And, right at the end of the month we were contacted by a Turkish swimmer who recommended some changes in the listing for the pool where he swims in Istanbul. The Turkish section of the site is not one that we're really proud of, we have 115 of listings there, but most of them are bare-bones, lacking prices, water temperatures, and often having non-official website links. So we took the opportunity to engage with him to find out more about swimming in Turkey and he was kind enough to explain how one gets to swim in some of the pools in Istanbul, at least. We've gotten only one of the listings in Istanbul updated, so far, but plan to spend a few days following the link he sent to find more pools there and to update some of the listings we already have in that city.

This work; updating the listings in Kentucky (our next U.S. target state); continuing work in Nova Scotia and Italy, will all get started in about ten days' time, as we're going to take a quick jaunt south to visit family in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. (It's surprising how many relatives one can accumulate in warmer climes, as one grows older ;-)) And, Gov. DeSantis, notwithstanding, we expect our "woke" to survive the few days we'll spend there…

Pool of the Month:

This month, we recommend to you the Deaconess Aquatic Center in Evansville, Indiana, U.S.A. It's a municipally owned and operated, indoor, 50-meter x 25-meter tank, plus recreational pool that replaced an older facility that had passed its "sell-by" date. We don't expect cities of Evansville's population (under 120,000) to have an indoor, Olympic-size pool that's not school-operated. And Evansville also has two YMCAs and two private health clubs with pools, within a six-mile radius of the city center.

Database Statistics February v. December:

We added 51 new listings in February but had to delete 30, for a net gain of 21.

As of February 28, 2023, the database lists 26,026 facilities in 210 countries and 14,516 cities and towns. In total, those facilities have 28,572 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

In the site's "Top 10" countries, there are now 7,698 listings in the United States, 2,210 in the United Kingdom, 1,631 in France, 1,568 in Germany, 1,468 in Spain, 1,164 in Italy, 999 in Canada, 944 in Australia, 893 in Japan, and 622 in Poland.

January Site Activity:

We finally finished reviewing the listings in Michigan and quickly turned to Italy (again!) in the hope we could make some progress there.

Plugging through the listings in Italy we are still finding a lot of unsatisfactory information. We've been working in the southeast region of Apulia where, in many cases, we'll find a pool's website or Facebook page but it's apparent that the information hasn't been updated in a long time. We'll send an inquiry and get no answer. This is not at all satisfying. Where we think it will help, we update the listing with a note expressing how soft the information is. But we know you need better information, and it disappoints us not to be able to provide it.

Since Italy hasn't been much fun to work with, we scooted up to New Brunswick, Canada, whose listing we were able to get through in a few days, and then we added Indiana and Japan to the mix. So we'll work on Italy, Indiana, and Japan for a while, now.

Last month, we announced that we'd hit the 26,000-listing mark – on January 26, we dropped down to 25,999. By the end of January, we were back up to 26,005. The swimming pool world is surprisingly dynamic!

Foreign Language Pool Names:

We're trying to develop a consistent way to display the facility names of facilities in countries that use an alphabet other than the Latin alphabet. In the past, we've most often used a translation of the meaning of the name of the facility, followed by a "|", followed by the name in the original language. For example, in Moscow, we have listing #15545, which is currently shown as "«Atlant» Swimming Pool | ??????? «??????»". Our plan is to change the first part of the displayed name from a translation of the meaning of the Russian name to a transliteration of roughly what the name in Russian sounds like, so the heading of the listing would now read "Basseyn «Atlant» | ??????? «??????»". The idea is to make it easier for you to communicate where you want to go with locals, in their language. We'll keep the translated name in the listing but move it down to the first part of the street address line of the listing, before the street name and house number. When we get around to updating that listing, the first Address line will read "«Atlant» Swimming Pool, Ulitsa Talalikhina, 28, Central District". It'll take a long time to get this done and the results may occasionally seem screwy, but we think it will be helpful most of the time for our listings in Russia, Greece, Israel, China, Japan, Thailand, etc.

(Unfortunately, the software we use to create this section is not capable of handling Cyrillic characters and replaces them with question marks. fortunately, the site's software can handle Cyrillic characters, so if you'd like to see the actual display, you can go to listing #15545 to see it.)

Pool of the Month:

We have two listings to recommend to you this month, both of which we found out about from users who completed "Add A Pool" questionnaires on the site.

The first of the Pools of the Month is the new Hawke's Bay Regional Aquatic Centre on the North Island of New Zealand. The facility was officially opened on August 10, 2022, by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. It is notable for being a full-fledged, modern, Olympic-standard facility, with two "standard" swimming pools (a 50-meter competition pool and a 25-meter warm-up pool), plus two Endless Pool hydrotherapy pools. It also has one of the best English-language websites we've come across. We were able to pull together the complete Swimmers Guide listing – including pool water temperatures – without sending a single email. We were also able to add links to the websites of all the teams that train at the facility because that information was included on the center's website, too. And the center has a Facebook page. Clearly, whoever set up the site had more marketing savvy than most of the people in the swimming business. We think this facility is outstanding and its website is an exemplar of what a pool website should tell its readers.

The second Pool of the Month honoree is the new Sonoma Splash in Sonoma, California. The pool is on the campus of Sonoma High School and has a fairly standard California high school pool (25-yards by about 33 yards, good for swimming competition and for high school water polo) but, in addition to the main pool, they've included a warm-water teaching pool – something we've not seen at other California high school swimming facilities. There's nothing like a warm pool to attract unruly kids and slowpoke OAPs. With 16 lanes, the pool has plenty of capacity, but with a warm-water tank, that capacity is less likely to be tested.

What brings this facility to the fore, however, is the fact that it is the product of a joint effort between the school district, which paid for most of it, and a non-profit group of citizens that raised $1.5 million for enhancements to the project to allow it to be open to the public. Currently only the warm-water pool is open to the public throughout the day, but the public access hours for the competition are not shabby and the plan is to expand them as time goes on.

We come across lots of leads for pools to add to this website, but we rarely waste our time following up on facilities located in primary, grammar, middle, or high school settings because they are so rarely open to the public. We understand the security concerns of school administrators, but we think that those concerns could be overcome with proper planning and execution. There are too many billions of dollars' worth of underutilized swimming facilities in the United States.

Database Statistics January v. December:

We added 27 new listings in January but had to delete 31, for a net loss of four. Losses in January were largely in Italy, where it appears that a significant number of pools may have closed during the pandemic.

As of January 31, 2023, the database lists 26,005 facilities in 210 countries and 14,505 cities and towns. In total, those facilities have 28,549 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

In the site's "Top 10" countries, there are now 7,702 listings in the United States, 2,210 in the United Kingdom, 1,631 in France, 1,568 in Germany, 1,468 in Spain, 1,168 in Italy, 1,001 in Canada, 944 in Australia, 884 in Japan, and 622 in Poland.

December Site Activity:

While we had hoped to finish reviewing the listings in Michigan by the end of the month, we were distracted by a number of other chores:

First, we found a site with information about a number of hotels we thought needed to be checked out for addition to the site. The German-language mein-triathlonhotel.de, a triathlete-targeted site, offered a number of leads for European hotels, some of which made it to the site, some of which did not. We spent a couple of weeks on that site, got about 35 new listings, and we're not finished with it, yet.

We got 55 Michigan listings reviewed, nine new ones found, and 65 yet to go when Christmas rolled around. Preparations for Christmas in our house begin a week before, and the holiday celebrations take a few days, so we lost a week in that felicitous diversion.

Then we spent a few days working on things for the new site.

During all that we managed to cross over the 26,000-listing mark.

Italy, you have not been forgotten – I'll get back to reviewing the listings there, shortly…

Pool of the Month:

The Holland Aquatic Center in Holland, Michigan (USA) gets our nod for the "Pool of the Month" for December. The facility, which has been in the database since 1995, has at least seven indoor pools including a 50-meter, 8-lane x 25-yard, 23-lane competition pool, a 25-yard, five-lane, warm-up/cool-down pool, a 25-yard, six-lane, instructional pool, and a 20-yard, 6-lane, warm-water exercise pool. The 25-yard, warm-up pool was added in a $26.3 million expansion and renovation completed in January, 2022, so they're not resting on their laurels as the premier public pool in Michigan.

Contributing to Swimmers Guide:

It's amazing how many emails we get thanking us for maintaining the site: "I've been using it for years." "I don't know what I'd do without Swimmers Guide!"

People often ask how they can help - here are several simple ways: 1) Take a look at the listing for the pool where you swim regularly; is it up-to-date and correct? If it isn't, send us an "Edit". 2) Have you been to one of the other pools and found the information in our listing to be incomplete or out of date? Don't leave it to someone else to fix it; send us an "Edit"! 3) When you went to a listed facility, did you like it? Tell us why or why not. The "Reviews" in Swimmer Guide listings often contain information that we cannot discover or verify – but that's incredibly helpful for other users, often reviews help users decide whether or not to swim at the listing. If you went to a pool that was terribly dirty and badly managed, wouldn't you have liked to know beforehand? Pitch in! We can't do it all. Send us a review. 4) Do you know about a good pool that meets our listing criteria? If you do, truck on over to the Add A Pool section of the site. If the form seems intimidating, skip it and drop us an email with the key information. You'd be amazed what we can find on Google once we have something to go on. 5) And, if none of the first four suggestions works for you, click on the Donate button in the upper right corner of every page and make a non-deductible contribution to support the management and operation of the site. We've been told that the button isn't sufficiently prominent in the menu, that we should have positioned it further to the left. We're not here to make a pile of money – but, if you want to thank us for the time and effort of maintaining the site, it's an easy way to do it.

If we could get enough funding from donations, we could cut out all those annoying advertisements!

Database Statistics December v. November:

We added 61 new listings in December but had to delete ten, for a net gain of fifty. Losses continue to be primarily due to the elimination of college and high school swimming pools that were listed only because they had youth swim teams that trained at them. COVID seems to have wiped out a lot of those programs and the justification for listing their host pools.

As of December 31, 2022, the database lists 26,009 facilities in 210 countries and 14,492 cities and towns. In total, those facilities have 28,551 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

In the site's "Top 10" countries, there are now 7,704 listings in the United States, 2,210 in the United Kingdom, 1,629 in France, 1,569 in Germany, 1,466 in Spain, 1,174 in Italy, 1,001 in Canada, 943 in Australia, 889 in Japan, and 622 in Poland.

A Last Word:

We're writing and posting this update on January 1, 2023, and wish all our faithful followers the Happiest, Healthiest, and most Prosperous New Years! We have great plans for the site in 2023 and we hop you'll to be able to enjoy them!

November Site Activity:

Even with a brief break for the Thanksgiving holiday, November was a productive month, with 58 new listings added and only 14 removed, for a net gain of 44. We completed our review of the 272 listings in Ohio and have gotten through 105 of the 229 in Michigan. When we finish Michigan, we'll do a few regions in Italy and maybe wrap-up the Atlantic Maritime provinces of Canada.

It appears that the world is reopening after the COVID pandemic. Lifeguard shortages are now impacting pool opening hours; the next challenge will probably be due to fuel shortages in Europe, where we're seeing some reductions in pool water temperatures as operators try to conserve increasingly expensive fossil fuels.

Pool of the Month:

The Sportcamp Woferlgut in Bruck an der Grossglocknerstrasse, Austria gets our nod for the "Pool of the Month" award for November. The facility, which has a hotel, a restaurant, and a health club, includes a 50-meter, two-lane, indoor swimming pool kept at 26ºC (79ºF). The Sportcamp has four other pools, none of which seem particularly interesting.

Database Statistics November v. September:

As noted in our opening, we added 58 new listings in November and had to delete 14, for a net gain of 44.

As of November 30, 2022, the database lists 25,959 facilities in 210 countries and 14,457 cities and towns. In total, those facilities have 28,490 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

In the site's "Top 10" countries, there are now 7,696 listings in the United States, 2,209 in the United Kingdom, 1,629 in France, 1,569 in Germany, 1,462 in Spain, 1,167 in Italy, 999 in Canada, 942 in Australia, 889 in Japan, and 622 in Poland.

October Site Activity:

Having recovered from the dreaded COVID in September, we tried to do some catching up in October. We finished up the last listings that needed review in Scotland and moved on to West Virginia, which we completed and Ohio, where we have 55 listings to go. From there, it's on to Michigan and maybe we'll take another stab at Italy. Our earlier attempts there have been quashed by continued COVID protection measures.

Pool of the Month:

The newly opened Hampton Aquaplex in Hampton, Virginia (USA) gets our nod for the "Pool of the Month" award for October. The facility, which opened on October 29, has two indoor pools: a 50-meter, 8-lane x 25-yard, 8-lane competition pool and a 25-yard, 8-lane, program and warm-up pool. It also has an outdoor, seasonal splash park.

A second selection for October would be the Fort Lauderdale Aquatic Complex, where they completed a major ($27,000,000) renovation and reopened at the end of September. In that renovation they completely rebuilt the main competition pool, which had been an American-standard 50-meter x 25-yard, 2m maximum depth tank, and replaced it with a new 50-meter x 25-meter, 2m – 3m depth tank, with two movable bulkheads, It's is now up to current FINA and Olympic standards. They also rebuilt the diving tank to 6-meter depth – and added 20-meter, 24-meter, and 27-meter diving platforms!

Database Statistics October v. September:

We added 24 new listings in October but had to delete 32, for a net loss of eight listings. For those who may be interested, most of the losses are due to the elimination of college and high school swimming pools that were listed only because they had youth swim teams that trained at them. COVID seems to have wiped out a lot of youth swim programs. A few YMCAs and private fitness club listings have also had to be deleted due to the effects of the pandemic, but the vast majority managed to survive.

As of October 31, 2022, the database lists 25,915 facilities in 210 countries and 14,431 cities and towns. In total, those facilities have 28,525 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

In the site's "Top 10" countries, there are now 7,683 listings in the United States, 2,208 in the United Kingdom, 1,627 in France, 1,563 in Germany, 1,462 in Spain, 1,164 in Italy, 999 in Canada, 942 in Australia, 889 in Japan, and 622 in Poland.

September Was a Nasty Month:

After two-and-a-half years of being really, really careful, we finally caught the dreaded COVID! With some help from a monoclonal antibody infusion, Tom's case cleared up really fast. Yours truly, not-so-much. I was able to get my hands on a five-day course of Paxlovid within a half day of testing positive and after five days, I felt just fine. But a couple of days after that I got a nasty rebound case. And I'm still not done with it. It's not that I feel bad, I just don't feel good. I appear to be on the mend, now, but I didn't get a whole lot done in September.

Pool of the Month:

The newly opened Centre Aquatique de la Vaudoise Aréna in Prilly, Switzerland gets our nod for the "Pool of the Month" award for September. The facility, which opened in September has: One 50-meter x 25-meter, ten-lane indoor pool; a 25-meter, 6-lane indoor pool; a 25-meter, 3-lane, diving pool with a full complement of diving boards and platforms; two indoor ice rinks; one outdoor ice rink; a venue with 21 ping-pong (table tennis) tables; and 21 fencing pistes. That's one amazing location!

September Site Activity:

We were not at our most industrious in September – COVID will do that to you – but we got through all but twelve of the 254 listings in Scotland, UK. In October, we'll finish those up and move on to West Virginia, Michigan, and Ohio in the U.S.

Database Statistics September v. August:

We added 23 new listings in September but had to delete 31, and we reinstated one listing that had been deleted during COVID but has since reopened for public membership, for a net loss of seven listings.

As of September 30, 2022, the database lists 25,921 facilities in 210 countries and 14,421 cities and towns. In total, those facilities have 28,434 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

In the site's "Top 10" countries, there are now 7,699 listings in the United States, 2,207 in the United Kingdom, 1,623 in France, 1,563 in Germany, 1,460 in Spain, 1,164 in Italy, 998 in Canada, 942 in Australia, 889 in Japan, and 622 in Poland.

A Belated Heads-up:

We received a note from one of our regular user/contributors who was unhappy that we had not included an alert that a Canadian pool he had made a special trip to visit was closed for maintenance in the last week or two of August and into September.

After receiving that note, as we went through some of the listings in the U.S., we noticed that pool closures in the late August / early September timeframe are common across the U.S. and Canada. We think you should always make a telephone call before going to any swimming pool (you never know when there's going to be a swim meet or when some infant has fouled the pool) but in late August and early September, there's a special risk of disappointment because of maintenance closures.

(We realized this at 76-years old. "Too soon old, too late smart.")

Looking for a Seasonal Pool?

We got a couple of complaints in August about our "eight months per year" listing policy from people who prefer to swim outdoors, when they can. There simply aren't enough hours in the day to take on the task of adding a few hundred thousand outdoor, summer swimming pools to the site – we're having trouble keeping up with the 25,000+ year-round pools we already have, without taking on a task ten-times bigger. So here's a suggestion that we've found works pretty well:

If you're looking for a seasonal, outdoor pool, aim your browser to Google Maps and, in the search field type the text "swimming pool near" + the name of the community where you're interested in finding a pool. Google will return a list and a map with all of the pools it has identified in the area, together with their website addresses (for those that have them). Unfortunately, the list and map will show the pool maintenance companies in the area, but those are easy to identify and skip over. When you click on a name on the list, Google will re-center the map and pop-up more detailed information about the selected location (street address, telephone number website link and, in most cases, a photograph of the pool).

OK, that's more work than you have to do when you're looking for a year-round pool on Swimmers Guide, but it's better than just using Google Search.

August Site Activity:

We took a week off in August to visit family "up North". We had great weather and enjoyed the lower temperatures and humidity than what we've been going through here in North Carolina for the last four months.

When we were working, we were able to complete our review of the listings in Québec and also in the U.S. states of Delaware and Maryland. Our plan is to review the twenty-seven listings in the District of Columbia, then move on to Scotland and, perhaps, try for a few more in Italy.

And we continued working on the contents of the Country, State, County-Region, and City Notes that we talked about, last month. We've found eighty of them so far and are continuing to add them at a fairly good pace.

Database Statistics August v. July:

We added 20 new listings in August but had to delete 21, for a net loss of 1.

As of August 31, 2022, the database lists 25,928 facilities in 210 countries and 14,415 cities and towns. In total, those facilities have 28,434 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

In the site's "Top 10" countries, there are now 7,696 listings in the United States, 2,224 in the United Kingdom, 1,620 in France, 1,562 in Germany, 1,460 in Spain, 1,164 in Italy, 1,000 in Canada, 942 in Australia, 888 in Japan, and 622 in Poland.

A Hopeful Observation:

As you might imagine, those little “Edit” buttons beside datapoints in our listings generate a lot of communication. And we’re delighted to say that it appears that travel – including international travel – is on the upswing. We’re seeing more updates by travelers obviously from countries other than the country in the subject listings. It’s not at the level that we’d like it to be, but it’s a hopeful sign.

July Site Activity:

We spent July reviewing existing listings in Québec, Canada, and in Italy. We have only a few listings left to review in Québec; Italy, however, is a whole ‘nother question. Apparently, large sections of Italy remain under COVID restrictions. It's either that or the “temporary” closures of pools there for the pandemic has caused major disruptions in their operations. In many cases, the references to the pools we can find online predate COVID-19 and our attempts to contact them, even in Italian, are drawing no response. It's really slow-going and we don't have a lot of confidence in the quality of our data there. While in Italy, however, we were able to make contact with someone in the Virgin Active Fitness Club’s main office in Italy, and s/he provided the basic information that allowed us to pick-up about 30 new listings there.

The plan is to continue plodding through Italy, a task that’s likely to take the better part of a year, and, when we finish up with Québec, to move back down to the United States to start reviewing the listings in Delaware, Maryland, and the District of Columbia.

In addition to the usual work of handling correspondence and reviewing listings, we took a day or two this month to start working on the contents of a planned new feature for the site: Country, State, County-Region, and City Notes. These will be notes, organized by geographic region, that will appear in every listing within the appropriate boundaries for the listing. As an example, a listing in Paris, France, might include a “Country Note” about swimming pools’ dress codes for men (no shorts, briefs and tight-fitting, pocketless suits only) and a City Note with a link to the page on the City’s website that includes information about all the public pools in the city, including seasonal pools that we can’t list.

(And, yes, we are continuing to work on an update to the site that we expect will “knock your socks off”, when it’s complete. It’s just that the darned thing is taking forever to pull together!)

Pool of the Month:

We have two facilities to refer to as our July, 2022 “Pool of the Month”:

The first is one we found out about from the fellow who has been so helpful in keeping the guide’s listings in France up-to-date. By way of background, he writes: “… learning how to swim is now a compulsory item in our primary schools’ educational programs. Although France is a small country, some areas are so remote that school kids often spend half a day to go to the nearest pool and come back, just for a 40-minute swimming lesson!” To solve the problem, someone came up with the idea of a pool on wheels or Centre Aquatique Mobile, it doesn’t qualify for a listing on the site, but it’s such a creative idea that we thought it merited sharing with you. It’s Aqwa Itinéris, a truck-trailer with a pool inside.

The second is a unique resort on Phuket Island in Thailand. The Thanyapura Sports & Leisure Club is a resort built for <u>us</u>! With 50-meter and 25-meter competition pools, the resort accommodates drop-in visitors, local members, independent travelers, and group training camps. We've had it listed for nearly ten years but were reminded of it the other day when we got an email about a training camp that will be held there in November, 2022. (In the interest of full disclosure, you should know that we have a very small equity interest in the organization that's running the camp.) This isn't the only hotel in the database that has such terrific facilities, but it's one of very few.

Other Interesting Things:

While reviewing the database, a few days ago, we pulled down some statistics that we had never looked at before – pools by "type". We do not currently publish the type of pool in our listings, but there is a field in the database to capture that information and we do intend to display it in the next version of the site, so we needed to clean up the field. We were surprised to find that there were 2,090 hotels, 4,662 private health clubs, 1,556 YMCAs, 1,147 schools, 791 colleges and universities, 219 other non-profit community service organizations, 116 military base pools, and 15,347 "public" pools.

Because we weren't displaying the data and because sometimes we were confused when dealing with facilities in non-English speaking countries, there's a lot of misclassification in those statistics; but we don't think we've mis-classified any of the hotel listings. We're particularly proud of having that many of them because, even though we did loosen the listing standards for hotels (the hotels' minimum length is 15-meters v. the 18-meters required for all others), we've always felt that we're more likely to get a swim into the day if it's only a staircase or elevator-ride away.

Database Statistics July v. June:

We added 57 new listings in July but had to delete 18, for a net gain of 39.

As of July 31, 2022, the database lists 25,929 facilities in 210 countries and 14,405 cities and towns. In total, those facilities have 28,432 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

In the site's "Top 10" countries, there are now 7,700 listings in the United States, 2,225 in the United Kingdom, 1,618 in France, 1,562 in Germany, 1,460 in Spain, 1,166 in Italy, 999 in Canada, 942 in Australia, 888 in Japan, and 622 in Poland.

June Site Activity:

Country #210

In early June, we came across our first listings in East Timor (Timor-Leste), a former Portuguese colony that was claimed by Indonesia when it gained its independence from Portugal in 1975. In 2002, it gained its independence from Indonesia. We found three listings in the capital, Dili, but (other than the pool in the U.S. Embassy compound in Dili), the best pool in the country is in Baucau. We thought we had run out of countries to list but, once again, we were wrong.

We weren’t looking for new pools in June; it was time to get back to work updating the too-many-thousand pools we already had listed but hadn’t updated in a long time. We turned first to Québec and decided to do some of Québec and then some of Italy, alternating between the two. It had been nearly ten years since we last did a run-through of Italy, and seven since we looked at Québec, so they were long past due.

Regarding Québec: We had been told some years ago that the counties we were using in the “County/Region” part of the listings were way-way out of date. We had used our trusty 1984 Hammond Medallion World Atlas to make place that province’s cities and towns into some logical order and had been avoiding trying to correct the arrangement, just because the provincial government had decided to change things around in the early 1980s, i.e., before Hammond even published the Atlas we were using.

Pool of the Month:

This month, we’ve selected the Florida Aquatics Swimming & Training facility in the Ocala, Florida. The facility, which opened in March, 2022, was purpose built for the operation of competitive swimming and training programs. It has two, 50-meter pools, one indoors, the other an outdoor pool. The indoor pool is kept at 81ºF (27ºC); it’s a standard, but state-of-the-arts competitive pool. The outdoor pool is temperature controlled at 82ºF (28ºC) and is a bit different from most 50-meter pools, as it has an “L” with a shaded, 25-yard, 6-lane section on one side.

The facility offers day passes and memberships and has USS and USMS-affiliated swim teams. It is likely to become a big destination for college and high school swim team training trips.

Database Statistics June v. May:

We added only 28 new listings in June but had to delete 20, for a net gain of just eight.

As of June 30, 2022, the database lists 25,890 facilities in 210 countries and 14,391 cities and towns. In total, those facilities have 28,387 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

In the site's "Top 10" countries, there are now 7,696 listings in the United States, 2,225 in the United Kingdom, 1,620 in France, 1,563 in Germany, 1,459 in Spain, 1,140 in Italy, 996 in Canada, 942 in Australia, 888 in Japan, and 622 in Poland.

May Site Activity:

A family illness continued to occupy our time and mental energy curtailing the amount of time we were able to devote to the maintenance of the site in May.

During May we continued completed our review of Pennsylvania’s 271 listings. We lost eight, primarily due to the disappearance of swim teams that had utilized pools not otherwise accessible to the public, so we’re not real upset about that. We also finished updating the broken website links of the 455 listings that our French correspondent told us about back in February.

In the coming months, we’re targeting the listings in West Virginia, Ohio, Quebec, and Italy for review.

Pool of the Month:

This month, we’ve selected the HBF Stadium complex in the Mount Claremont suburb of Perth in Western Australia. The facility, which was formerly known as the “Perth Challenge Stadium” and hosted the 1998 FINA Swimming World Championships, boasts three 50-meter pools, one indoors and two outdoors, an indoor 30-meter, three to five meter depth, diving/water polo tank, and an outdoor 33-meter water polo pool. All five of the pools are temperature controlled at 27ºC (81ºF). And the pools are open to the public. You can see a nice aerial photograph of the complex on the Google Maps page for the facility, ground level photos of all the pools can be seen by clicking on the small photo of the complex in the upper left corner of the page. This facility is seriously impressive!

Database Statistics May v. March:

We added only 22 new listings in May but had to delete 19, for a net gain of just three.

As of May 31, 2022, the database lists 25,882 facilities in 209 countries and 14,382 cities and towns. In total, those facilities have 28,376 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

In the site's "Top 10" countries, there are now 7,965 listings in the United States, 2,225 in the United Kingdom, 1,620 in France, 1,561 in Germany, 1,459 in Spain, 1,139 in Italy, 1,001 in Canada, 942 in Australia, 888 in Japan, and 622 in Poland.

April Site Activity:

An illness in the family sharply curtailed the amount of time we were able to devote to the maintenance of the site in April; this situation is likely to continue for the next four to six months.

During April we continued our review of the listings in Pennsylvania, where we've checked out 137 of that state's 271 listings. And we made good progress in France, where we've been able to repair the broken links (and update the listing information) of 369 of the 455 listings that our French correspondent told us about a couple of months ago.

Pool of the Month:

Rather than pick one facility as the "Pool of the Month" for April, we're selecting an entire country: Singapore. With 55 listings in an area of just 283 square miles (733 square kilometers) and a population of 5.5 million people (approximately), Singapore is one of the most swimmer-friendly countries we've come across. Many of its public swimming centers have two 50-meter swimming pools; the Tampines Swimming Complex has two and what we believe is a 33-meter third pool, and the Marina Bay Sands Hotel has a 135-meter "infinity" pool situated 55 stories above ground. Singapore has the singular advantages of being close to the equator and being quite wealthy. We wish we could get there some day.

For the record, let it be noted that #WeStandWithUkraine.

Database Statistics April v. March:

We added only 30 new listings in April but had to delete 15, for a net gain of 15.

As of April 30, 2022, the database lists 25,879 facilities in 209 countries and 14,374 cities and towns. In total, those facilities have 28,372 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

In the site's "Top 10" countries, there are now 7,702 listings in the United States, 2,223 in the United Kingdom, 1,624 in France, 1,561 in Germany, 1,458 in Spain, 1,138 in Italy, 1,001 in Canada, 937 in Australia, 888 in Japan, and 622 in Poland.

March Site Activity:

We completed our review of the listings in New Jersey and have made a good start with the listings in Pennsylvania. We've also made good progress with the 450 broken facility Website links for listings in France, having fixed more than 250 of them.

When we finish with Pennsylvania, we'll move back to Canada, whose reviews were interrupted by the plague after completing Ontario (we were working west to east, so had already covered BC, Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and the Northern Territories).

Pool of the Month:

Last month we neglected to name a Pool of The Month – and we heard from several of you about the oversight. We'll not do that again!

Although April was relatively light on new listings, we did find one that struck us: the Aura Sky Pool, a racetrack-shaped, infinity pool on the 50^th story of The Palm Tower in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Based on our Google Maps take-offs, the pool, which encircles the top floor of the building that houses the St. Regis Hotel, is 140-meters long and approximately 3-meters wide. The pool operates independently from the hotel, so if you're staying at the St. Regis, you can't just elevator up to the 50^th floor and dive in; it will cost you AED 200 or more (about US$55.00); prices vary by time of day, with a full day going for AED 425.

And, by the way, you'll need to make reservations, too. When we checked on the morning of April 1, the first opening available was in mid-May. Reservations open 60 days in advance.

Aside from the pool, itself, in checking out the Aura Sky Pool's website (there's a link to it in our listing) we were struck by the enormity of "The Palm", the set of artificial islands in the shape of a palm tree that juts out into the Persian Gulf. We had seen aerial photographs of it before but had never taken a careful look at it: From the base of the trunk of the palm tree to the outermost edge of the island that encircles it is 4.75 kilometers or 2.95 miles; from the outer edges of the surrounding island is about 5.3 kilometers or 3.3 miles! Although we can think of many better ways to spend the money it must have cost to build the islands, it is better all those petrodollars went to this foolishness than to going to war with Dubai's neighbors.

For the record, let it be noted that #WeStandWithUkraine.

Database Statistics March v. February:

We added only 33 new listings in February but had to delete 19, for a net gain of 14.

As of March, 2022, the database lists 25,864 facilities in 209 countries and 14,359 cities and towns. In total, those facilities have 28,352 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

In the site's "Top 10" countries, there are now 7,702 listings in the United States, 2,223 in the United Kingdom, 1,623 in France, 1,562 in Germany, 1,458 in Spain, 1,138 in Italy, 1,001 in Canada, 936 in Australia, 889 in Japan, and 622 in Poland.

February Site Activity:

It appears that the most recent COVID-19 variant crisis has passed and in the second half of February, we started surveying our listings in the U.S. state of New Jersey. With only one exception, so far, we've found that all the pools we expect to reopen are now open and responding to telephone and email enquiries. We've been through 98 of the 171 listings there and will proceed on to Pennsylvania next.

Unfortunately, as we were running through our New Jersey list, our correspondent and data-partner in France sent us a list of 450 facility website links that had gone bad on us, along with an updated list of the pools in France and her overseas regions. We fell for the bait and were able to add a goodly number of new listings in Reunion Island, the French West Indies, French Guyana, and New Caledonia. It's more fun to add new pools than to review and update old listings, so NJ took a back seat for a while. Now, we're trying to alternate between reviewing the old U.S. listings in New Jersey and fixing broken French pool links. Never a dull moment in the world of the pool-obsessed. As they say in Spain – Cada loco con su tema. I've got mine.

For the record, let it be noted that #WeStandWithUkraine.

Database Statistics February v. January:

We added 67 new listings in February but had to delete 20, for a net gain of 47.

As of February 28, 2022, the database lists 25,850 facilities in 209 countries and 14,348 cities and towns. In total, those facilities have 28,330 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

In the site's "Top 10" countries, there are now 7,702 listings in the United States, 2,223 in the United Kingdom, 1,622 in France, 1,562 in Germany, 1,458 in Spain, 1,137 in Italy, 1001 in Canada, 935 in Australia, 889 in Japan, and 622 in Poland.

January Site Activity:

During January we were able to get some listings in New Jersey and in Italy updated, but we hit a lot of brick walls, where we found that many of the places whose listings we wanted to review were involved in COVID lockdowns. Rather than waste a lot of time unable to gather updated prices, etc., we "twiddled our thumbs" and looked for new pools. An effort that was not unrewarded. During the month we picked up a net of 61 new listings, 79 new pools, and 30 new cities and towns.

Pools of the Month:

None of the pools we came across this month struck us as really interesting, so we're skipping selecting one for special note, this month. Hopefully we'll have better luck next month. If you have a suggestion for the feature, drop us a line and we'll scope it out.

Database Statistics January v. December:

We added 76 new listings in January but had to delete 15, for a net gain of 61.

As of January 31, 2022, the database lists 25,803 facilities in 209 countries and 14,312 cities and towns. In total, those facilities have 28,270 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

In the site's "Top 10" countries, there are now 7,700 listings in the United States, 2,221 in the United Kingdom, 1,621 in France, 1,562 in Germany, 1,457 in Spain, 1,134 in Italy, 999 in Canada, 935 in Australia, 887 in Japan, and 621 in Poland.

December Site Activity:

During December we finalized our review of all the listings in New York State. Because of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, we did not attempt to update a lot of the pricing information, but we verified (or changed, as appropriate) the names, addresses, telephone numbers, and home page website URLs, to the extent we could.

In addition to the ongoing review of existing listings, we continued looking for more pools in more countries.

Given the rise of the Omicron variant of COVID in late December, we're going to go slow with our planned review of listings in New Jersey and, perhaps, begin reviewing some of the listings in Italy, which hasn't been looked at in seven years.

Pools of the Month:

We've selected three "Pools of the Month" for December, 2021. The first is, unfortunately, "unlistable". It's a 300-meter long, ten meter wide, four-lane outdoor, training pool at the KYSM School in Bambang, Malacca Province, Malaysia. For a close in link to a satellite view from Google Maps, click HERE. And that dinky little pool to the left of the long one? That's a 50-meter, 8-lane competition tank! The sort of a pool that we usually think of as the "gold standard". Neither of the pools at the schools is accessible to the public, but we felt we had to share them with you, anyway.

Looking at things in a more down-to-earth fashion, we were also taken by two other facilities we discovered over the course of the month on either the the Did you swim today? or the Lap Swimmers of the World Facebook groups:

The first is the Barceló Maya Grand Resort, a six-hotel mega-resort in Riviera Maya, Mexico with a 70-meter, two-lane pool and three 25-meter, five-lane tanks! The fellow who created the post said that he'd been able to swim 2,500 meters in the 70-meter pool, before 8 AM, every day, for two weeks. We like to list hotels but, as we say in that listing, being able to actually swim at a resort hotel is often a crapshoot. You never know whether the kids will beat you to the pool and make a great pool totally "unswimmable". The 70-meter pool is on the property of the resort's single "Adults Only" hotel, which may be how the fellow was able to get his laps in.

The second is also a hotel property, but way at the other end of the spectrum and almost the other end of the world; the Only Fools and Horses Accommodations, Casual Swimming, etc. It's a guesthouse property in Muriwai Beach, New Zealand, with a 25-meter, four-lane, outdoor pool that becomes an indoor pool, when its transparent, semi-circular, sliding roof segments are deployed. The accommodations consist of two bunkrooms -one with four beds, the other with six- and stables to house several horses, if you bring them. Bunkrooms may be shared with other people.

It's hard to imagine two resorts more unalike!

Database Statistics December v. November:

We added 52 new listings in December but had to delete 26, for a net gain of 26.

As of December 31, 2021, the database lists 25,657 facilities in 209 countries and 14,239 cities and towns. In total, those facilities have 28,092 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

In the site's "Top 10" countries, there are now 7,635 listings in the United States, 2,216 in the United Kingdom, 1,617 in France, 1,561 in Germany, 1,454 in Spain, 1,130 in Italy, 998 in Canada, 929 in Australia, 887 in Japan, and 621 in Poland.

Database Statistics 2021 v. 2020:

Over the course of 2021, the database grew by 262 listings and 385 pools, we added only one country (the Solomon Islands) but 275 new communities.

We had a net loss of three listings in the United States and 83 in the United Kingdom, but picked up 23 new listings in France, 24 in Germany, 12 in Spain, five in Italy, eight in Canada, seven in Australia, and one in Japan.

November Site Activity:

During November we spent most of our time working on updating the listings in New York State. We were surprised to find that, although most municipal and commercial health club pools were back online and operating with relatively few modifications for COVID, the educational sector, most notably colleges and universities were still either shut down entirely or, if reopened, were operating in a less welcoming mode than they had pre-COVID.

In addition to the ongoing review of existing listings, we continued looking for more pools in more countries. In this job, that's where the fun is; checking existing listings' telephone numbers and postcodes is boring stuff - but there's a "Eureka!" moment when you find a pool you didn't know about before – and it's even better when it's a lead you've been tracking down for years, which is not uncommon in this game. (Speaking of which, can anyone please tell me how long the pool at the Hallenbad Schrems in Austria is? I've been looking for that morsel of information since February 19, 2001…)

Also in November, we added the 209^th country to the Swimmers Guide pantheon of pools – the Solomon Islands. We found a hotel in Honiara on Guadalcanal Island with a perfectly acceptable 20-yard, outdoor pool. We don't have much information about the hotel or its pool, but they gave us bragging rights to 209 countries,,,

In terms of plans for the future, we'll complete our review of the listings in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and then turn to Italy, which hasn't been looked at closely since 2012 or 2013.

Pool of the Month:

On one of several Facebook swimming-related groups we follow, we found the Yarrangobilly Caves Thermal Pool in Yarrangobilly, New South Wales, Australia. The pool is located off a hiking trail in the hills of Kosciuszzko National Park, about 200 miles (320 kilometers) southwest of Sydney. The pool must be a godsend to summertime hikers and we find it remarkable for its combination of remoteness and suitability for swimming.

Database Statistics:

We added 52 new listings in November but had to delete 26, for a net gain of 26.

As of November 30, 2021, the database lists 25,657 facilities in 209 countries and 14,239 cities and towns. In total, those facilities have 28,092 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

In the site's "Top 10" countries, there are now 7,635 listings in the United States, 2,216 in the United Kingdom, 1,617 in France, 1,561 in Germany, 1,454 in Spain, 1,130 in Italy, 998 in Canada, 929 in Australia, 887 in Japan, and 621 in Poland.

October Site Activity:

During October we finally finished updating the listings in England and immediately turned to the first of the mid-Atlantic states in the US – New York.

As with the listings in the UK, we did not attempt to update the admission prices for private pools there, as COVID-19 restrictions are still in place and we were concerned that temporary admission restrictions at private facilities would become permanently embedded in our database. Although the admission information we present now may be out-of-date and wrong, we expect that many of the private gyms and clubs that do not currently offer drop-in admissions soon will and, if we were to show them as "no access" facilities, in six months or a year, you might reject them out-of-hand, rather call and be pleasantly surprised.

What we have been doing with private facility listings is to check that the are still open, that the Website links we show are all working, and that the contact information is still correct.

Pool of the Month:

We came across one truly unique pool in October at the Mooshaus Winterresort in Kühtai, Tirol, Austria. The pool, which is approximately 100m long and three or four meters wide is an infinity pool that encircles the entire fifth (top) floor of the resort hotel building. It has two 33-meter sides and two 16-meter sides, The fifth floor of the hotel is rectangular, so the pool is something like a donut with corners. Sadly, they keep the water in the pool at 36ºC (97ºF), way, way too high for vigorous swimming, so we decided that including it on the site would not be appropriate. But it is kinda cool and we thought you'd like to know about it.

Database Statistics:

October wasn't a great month, but it did beat September: We added 31 listings, like September, and lost only 22, for a 9-listing net gain. Most of the losses were in England, where we had a net loss of 15 listings (the same as September).

As of October 31, 2021, the database lists 25,631 facilities in 208 countries and 14,222 cities and towns. In total, those facilities have 28,062 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

In the site's "Top 10" countries, there are now 7,625 listings in the United States, 2,215 in the United Kingdom, 1,615 in France, 1,560 in Germany, 1,454 in Spain, 1,130 in Italy, 999 in Canada, 928 in Australia, 887 in Japan, and 621 in Poland.

September Site Activity:

During August we continued updating the listings in England. We're working in the North Riding of Yorkshire, now, and have only 141 English listings left to review. We'll turn to the long-deferred review of the United States' mid-Atlantic region (New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania) as soon as England is done. Then it'll be off to cyber-Italia.

Pool of the Month:

With all the shopping centers going bust, these days, and all the talk about Amazon converting them into massive warehouses (the conqueror puts his foot on the neck of his vanquished foe), we find the NOVA Aquatics Center at Regency Mall in Richmond, Virginia refreshing. NOVA Swimming, Thalhimer Realty Partners, The Rebkee Company, and Henrico County financed the conversion of a 50,000 square foot space, formerly occupied by a Macy's Department Store into a three-pool aquatic center with a 50-meter pool and two 25-yard pools.

We reached out to NOVA Aquatics by email to find out what the center's admission policies are and to gather further details about the pools, themselves, but they were apparently too busy to answer the queries we emailed on September 6. So, if you're in the neighborhood, you'll just have to call. (Please pass along any useful information you may be able to garner.)

Database Statistics:

September wasn't a great month: We didn't lose a lot of listings – just 31, but we didn't gain a lot, either – also just 31. Most of the losses were in England, where we had a net loss of 15 listings. The gains, on the other hand, were well distributed around the world.

As of September 30, 2021, the database lists 25,622 facilities in 208 countries and 14,209 cities and towns. In total, those facilities have 28,047 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

In the site's "Top 10" countries, there are now 7,620 listings in the United States, 2,227 in the United Kingdom, 1,613 in France, 1,560 in Germany, 1,449 in Spain, 1,130 in Italy, 995 in Canada, 928 in Australia, 887 in Japan, and 621 in Poland.

August Site Activity:

During August we continued updating the listings in England. We're well into Surry, now, and have another 377 English listings yet to review. We continue to defer looking into the mid-Atlantic states of the United States due to the uncertainty imposed by a resurgent COVID-19 pandemic. There are those among us who feel that they should be entitled to maintain their "freedom of choice" at the risk of others' right to life. That attitude that has done incalculable harm to everyone, extending the duration of the pandemic well past the point when it could have been easily contained. (Is anyone else gob smacked by the hypocrisy implicit in the anti-vaxxers' right-to-life positions?)

For those of you who participated in the user interviews we conducted a few months ago, we have not abandoned the site update project. In fact, we've made some decisions on a site expansion that we think will have everyone quite excited. But the new site is still a few months down the road. Your patience is appreciated and will be rewarded.

A Request:

It has been relatively easy for us to eliminate the listings of facilities owned or operated by large commercial chains that fell into bankruptcy during the COVID-19 pandemic, but there is no easy way for us to find and remove listings of YMCAs and independently owned and operated gyms that have closed permanently over the last 18 or so months. So, for the benefit of everyone who uses this site, please use any of the "Edit" buttons in any listing for any facility that you know is permanently closed. We will remove the listings as quickly as we find out about their closures. It won't take you long; it won't get you on an email SPAM list (I promise); and it will save other swimmers some time and trouble as they look for places to swim going forward.

Swimmers helping other swimmers has always been at the core of the Swimmers Guide mission and we've never needed that help more.

Pool of the Month:

Although the body of water can't really be called a "swimming pool" in the classic sense of a "concrete pond" (as expressed in the Beverly Hillbillies TV show of the '60s), the dirt pond of the Bicester Hotel Golf and Spa in Chesterton, England really caught our attention. Google Maps flags it as a "Performance Lake" and, although it is not the only quasi-open water listing on the site (we've had The Dolphin Club at San Francisco Aquatic Park since "Day One" and added Walden Pond sometime later), it appears to be the only artificial open water site we've come across.

Database Statistics:

Having deleted the bankrupt gym-chain listings in June and July, we were able to resume the upward trend in the number of listings. We didn't add a lot of new facilities, netting just 28, but at least that reverses the downward trend of the previous two months.

As of August 31, 2021, the database lists 25,622 facilities in 208 countries and 14,201 cities and towns. In total, those facilities have 28,033 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,614 listings in the United States, 2,242 in the United Kingdom, 1,612 in France, 1,558 in Germany, 1,449 in Spain, 1,129 in Italy, 994 in Canada, 929 in Australia, 887 in Japan, and 621 in Poland.

July Site Activity:

As noted in our "Quick Update" in early July, we spent the first couple of days of the month checking the status of the pools in the Gold's Gym listings. After we finished that, we went ahead to check the status of the listings that had formerly been operated by the now-defunct DW Fitness chain in the UK. The situation there wasn't so bad, as most of the DW locations were taken over by the Everlast Fitness Clubs chain; we lost only eight listings as a result of DW's bankruptcy.

For the rest of the month (aside from the week we took off to visit family in New York and Rhode Island), we continued updating the listings in England. We're about half-way through Northumbria, and have another 630 English listings, one-third of the total, yet to review.

Pool of the Month:

For the last two weeks, the eyes of the world have been focused on the Tokyo Aquatics Center. Its selection as the Pool of the Month for July is a no-brainer.

Database Statistics:

Owing to the situation with Gold's Gyms, DW Fitness, and the general impact of Covid-19 on the viability of commercially operated swimming pools in the UK and US, we actually lost 86 listings and were able to find only 20 new ones, for a net loss of 66.

As of July 31, 2021, the database lists 25,594 facilities in 208 countries and 14,184 cities and towns. In total, those facilities have 27,998 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,607 listings in the United States, 2,246 in the United Kingdom, 1,611 in France, 1,558 in Germany, 1,448 in Spain, 1,128 in Italy, 994 in Canada, 928 in Australia, 886 in Japan, and 621 in Poland.

Regarding the Gold's Gym Pool Closures:

We headed our June 30 "What's New" report with a paragraph about the possible closure of the swimming pools at all Gold's Gyms. We have now checked the websites of all 96 or 97 Gold's Gyms in our database. Just over half of them no longer list a swimming pool on the list of club amenities. Those listings (mostly in Texas, Oklahoma, and North Carolina) have now been removed from our website. The remaining 44 still include swimming pools on their amenities lists and have been retained on the site. 

It's amusing to note that the clubs that still include swimming pools on their amenities lists, put the pools first, on every single one!

What is it they say about half a loaf? Or the glass being half enpty...?

Heads-up On a Rumor That May Just Be A Rumor (but maybe not)

In one of the Facebook groups we follow, we found a post made around June 29 to the effect that the "new owners" of the Gold's Gym chain were going to close all of the pools in all of their locations. We tried to check that statement out by Googling news articles but could find nothing confirming. Then, on June 30, we received an "Edit" for a Gold's location in Ashville, North Carolina, telling us that the pools in two Gold's Gym locations there had been closed. We haven't had time to go through all 90 Gold's Gym locations in the database, yet, but we think it likely the rumor is true. We'll try to find out more in July.

June Site Activity:

We spent most of June reviewing the listings in England that we hadn't checked since our last pass-through there in 2015 (2015!). It's slow work, but we're making progress. Sadly, the DW Fitness chain went into receivership during the pandemic; happily, it appears that most of their locations were picked up by the Everlast Fitness Clubs chain. We've been contacting those locations to get better information. As a general rule, we're leaving other private clubs alone, just confirming their URLs and contact information, as those that had welcoming drop-in policies may have tightened things up temporarily during the pandemic – and we don’t want our listings to reflect a more restrictive situation than what may apply after we get the virus beat.

Also in June, we were contacted by a French swimmer who has been enormously helpful in sending us updates about the listings in France. And not just updates, he's sent information about a lot of new listings in that country.

For much of June, we were working on parallel tracks, alternating between England and France (plus the information that many of you have sent in through the "Edit" forms in the individual listings.

In July, we'll be taking some vacation time but will try to get resolution of the Gold's Gym "issue" and continue with the review of the listings in England.

Pool of the Month (Correction)

We gave our "Pool of the Month" nod for June to the new Address Beach Resort in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. In our description of that property, we indicated that its most noteworthy attribute is that its largest pool "is located on the 77^th floor, at an elevation 293.9 meters (964.7 feet) above the ground; that puts it roughly 94 meters (22 floors) higher than the arina Bay Sands Hotel's 135-meter long pool". We should have pointed out that the pool at the highest building elevation is the one on the 116^th floor of the Ritz Carlton, Hong Kong almost 200 meters higher!

(Sometimes our enthusiasm gets the better of us.)

Database Statistics:

We managed to maintain the total of 25,660 listings in June, but just barely: We added 30 new listings and removed exactly the same number. Most of the deletions were in England, where we lost 16. Most of the adds were in France, where we picked up 16.

As of June 30, 2021, the database lists 25,660 listings in 208 countries and 14,177 cities and towns. In total, those facilities have 28,061 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,653 listings in the United States, 2,273 in the United Kingdom, 1,610 in France, 1,558 in Germany, 1,448 in Spain, 1,128 in Italy, 994 in Canada, 928 in Australia, 886 in Japan, and 621 in Poland.

An Anniversary Forgotten?

With all the other stuff going on in the world and in our lives, we completely forgot that the site had it's 25^th Anniversary, back in March. When we started collecting the data for the database in 1991, I don't think the Internet was even in existence at that point; five years later, however, the site went online with about 3,300 listings. We had no idea that it would last so long – but it did!

¡Happy Birthday, SwimmersGuide.com!

May Site Activity:

In May, we were able to resume the systematic review of listing that has occupied our time for the last ten or twelve years. For those who haven't been paying attention, the Covid-19 pandemic pool closures made it practically impossible to connect with the operators of the facilities listed on the site – a closed pool doesn't answer email. As a general rule, adding a new listing doesn't require communication the facility's operator but updating a listing often does, so the last fourteen or so months we've been concentrating on expanding the database. Now that the world is opening up again, we've been able to return to the county-by-county/city-by-city check-every-listing review that we had to abort when pools around the world began closing.

So, in early May, we began going through the site's listings in England; of the 1,818 listings there, we were able to review nearly 400. Given that many private facilities have not yet opened to non-members, we did not seek price updates for them, but at least we're fairly certain that the ones we were able to check are still operating. (We're done through Hampshire, so far). We'll continue working on England through the middle of June, when the mid-Atlantic states (New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania) will have reopened.

Pool of the Month

This month's "Pool of the Month" is the Address Beach Resort in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The resort has three, temperature-controlled, outdoor pools (the hotel confirmed that they're temperature-controlled, but didn't respond when we asked for the temperature).The pools are 94.84-meters, 53.95-meters, and 48.95-meters long; although the lengths are notable, what makes the listing especially noteworthy is that the big one is located on the 77^th floor, at an elevation 293.9 meters (964.7 feet) above the ground; that puts it roughly 94 meters (22 floors) higher than the Marina Bay Sands Hotel's 135-meter long pool.

Database Statistics:

For the second time in the site's history, we actually reduced the number of listings in May: We had a net loss of four listings in the U.S.; thirteen in the UK; and eight in France. The losses in the U.S, and U.K. are attributable to the pandemic. The losses in France appear to be largely due to age, as the pools built in the 1970s' "One Thousand Pools" program became too expensive to maintain.

As of May 31, 2021, the database lists 25,660 listings in 208 countries and 14,147 cities and towns. In total, those facilities have 28,030 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,652 listings in the United States, 2,286 in the United Kingdom, 1,600 in France, 1,557 in Germany, 1,448 in Spain, 1,128 in Italy, 994 in Canada, 927 in Australia, 886 in Japan, and 621 in Poland.

April Site Activity:

Like March, April was a quiet month. We came across a bunch of LA Fitness (a U.S. health club chain) locations, which gave us 33 new listings, and checked a bunch of new listings in France, Moldova, Peru, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Turkmenistan, Kuwait, and Uzbekistan, while we continued to wait-out the Covid-19 pandemic.

England reopened its pools in mid-April and we think enough time may have passed to allow them to update their individual websites, so we'll now be able to return to the county-by-county/city-by-city check-every-listing review that we had to abort when pools around the world began closing.

Also, it's worth mentioning that we passed the 28,000 swimming pool mark in April.

Pool of the Month

This month's selection for the "Pool of the Month" goes to the Kolam Renang Senayan - Aquatic Center GBK in Jakarta, Indonesia. The facility, which was used for the 2018 Asian Games, boasts three 50-meter pools (two 10 lanes, indoor/outdoor, the other 8 lanes, indoors), plus a 25-meter x 21-meter, 5m depth diving pool. The two 50-meter, 10 lane pools and the 25-meter diving pool are laid-out end-to end under an ingenious roof structure that folds and unfolds like a wave. The architect's website has some interesting photos and renderings of the structure, you can find them on the andramatin website.

Database Statistics:

As of April 30, 2021, the database lists 25,673 swimming) in 208 countries and 14,147 cities and towns. In total, those facilities have 28,030 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,656 listings in the United States, 2,299 in the United Kingdom, 1,608 in France, 1,555 in Germany, 1,447 in Spain, 1,128 in Italy, 994 in Canada, 927 in Australia, 886 in Japan, and 621 in Poland.

March Site Activity:

March was a pretty quiet month. We updated the listings in Hong Kong, Macau, and Singapore; added a bunch of new listings in Mexico and generally worked on maintaining the data in the database, while we wait-out the Covid-19 pandemic. We're encouraged to see that a number of countries have opened up their pools or announced opening dates, and we are cautiously optimistic as vaccination statistics improve. But the sort of organized update that we like to do – checking every listing in a particular state or country – will have to wait a bit longer because the states and countries that we should logically be working on (the mid-Atlantic states in the US, all of Italy and the UK) are still only partly open or entirely shut-down, as we write this update. Pools in the UK are slated to reopen in early April, so we may be able to make some progress on that front in the coming days and weeks.

Pool of the Month

This month's selection for the "Pool of the Month" goes to the Tampines Swimming Complex in eastern Singapore. The facility boasts of two 50-meter pools (one 10 lanes, indoors, the other 8 lanes, outdoors), plus an all-deep, indoor pool designed for water polo and synchronized (now artistic) swimming. We had to relegate that one to the "Notes" section of the facility's listing, because we could not find that pool's dimensions anywhere. In addition to those, there's an "interactive pool" and a wading pool (both only 0.3m deep) for the little ones; and a Jacuzzi® pool. All of this is located on the 6^th floor of a "Community Hub". Another nice feature of this facility is its proximity to Singapore's Airport, so if you're traveling and stuck on a long layover in Singapore, you have to go only about 5 km. (3.2 miles) to get there.

Database Statistics:

As of March 31, 2021, the database lists 25,574 swimming) in 208 countries and 14,106 cities and towns. In total, those facilities have 27,924 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,618 listings in the United States, 2,298 in the United Kingdom, 1,604 in France, 1,554 in Germany, 1,447 in Spain, 1,128 in Italy, 994 in Canada, 927 in Australia, 886 in Japan, and 621 in Poland.

February Site Activity:

In February, we spent the first half of the month picking up new listings; in the U.S. we discovered that the Vasa Fitness chain had undergone quite an expansion since we last checked their outlets and we were also able to pick up a few YMCAs, JCCs, and other types of pool. We also did some work in Central America, gathering a bunch of new listings in Panama, Costa Rica, and Honduras.

During the second half of the month, we spent most of our time cleaning up erroneous data in a field in the database that you can't see, yet. There is a field in the database that should be used to indicate the "type" of pool, e.g., Municipal (or Council-owned); YMCA; JCC; Private health club; etc. Because those fields do not impact the public's use of the database, over the years, we got a bit lazy with how carefully we maintained the information in that field. Our plans for the future, however, include giving you the opportunity to "filter" the information from the database by type; if you want to see only YMCA pools, or public (municipal or council-owned) listings, we expect to be able to give you that option in our next site update. Unfortunately, that means we have to go back through the listings to make sure that we correct misclassification errors. It's a slow, tedious, and unproductive process, but the effort should pay off when we get the new site online in a few months.

And, you will recall, back in January we spent a lot of time purging listings for private health club chain branches that had been closed due to bankruptcies. Our efforts in that regard were limited entirely to chains that operate in the U.S. But, just as the month was coming to an end, we discovered that the DW Fitness chain in the UK had also gone into receivership. We don’t have the situation with their locations sorted out, yet, and probably won't be able to until the current UK lock-down is lifted, so here's a heads-up for our UK users to be sure to verify that the club that you're thinking of visiting, post-lockdown, has survived the pandemic.

Pool of the Month

This month's selection for the "Pool of the Month" goes to the St. James Sports, Wellness and Entertainment Complex in the northern Virginia suburbs of the District of Columbia. The pool here is a 50m, 10 lane x 25y, 20 lane, indoor tank kept at 79º - 82ºF (27º - 28ºC), but that's just the tip of the iceberg of offerings at this 450,000 square foot (!) training center: The facility also has a field house for soccer, lacrosse, and football; a courthouse for basketball, volleyball, and futsal (whatever that is); an ice rink; a baseball and softball hitting facility; squash and golf; and climbing and strength-conditioning areas. And, it's not just a one-off facility, they plan to begin construction on a second campus in Lincolnshire, Illinois, in late-2021.

Database Statistics:

As of February 28, 2021, the database lists 25,522 swimming) in 208 countries and 14,084 cities and towns. In total, those facilities have 27,866 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,610 listings in the United States, 2,298 in the United Kingdom, 1,604 in France, 1,554 in Germany, 1,446 in Spain, 1,128 in Italy, 991 in Canada, 926 in Australia, 886 in Japan, and 621 in Poland.

January Site Activity:

As promised in the December report, we spent a large part of January checking the listings of individual clubs that are parts of chains that have filed for bankruptcy protection during the Covid-19 pandemic shutdowns. In a word, it could have been worse. We ended up deleting about 100 listings: the 24-Hour Fitness chain was hit the worst, with 56 listings removed from the database; Gold's Gyms lost 25; the New York and Boston Sports Clubs, which are owned by the same parent company, lost ten; and California's In-Shape Fitness lost eight.

While going through all those sad stories, however, we also found one entirely new chain – Esporta Fitness (a spin-off and expansion of the LA Fitness brand) that's operating primarily in California, Arizona, and Florida, and significant expansions of the Genesis, EoS, and Vasa Fitness brands. (We still have about twenty Vasa locations to check-out; those that qualify will be added to the site in February.)

We also picked up a bunch of listings on Mauritius and Reunion Islands in the Indian Ocean and a few more in Germany and France. But all the new listings didn't completely make up for the losses left by the Covid bankruptcies.

Pool of the Month

This month's selection for the "Pool of the Month" goes to a pool that's not even open, the Waikiki Natatorium War Memorial. This 100m x 40m, oceanfront, saltwater pool was built in 1927 as a memorial to the Hawaiians who served and died in World War I. The pool officially closed in 1963 and a group called the Friends of the Natatorium is running a fundraising effort to preserve, repair, and reopen the facility. It looks like a really cool facility – and the men and women who served in WWI deserve better than a decaying "memorial".

Database Statistics:

As of January 31, 2021, the database lists 25,446 swimming facilities (down 34 from December 31, 2020, our first month-over-month decline in the nearly 25 years the site has been online) in 208 countries and 14,053 cities and towns. In total, those facilities have 27,776 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,588 listings in the United States, 2,302 in the United Kingdom, 1,602 in France, 1,554 in Germany, 1,444 in Spain, 1,127 in Italy, 991 in Canada, 923 in Australia, 885 in Japan, and 621 in Poland.

What's New as of December 31, 2020

It ain't over 'til it's over:

Like everyone else in the world, we couldn't wait for 2020 to come to an end. But, although things are looking up, until the Covid-19 vaccines are fully (and competently) distributed, things aren't going to change much. Pools will remain closed in locked-down cities, states, and countries. And a significant number of them may remain closed permanently, due to the financial impact of the shut-downs. Here in the United States, a significant portion of our listings are in private health clubs, several of which have declared bankruptcy, already. We can expect more of them to go under in the future. Given the problems with validating our data regarding existing listings, due to temporary Covid-19  closures, in the upcoming months, we're going to try to identify and delete permanently closed health club facilities.

December Site Activity:

As mentioned last month, the pandemic has made it difficult to do a systematic review of our existing listings so, in December we spent most of the month doing random key word Google searches for new listings. We came up with 55 of them broadly distributed around the world, three of them (not very good ones) in Yemen, which became the 208^th country represented on the website. We also added 21 new cities and towns to the site, bringing that total to more than 14,000.

Pool of the Month

This month's selection for the "Pool of the Month" goes to the new Shawnee Mission School District Aquatic Center; we found this pool notable for its location across the street from the Lenexa Recreation Center. The school district's facilities, with 50m and 25y tanks will serve the serious segment of the swimming population, while the Recreation Center's warm, 25y, 3 lane pool will be great for the kids, kickers, and splashers. Notably, the school district and the county parks and recreation department are cooperating in the operation of the school district's pool, a cooperation that should benefit all of both pools' users.

Database Statistics:

As of December 31, 2020, the database lists 25,480 swimming facilities (up 677 from December 31, 2019) in 208 countries ( up four from 2019) and 14,007 cities and towns (up 401 from 2019). In total, those facilities have 27,806 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ) (v. 2019's 27,022).

There are now 7,670 listings in the United States, 2,302 in the United Kingdom, 1,597 in France, 1,537 in Germany, 1,444 in Spain, 1,127 in Italy, 991 in Canada, 923 in Australia, 886 in Japan, and 621 in Poland.

Things we learn – way too late:

During November, we engaged the services of a professional designer to review the layout, look, and feel of the SwimmersGuide website, before we set the programmers on the task of bringing everything up to date. As a part of his work, he interviewed eight site users with whom we have had extensive correspondence over the years. During the interviews, we found out a lot about how they (and by extension, you) use the site and we were really surprised by a few things:

Using the maps:

Some users questioned the reason for the different colors of the map's "dots" marking the locations of the pools. A green dot indicates that the pool is open to the public for a drop-in fee. A red dot indicates that the pool does not offer day passes. And a yellow dot indicates that we either don't know the pool's day pass policy or we do know it, but the pool's policies are not so simple, e.g., they may offer drop-in admissions in summer, but not in winter.

Several of the people the designer talked with were not aware of how the site has been integrated into the Google Maps universe. When the home page comes up and presents that big, blank field where you begin a search, the location information you can enter is not limited to a city and country combination. You can put in an exact street address, the name of a hotel, the name of an airport or a three-character airport code. You can even enter the name of a swimming pool you know about. So, for example, if you're going to Paris and you're have reservations to stay at the George V Hotel, you can type that into the search field. By the time you have typed "George V H", the search tool will auto-fill with "Four Seasons Hotel George V, Paris…" Select it, hit "Enter" and the map that comes up will be centered exactly on the location of the George V Hotel, with the closest pools clearly indicated on the map.

You can get a quick idea of which pool is closest by looking at the map. In the case of the Georg V Hotel, the closest public pool is the Piscine Jacqueline Auriol ex Beaujon. You can follow the "Read More" link after clicking on the dot on the map to pull up that pool's listing data page or,

Using the tables beneath the maps:

Instead of clicking on the "Read More" link, you can get a bit more information by scrolling down the page to the table beneath the map. There you can see a snapshot of information about the 50 pools closest the Hotel George V, including the "as the crow flies" distance from the hotel to each of the pools, sorted in ascending order (closest pools first).

If you're looking for a Masters group to train with, you can either scroll down the list to find a "Masters" entry in the "Team" column or you can type "Masters" in the "Filter" box, which will cause all the lines that don't have Masters entries in the listing to disappear.         That filtering capability works for every word in every field in the table.

If you'd like to see about 50-meter pools in the vicinity, again, you can scroll down the table, you can filter on "50m", or you can resort the list by clicking twice on the "Primary Pool" field. The first click sorts the list in ascending (shortest to longest) order, the second click resorts to descending order, with the 50m pools at the top. All of the fields in the table are sortable and you can sort and filter to your heart's content to find the best option for you.

Finding directions to the pools:

For purposes of this example, you decide that you want to swim at the Piscine Jacqueline Auriol ex Beaujon. To find directions to that pool from the George V Hotel, go to the "Location" section of the SwimmersGuide listing page and click on the text "Targeted Google Map Link". That will bring up a Google Map page showing the exact location of the Piscine Jacqueline Auriol (which used to be known as the Piscine Beaujon, hence "ex Beaujon"). On the left side of the map page, beneath the photo and name of the pool, above the address and contact information, you'll see the usual Google Maps tools "Directions", "Save", etc. Click on the Directions icon, and type "George V Hotel…" and <i>voilà</i> you have your turn-by-turn directions. It will tell you the exact distance and the estimated walking, driving, cycling, etc. time to get from the hotel to the pool.

Photographs:

Some users also mentioned their disappointment about our not having photographs of the pools on the site. Although we're looking at ways we may be able to correct this deficiency, we were surprised to find that our users didn't realize that the "Website", "Targeted Google Map", and "Facebook" links that are peppered throughout the listings often have great photographs of the pools. Even the "Team" links to swim team websites often have good pool photos, though some of the photos on team websites may be of places where the team has swum in a meet, i.e., they're not photos of their "home" pools. Also, the Life Time Fitness health club chain in the US and Canada often uses stock photos of pools on their locations' websites and on the Google Maps website, so in the case of those facilities, what you see may not be what you'll find, when you get there.

As we work on the redesign of SwimmersGuide, we'll be working on making some of the functions that users have not found on the current version of the site more obvious.

Database News:

For the last six years, we've been working on a systematic review of every listing on the site. Unfortunately, this Covid-19 pandemic has really stifled progress in that effort. Pools that are closed temporarily because of the plague often remove price and other information from their websites, and email inquiries go unanswered.

In most parts of the world, nobody is traveling, anyway, so our inability to update the listings doesn't make much difference, but we find it frustrating. So, while we can't do much of anything with the existing listings, we've gone on a hunt to find new ones. For years, we've been unhappy with our coverage of pools in South America, so we zeroed-in on places where our coverage was particularly light in northern South America: Ecuador, Colombia, the Guianas, and northern Brazil. We came up with about 140 of them. Including our first listings in Guyana, the 207^th country represented in the SwimmersGuide database!

Now we're working on Peru. If you're keeping track of these "What's New" entries, the site in India that we said might be productive last month just didn't pan out.

Pool of the Month

This month's selection for the "Pool of the Month" goes to the new Tokyo Aquatics Centre which has finally opened at a cost of more than $530,000,000 – several months after the Olympic Games of 2020 would have been over, had they not been postponed. You can't swim there now and probably won't be permitted to until after the games are completed in 2021.

Database Statistics:

As of November 30, 2020, the database lists 25,758 swimming facilities in 207 countries and 13,986 cities and towns. In total, those facilities have 27,740 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,660 listings in the United States, 2,301 in the United Kingdom, 1,594 in France, 1,536 in Germany, 1,444 in Spain, 1,127 in Italy, 990 in Canada, 923 in Australia, 886 in Japan, and 621 in Poland.

Covid-19:

Pools around the world have had to make adjustments to protect their patrons during the Covid-19 pandemic and a number of users have sent us notes, reviews, and general updates on what's going on at pools they've recently visited or tried to visit.

While we appreciate those notes, we have decided not to include reference to measures taken by the pools in the height of the Covid pandemic because:

a)       Since we are able to review and update the listings so rarely [there are still have nearly 4,000 un-reviewed pools since the current whole-site review began in late 2014], if we were to add the special procedures, the information would remain in the listings for years after the pandemic is over, making the listings appear extremely dated;

b)      We expect that everyone knows there are going to be some special measures and limitations in effect while the pandemic still rages; 

c)       Most of the pools' own websites go into great detail on the measures they have taken and that swimmers will have to take, until the pandemic is over; and

d)      Even with the pools' own websites' explanations of new procedures, we expect that every sensible swimmer will contact a facility s/he hasn't visited before to get the "lay of the land", at which point we also expect that the subject of new "dos and don'ts" will be taken up. 

We hope that makes sense to you and that you'll take it into account as you look for pools in these troubled times.

Database News:

During October we finished reviewing the 412 listings in Ontario, Canada, and ended up with a net reduction to 400 listings. A few private clubs have closed, but the drop-off was principally due to a loss of listings in Toronto. The school district there shut down a bunch of pools that it had previously rented to local swimming clubs and teams. The closed pools were not open to the general public, before, they were included on the site on the basis that they hosted youth and Masters swim teams. Apparently, the school district didn't think that hosting swim team practices in the middle of a pandemic made a lot of sense, so they shut them down, entirely.

Just as we were finishing-up our review of Ontario, Italy, where we had hoped to go next, found itself in the throes of a second pandemic shut-down. By happenstance, we came across some websites that provided a lot of leads in Israel, and we ended up adding 33 new listings there. Although Israel is also in a lock-down, collecting basic information (name, address, phone, number, and pool dimensions) wasn't much of a problem. Getting accessibility information, prices, and water temperatures, however, is a whole different story. We sent out 28 email inquiries (in Hebrew, no less – thank you Google!), but got only two, partial replies. Maybe when the pools reopen…

We need a hand:

While reviewing the listings in Ontario, we came across the website of a private health club chain, Movati Athletic, that has 17 locations in that province, 15 of which have swimming pools, 5 of them actually have two pools (where there are two pools, they call one of them the "coed pool" and the other the "women's pool"). Judging from the photographs we saw, it's likely most of the chain's locations will qualify for listing but we couldn't tell for sure and they were all on shut-down, so it didn't make any sense to call them on the telephone. If you happen to know anything about any of the Movati Athletic chain's pools and/or whether they sell day passes (in normal, non Covid circumstances), could you drop us a line at BHaverland@swimmersguide.com? Thanks!

Moving Forward:

Going forward, we've found an interesting site in India that may give us some new listings there, so we'll play with that, until things start opening up in Italy and New York – two targets too long deferred.

Pool of the Month:

If you happen to find yourself in northern West Virginia, you'll want to check out The Aquatic Center at Mylan Park in Morgantown. It has three lap-swimmable tanks, including a 77º - 78ºF. Olympic-size pool and a couple of warmer 25-yarders. It's a public pool that also serves as the home pool for the West Virginia University swim team. It opened in late 2019 but we didn't get the full details until just recently.

And if you can make it to Charleston, South Carolina, drop by the new North Charleston Aquatic Center, which also has an Olympic pool with decent water temperature. It's a joint operation of the city and school district – we like to see that sort of cooperation – and it just opened in mid-October.

Database Statistics:

As of October 31, 2020, the database lists 25,277 swimming facilities in 206 countries and 13,931 cities and towns. In total, those facilities have 27,572 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,658 listings in the United States, 2,299 in the United Kingdom, 1,594 in France, 1,536 in Germany, 1,443 in Spain, 1,127 in Italy, 989 in Canada, 921 in Australia, 885 in Japan, and 621 in Poland.

Database News:

Not much happened in September. We finished reviewing the listings in Lithuania, doubling the number of listings from 24 to 48.

We had planned to start reviewing the listings in hard-hit-by-Covid states of New York and New Jersey but, after trying to check a very few listings in Upstate New York, and finding only a few open, we decided to give those states some more time. Early in the month we had been advised that prices in Toronto, Ontario, had been increased (we have over 100 listings in Toronto), so we decided to put New York, New Jersey, and Italy on the back-burner for another month and set our sights on the Canadian Province of Ontario.

So far, the results are mixed. We've been through more than 100 of Ontario's 412 listings and have been able to collect reasonable amounts of information but, in some cases, we were unable to update the pools' pricing because many of them are operating on a members-only, lane reservation required basis, where you can't just call and ask for the drop-in price, some are still closed, and some are partly open, but their pools are closed. In some cases we were able to find the pre-Covid prices and for those, we simply dated the prices "February, 2020". Where we couldn't find prices, we left the price information we had, which often goes back to 2015 and updated the links, telephone numbers, maps, and team and club information. It's not an ideal situation but we have, at least, been able to cull out the listings for pools that have closed permanently.

Pool of the Month:

A Minnesota swimmer turned us onto what became the largest listing on the site - the Complejo Acuático de Medellín in Medellín, Colombia, with seven pools, two Olympic-size, four semi-Olympic, and a 20-meter diving pool. We couldn't get the admission price, as the facility is closed due to the pandemic, but we know it's open to the public and it's really a facility worth checking out. You can find it at https://www.SwimmersGuide.com/locations/34968/. Be sure to click on and zoom-into the Google Maps link in the listing to see all that beautiful water.

Moving Forward:

As mentioned, we're only a quarter of the way through the listings in Ontario and it's likely to take a full month to finish them all. If we do finish, we'll move on to Italy and see how much we can accomplish there.

Database Statistics:

As of September 30, 2020, the database lists 25,256 swimming facilities in 206 countries and 13,911 cities and towns. In total, those facilities have 27,549 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,659 listings in the United States, 2,301 in the United Kingdom, 1,594 in France, 1,536 in Germany, 1,443 in Spain, 1,127 in Italy, 1,001 in Canada, 921 in Australia, 885 in Japan, and 621 in Poland.

Database News:

We got a lot done in August: We finished our review of all the listings in Sweden, then got through all the listings in the Estonia and Latvia. We also knocked off Ethiopia and Bermuda. In Sweden, we added 77 listings, bringing the total there to 305 (a 34% increase); in Estonia, we added 29 listings, to bring the total to 56; (a 107% increase); and in Latvia, we added 31 listings, for a new total of 42 (a whopping 282% increase). We had planned to start reviewing the listings in New York and New Jersey, after finishing up Sweden, but we decided to give those states some more time. New York and New Jersey were hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic and we understand that they may now be allowing their pools and health clubs to reopen, so we thought we'd give them some time, before we start pestering them for updated information.

Moving Forward:

We're just beginning work on the listings in Lithuania, of which there were only 24 when we started, yesterday. We expect we'll see a pretty dramatic increase in this go-round, as we did with Sweden, Estonia, and Latvia but, when you start with only 24, doubling or even tripling the number won't take too many days. Then we'll either go to New York and New Jersey or start working on Italy, whose 1,127 listings haven't been looked at for a long time. Whether we go to NY/NJ or Italy, we'll be beginning a long-haul set of reviews.

Database Statistics:

As of August 31, 2020, the database lists 25,205 swimming facilities in 206 countries and 13,881 cities and towns. In total, those facilities have 27,472 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,662 listings in the United States, 2,301 in the United Kingdom, 1,594 in France, 1,536 in Germany, 1,442 in Spain, 1,127 in Italy, 1,006 in Canada, 920 in Australia, 886 in Japan, and 621 in Poland.

General Note:

For a long time we've had some great ideas for improving and expanding the site, but we felt we shouldn't try adding "bells and whistles" until we had the basic functions working properly. In July, we finally got the last of the annoying, little bugs worked out.

The table of listings now, shows the contents of any listing "Alerts" in red typeface beneath the facility name. We use the Alerts field to mark when a pool is closed for renovations, if we think there's something you need to know about the pool, right off the bat, or if we've stretched the listing requirements. Now the contents of that field (if any) is displayed in red typeface in the map point, in the pool's line on the table listing the pools beneath the map, and in the listing, itself. We hope that will save you some time.

Also in the table display, we finally got the list of types of clubs and teams that train in the listed facilities to appear properly. Apparently, a few years ago, one of the less-wonderful programmers who's worked on the site messed up one of the tables in the underlying database causing the list of team types not to show up properly in that far-right column of the listings table. We didn’t even realize it had happened until a month or so ago, but it's fixed now and should make things easier for team swimmers – particularly you Masters swimmers, out there.

So, having gotten the database and site up to a standard that we're happy with, we're now in a position to start working on adding features and capabilities to make it even better. One of the things we've been wanting to add is a set of notes tied to geographical locations: references to particular aspects of swimming on a national, regional, or city-wide basis, e.g., the French love of brief-style, men's swim suits and the near universal prohibition of boxer-style suits, or links to lists of all the pools in a particular city or county, including the outdoor, seasonal pools that we don't list, or links to the websites that we've found most helpful in our pool-finding research. We may consider adding an automatic translation feature to the listings. Or a free-form text search, for example to show only  50 meter pools or pools with diving boards.

We have been adding information about official Facebook pages in the "Notes" section of the listings; we're thinking of moving the links to Facebook pages into the "Facility Overview" section of the listings.

A suggestion we received from a user was to add a capability to filter-out certain types of listings from search results (he noted that the mass-market health clubs usually overstate their dimensions and overheat the water and he'd like to be able to exclude them from the search results). On the flip side of that, some users may want to see only certain types of listings, e.g., hotels or YMCAs. That may be the first of the changes we'll implement, just because it should be so easy to do.

There are lots of things that we'd like to do, it's just a question of time and money…

Database News:

In July, we finished our review of all the listings in Denmark, then got through all the listings in the Faroe Islands, Greenland, Iceland, and Norway. We're working on Sweden, now, and should be able to wrap it up during August. (As with Denmark, we also rearranged the County/Region set-ups in Norway and Sweden to conform to administrative rearrangements that should have been addressed a long time ago.)

Moving Forward:

We're still holding off on reviewing the listings in New York and New Jersey to give them time to recover from their bouts with Covid-19. We'll take a look at the situation there after we finish Sweden.

Database Statistics:

As of July 31, 2020, the database lists 25,091 swimming facilities in 206 countries and 13,776 cities. In total, those facilities have 27,352 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,660 listings in the United States, 2,303 in the United Kingdom, 1,594 in France, 1,536 in Germany, 1,442 in Spain, 1,127 in Italy, 1,007 in Canada, 920 in Australia, 885 in Japan, and 621 in Poland.

Database News:

In June, we reviewed all the listings in South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, and Western Australia, finishing up our third (or is it 4^th?) review of all the listings in Australia. We've also been through 171 of the 223 listings in Denmark. That's a total of about 450 listings reviewed and updated, which isn't bad. We also restructured the Danish portion of the database to reflect the 2007 switch from counties to administrative regions.

During our reviews of the Australian pools, we also purged many listings of pools whose water temperatures are too high for lap swimming. Based in purpose-built swimming schools, they generally have water temperatures in excess of 90ºF (32ºC). That may be a great temperature for teaching infants to swim, but we think it's unhealthy for anyone to try to swim laps in. So we removed them – even if they had public lap-swimming times.

Moving Forward:

Under normal circumstances, we'd be targeting New York and New Jersey, next, but we're going to give those states a little more time to recover from their bouts with Covid-19.

Sad to say, we can usually get more, current, useful information from foreign language (non-English) websites than those published in English for pools in the U.S. European pools are almost always municipal facilities and their websites are quite transparent about descriptions, admission charges, etc.; U.S. pools, on the other hand, are a mix of public (usually fairly transparent), YMCA (often require a telephone call for temperature and price information), and private clubs (which almost always require at least one telephone call, and often several, for update information). While so many U.S. facilities are "on hold", getting our telephone calls answered (let alone our questions, if they do answer the phone), we'd spend a lot of time getting not much information. So, we're sticking with Scandinavia, for the time-being, and will try New York and New Jersey in a month or two.

More Browser News:

Speaking of languages, we noted in last month's report that Chrome had added a translation capability right in the browser. We happened to be looking at something in the MS Edge browser this month and saw that same, in-browser, functionality; we didn't test the quality of the translations but, if that's your browser of choice, you may find it helpful.

Database Statistics:

As of June 30, 2020, the database lists 25,027 swimming facilities in 206 countries and 13,717 cities. In total, those facilities have 27,285 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,659 listings in the United States, 2,303 in the United Kingdom, 1,594 in France, 1,536 in Germany, 1,442 in Spain, 1,127 in Italy, 1,008 in Canada, 920 in Australia, 885 in Japan, and 621 in Poland.

25,000^th Listing

On May 18, 2020, we added the 25,000^th listing to the Swimmers Guide website!

To be honest, we were afraid it might take a long time to reach that milestone, as we fear that a lot of our listings are going to "disappear", after the U.S. reopens from the Corona-19 pandemic shut-down: Gold's Gym has already filed for bankruptcy protection; news outlets are reporting on a potential filing for the 24-Hour Fitness chain; and then there will be the "Mom & Pop" gyms that won't be able to reopen – ever.

So we expect we're going to see a major drop-off of listings in the not-too-distant future. Shutting down the world's economy has saved a lot of lives, but the price for the survivors has been enormous and, until there's a proven vaccine or treatment, many people are going to avoid gyms and indoor gathering places, further exacerbating the already heavy toll.

A Neat, New Feature of the Chrome Browser

Google has added a new feature into the latest version of the Chrome web browser: Instant translation. If you're checking out a page in a different language from your own, check the right side of the browser's address line; if there's a small icon with a white "G" on a black background next to the star (for bookmarking) icon, click on it and select whether you want to read the page in its native language or your own. If you choose a translation, it's almost instantaneous; there's no copying and pasting the URL into a form on another browser tab, the page just appears in translation.

We link to a lot of foreign-language web pages so this new Chrome feature can be a big time-saver for you – as it sure has been for us.

Database News

In May, we were able to review all of the listings in Austria, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland, something over 400 listings. Now, we're going to go back to Australia to review the 284 listings in South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, and Western Australia. When those are done, it'll be off to Scandinavia: Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, before we return to an English-speaking country.

Database Statistics:

As of May 31, 2020, the database lists 25,015 swimming facilities in 206 countries and 13,724 cities. In total, those facilities have 27,042 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,657 listings in the United States, 2,304 in the United Kingdom, 1,593 in France, 1,535 in Germany, 1,442 in Spain, 1,126 in Italy, 1,009 in Canada, 914 in Australia, 885 in Japan, and 621 in Poland.

Old News:

If you missed our April 17, Special Edition Announcement, scroll on down to see what you missed.

Regarding the Apple devices problem mentioned in that report, we found that the problem was in a setting on our Wi-Fi router. Once we made the right adjustment, Swimmers Guide was Apple-friendly again.

New News:

Covid-19 is killing us! Pools everywhere are closed and nobody's traveling anywhere, anyway. But if there's a body of open water near you, you'll be interested in seeing the Wild Swim, a world-wide, crowd-sourced, map of open-water swimming locations. Until the virus situation settles down, it's either open-water swimming or a backyard pool with a bungee cord, so get out those wetsuits and take the plunge! (This assumes, of course, that the local authorities haven't put your local river, lake, pond, or ocean beach under a closure order.)

Database News

Although the pools are closed and nobody's traveling, we're soldiering on as always, finding new pools and updating the information on pools we already had. In April, we added our first listing in Eswatini (formerly known as Swaziland), which became the 206^th country in the guide. As of the end of April, we're just 19 listings shy of 25,000.

During April, we finished reviewing all of our listings in South Africa -we started with 238, had to delete 15 of them, but added 75 for a net increase of 60 in that country. Then we finished reviewing the German Federal State of Thuringia, which also completed our review of all the listings in Germany. From there, we moved on to Canada, checking and updating the listings in Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

We're now headed on to Austria and Switzerland, which should take more than just the month of May to put to bed. If we do complete the review of those countries, we'll return to Australia to review the states that haven't already been checked, i.e., South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, and Western Australia.

Database Statistics:

As of April 30, 2020, the database lists 24,981 swimming facilities in 206 countries and 13,689 cities. In total, those facilities have 27,237 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,656 listings in the United States, 2,303 in the United Kingdom, 1,590 in France, 1,533 in Germany, 1,442 in Spain, 1,122 in Italy, 1,009 in Canada, 914 in Australia, 885 in Japan, and 618 in Poland.

Welcome to the NEW SwimmersGuide.com Website:

Before we get into the good news, here's some bad news: For reasons not yet clear to us, the Swimmers Guide website's main "Find a Pool" search tool is not working – at all – on some Apple devices (iPhones and iPads). We're aware of the issue and are working on it now. If you have a Windows computer or Android phone available to you, please use it for now.

Now, for the good news: if you're here before May 1, when you'd expect to see our regular What's New post, it's probably because you noticed that there was something different about the site. And you were right. The site has been almost totally re-engineered (which probably explains the problems noted in the first paragraph). Here are the most notable other changes:

For users who have location service enabled, the home page will automatically open with a map and facility list that include the fifty listed facilities closest to them. No buttons to press or data to be typed, the page will open with the map there, as if we had written the site for just you.

For users who have blocked their devices' or browsers' location service, the home page will open with a search window. Fill in the search criteria and hit Enter to see the fifty listings closest to the search location.

Although the site uses some of Google's Map service tools, the maps that come up will be OpenStreetMap maps, which cost me a lot less.

In both cases, the list beneath the map will show all fifty closest listings, instead of just ten with an option to see more.

Instructions on how to use the site, including instructions on how to enable or block your browser's or your smart phone's location service are included in the FAQ section under the caption "How to use this site".

The listing page has not changed much, but if you click on an "Edit" or "Add…" button within a listing, when you're finished suggesting changes or you decide to cancel without making a suggestion, you'll be taken back to the listing you were looking at, not the site's home page. (I hadn't realized that had been happening, but we have it fixed now).

Similarly, when you try to use the "Add A Pool" section of the site, it shouldn't blow up when you answer one of the questions.

We've switched from GoFundMe to a PayPal contribution model, so the old GoFundMe link has been replaced with one that says "Donate".

Tool around on the new site and, if you run across any problems, please, please let me know using the email address in the footer of every page on the site.

After we get the site operating and looking as we think it should, you can look forward to some great enhancements!

March Site News:

Notable Good News:

SwimmersGuide.com had its 24th Anniversary in March. Originally delivered from the URL http://www.lornet.com/sgol, the site didn't get its own domain until a couple of years later. We owe a special debt of gratitude to John Lorimer, a Denver-area Masters swimmer, who had the vision and did all the work to put the first couple of editions of the Swimmers Guide database online.

Coincidentally, March was also the 29th Anniversary of the (print) publication of Swimmers' Guide: A Directory of Pools for Lap Swimmers. If we can make it through another year, next year will be a really big one for us.

As a sort of celebration, we also added the 205th country to the site: Cabo Verde, an island nation west of the African continent. We found five hotels on three separate islands (Cabo Verde is made up of 10 islands, in total); a couple of the hotels notable for their great pools - but we're getting ahead of ourselves.

And, lastly, we came within 94 listings of a landmark 25,000!

Notable Not So Good News:

The arrival and distribution of the Covid-19 virus pandemic has certainly turned the world upside-down. By the end of March, world travel had come to a standstill; businesses around the world were closing (hopefully temporarily) either voluntarily or by government order;and swimming pools everywhere were being shut down for the duration.

We're using our social distancing time to do what we were doing before the pandemic - trying to keep the listings on the updated. We have more time for it, since everything is closed and we can't get our regular workouts in, but it's harder to get responses to our questions from the closed pools, so that's probably a wash.

The site went from an average of about 2,000 page views a day to about 200 and still falling. That cut Google's mapping service charges substantially, which is good, but the Google AdSense revenue we collect took a bigger hit. Ouch!

March Site Development News:

We have been working hard with a new programming partner to move the site to a new server, reduce our reliance on Google Maps, and set the stage for some exciting site enhancements. It looks like the move to the new server and switch from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap will take place in the first half of April. Most of the changes will be subtle, but you'll notice a difference. Once the site is stabilized, we'll start rolling out some interesting tools that we expect you'll find helpful.

March Database News:

In March, we reviewed all of the listings in the German Federal States of Saarland and Saxony; updated all of the listings in New Zealand; and returned to Germany to review Saxony-Anhalt and Schleswig-Holstein. We're now digging into South Africa's 224 listings, after which we'll return to Germany to finish its last state, Thuringia. After that, it'll be on to one or two of Canada's western provinces, and then to Austria or Switzerland.

The Pool of the Month:

This month we feature two pools in this category, both hotels and both on Sal Island in the nation of Cabo Verde the TUI BLUE Cabo Verde and the Meliá Llana Cape Verde With three, 50+ meter swimming pools each, the two hotels are adjacent to each other and mirror images of each other. The pools aren't big, width-wise, we estimate them all at about 2.5 meters, but you won't have to worry about crowding, each of the pools is reserved for use by guests staying in the rooms that give onto them. Use the Google Maps link in either of the listings to see aerial views of the properties and pools.

Database Statistics:

As of March 31, 2020, the database lists 24,906 swimming facilities in 205 countries and 13,661 cities. In total, those facilities have 27,165 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,657 listings in the United States, 2,303 in the United Kingdom, 1,590 in France, 1,508 in Germany, 1,442 in Spain, 1,122 in Italy, 1,012 in Canada, 914 in Australia, 885 in Japan, and 618 in Poland.

February Site News:

Google Maps Fees:

February Google charges for using its mapping service exceeded Google AdSense revenue by $16.78. Thank you to the GoFundMe contributors who made up the difference and covered the month's site overhead...

February Database News:

In February, we finished up our review of the last 81 listings in Greater London, England, and moved on back to Germany, where we reviewed the 64 listings in Rhineland-Palatinate.

Reviewing listings had to take a back seat to testing the operation of the site on a new server in anticipation of moving the database and site to the Microsoft Cloud, a project that is moving fairly well, in the circumstances.

We also found a site in Denmark with what appeared to have a pretty complete list of pools in that country - so we started "milking" it and have been able to add 21 new listings in that country. We have about 50 more potential adds from that list (the website is at http://svomning.dk/haller/, if you're interested).

And, finally, we took a week off to visit family living or vacationing in North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

We're back in the saddle again and, when we finish checking the Danish site mentioned above, we hope to be able to check out the 28 listings in Saarland, Germany, and some or all of the 150 listings in New Zealand.

The Pool of the Month:

This month we feature the San Alfonso del Mar Resort in Algarrobo, Chile. At more than a kilometer long (1,013 meters), it is the largest pool in the database and, to our knowledge, just the first of a number of huge pools - tho' not as big as this one - to be built using the same technology around the world.

Database Statistics:

As of February 29, 2020, the database lists 24,851 swimming facilities in 204 countries and 13,635 cities. In total, those facilities have 27,086 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,655 listings in the United States, 2,304 in the United Kingdom, 1,590 in France, 1,508 in Germany, 1,442 in Spain, 1,122 in Italy, 1,012 in Canada, 914 in Australia, 885 in Japan, and 618 in Poland.

January Site News:

Google Maps Fees:

January Google charges for using its mapping service exceeded Google AdSense revenue by $15.69. Thank you to the GoFundMe contributors who made up the difference and covered the month's site overhead...

January Database News:

In January, we finished up our review of the last 90 listings in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, and moved on to England. Up to now, we've been reviewing the English counties in alphabetical order; in January, we took a different tack and went straight to the London Metropolitan Area, where we had 278, high-profile listings that hadn't been looked at systematically since 2015. We've gotten through 197 of them, so have 81 to go, before we move back to Germany, where there are 63 listings to be checked in the Rhineland-Palatinate. If that goes quickly enough, we may move on to the 28 listings in Saarland, or defer those to review some of the 150 listings in New Zealand.

The Pool of the Month:

This month, we feature, without too much further comment the listing for the Spa Tsentr «Arena» in Kaspiysk, Republic of Dagestan, Russia. Guess Russia needs a Title IX. (As the Soviet Union, they used to brag about gender equality...) The mind boggles!

Database Statistics:

As of January 31, 2020, the database lists 24,818 swimming facilities in 204 countries and 13,619 cities. In total, those facilities have 27,048 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,648 listings in the United States, 2,306 in the United Kingdom, 1,590 in France, 1,506 in Germany, 1,442 in Spain, 1,122 in Italy, 1,012 in Canada, 914 in Australia, 885 in Japan, and 618 in Poland.

December Site News:

Google Maps Fees:

December GoogleAds revenue exceeded Google's charges for using its mapping service by $29.47 - a nice change of pace...

December Database News:

In our November report, we discussed the possibility of adding a large number of listings in Turkey, based on having found a website with a significant amount of information about pools in that country. Early in December, we started going through that site, but were not satisfied that we would be able to add enough helpful listings to justify the time spent in pulling together the data. Turkish is a difficult language, even with the Google Translation website, and we have found very few pools in that country that would be of interest to our target audience: swimmers who travel.

Rather than spending time adding unhelpful Turkish listings to the site, we moved on to resume our review of the listings in Germany. We had hoped to complete the reviews of the listings in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and Rhineland Palatinate (RP) but, with the holidays and all, we were able to clear only 297 of the 387 listings in NRW and none in the RP. When we finish reviewing the remaining 90 listings in North Rhine-Westphalia, we'll march on to England and start checking a county or two there, and then do the listings in the Rhineland Palatinate.

The Pool of the Month:

We received an interesting "Add A Pool" entry in December: The Sheraton Grand Danang Resort in Danang, Vietnam. With a "swimmable length" of about 215 meters (706 feet), it appears to be the second longest swimming pool on the website. We wish we had found it before Sheraton was subsumed into the Marriott brand; under the old Sheraton brand and website, we'd have been able to reach out to the hotel for more precise details; as a Marriott property, no details about the pool are available on its web page and there is no way to contact an individual Marriott property through its website.

(The longest pool on the site is the 1,013 meter (3,326 feet) long pool at the San Alfonso del Mar Resort in Algarrobo, in the Valparaiso region of Chile. (If your browser blocks Adobe Flash Player websites, as mine does, you can read a bit about it in its Wikipedia entry.)

Database Statistics:

As of December 31, 2019, the database lists 24,803 swimming facilities in 204 countries and 13,606 cities. In total, those facilities have 27,025 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,649 listings in the United States, 2,315 in the United Kingdom, 1,590 in France, 1,497 in Germany, 1,442 in Spain, 1,121 in Italy, 1,012 in Canada, 913 in Australia, 885 in Japan, and 618 in Poland.

In 2019, we added a total of 703 listings, 836 pools, 366 cities, and four countries to the database. We are now just 197 listings shy of 25,000!

A Year-end Thank You:

The beginning of a one year and the end of another is a good time to thank all of you, who have contributed to the site, either informationally - telling us about pools we'd missed, closings, changes in prices, etc., or financially - by sending a cash contribution to us through the SwimmersGuide.com Upgrade/Update site. We are truly and unabashedly grateful. Thank you!

November Site News:

Google Maps Fees:

November GoogleAds revenue fell short of Google's charges for using its mapping service by $32.63.

Fortunately, a very small number of Swimmers Guide users have heeded the call on our GoFundMe site ( https://www.gofundme.com/swimmersguidecom-upgradeupdate) and sent contributions that have covered the Google AdSense v. Google Mapping Service deficit. (That's the Google v. Google aspect of the site, not counting our website hosting, programming, ancillary apps costs, etc.)

November Database News:

In November, we reviewed all our listings in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, Germany (18), and the Northern Territories (17) and Queensland (284), Australia. Just as we were wrapping up Queensland, someone sent us an update for a listing in Turkey. In that Edit, we were directed to a site that we'd seen before, but hadn't checked very closely.

As it turned out, that site, https://www.yuzmehavuzu.org/, which translates to "Swimming Pool Guide" in English and which we'll abbreviate to YHR for this update) is a gold mine of information about the Turkish swimming scene. in just a few days, we went through all of the pools in Istanbul that the YHR had to offer and added 64 new listings to Swimmers Guide. It was nice to be able to add that many pools to the site in one strike but, sadly, only one or two of them will be of interest to our international readership: swimming pools in Istanbul simply don't offer single-visit admissions and the health certifications required for a pass boggle the mind - EKGs, HIV tests, Hepatitis B tests, a dermatologist sign-off, a cardiologist sign-off...

There are 33 more provinces represented in the YHR website (of a total of 81 Turkish provinces). Ordinarily, we'd plow through them until we had found all the pools we could possibly list but, unless we find the pools in the first one or two provinces we examine to be more welcoming than those in Istanbul, we'll probably add them in small bites over the next year or two.

So, in December, we'll see what we can find in Turkey's Adana and Ankara provinces, then dig into the German States of North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland Palatinate. And, if we get those all taken care of, we'll march on to England to start checking a county or two there.

We keep saying that we need to update the "About Us", "FAQ", and other "wrap-around" sections of the site. Given the other changes we're looking at, we'd better start pretty soon!

It's December:

For a Christmas-themed swim this December, consider these: Westcott Pool in North Pole, Alaska; the Christmas Island Recreation Centre in Australia's Christmas Island Territory, that new, 50 meter pool in Tromsø, Norway that we told you about last month, Tromsøbadet, 350 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, or, another 900 kilometers north of that, Svalbardhallen.

Database Statistics:

As of November 30, 2019, the database lists 24,789 swimming facilities in 204 countries and 13,559 cities. In total, those facilities have 27,003 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,646 listings in the United States, 2,316 in the United Kingdom, 1,590 in France, 1,500 in Germany, 1,442 in Spain, 1,121 in Italy, 1,012 in Canada, 913 in Australia, 885 in Japan, and 618 in Poland. Those ten countries have a total of 19,043 listings or 77% of the entire database!

October Site News:

Google Maps Fees:

October GoogleAds revenue fell short of Google's charges for using its mapping service by $59.96!

We have analyzed the GoogleAds revenue .v. Google's charges for its mapping service since they began charging us in February and found that, when the revenues and expenses are properly matched (they pay on a calendar month basis but bill on a schedule that ends the month on the weekend before the end of the calendar month), our net revenue has been decreasing every month or, to turn it around, our losses have been increasing. This is not a sustainable business model.

Fortunately, a very small number of Swimmers Guide users have heeded the call on our GoFundMe site and sent contributions that have covered the Google AdSense v. Google Mapping Service deficit. (That's the Google v. Google aspect of the site, not counting our website hosting, programming, ancillary apps costs, etc.)

Even more fortunately, an avid swimmer, who happens also to be an accomplished website and app developer, has volunteered to help move our mapping service from Google Maps to the free OpenStreetMap mapping service. He has also agreed to look into some of the site enhancements we have wanted to make for several years, and to do it without charge. Changes won't happen overnight, but we're hopeful that the easiest changes should become visible in reasonably short order. The most important and most difficult ones may take several months to bring online.

October Database News:

In October, we finished reviewing the listings in the U.S. state of Connecticut and in Lower Saxony, Germany. We were distracted briefly by a query from someone going to Curitiba, Brazil, where we ended up adding 16 listings (most, but not all, in Curitiba). We also got tied up in Zimbabwe, where we added seven. Overall, we added 85 new listings to the site during the month and deleted 17, for a net increase of 68 listings. We're at a round, 24,700 listings, now, only 300 shy of 25,000!

In November, we'll review the 17 listings in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, that we had hoped to do in October, and then go back to Australia to review the 289 listings in the Northern Territories and Queensland.

We keep saying that we need to update the "About Us", "FAQ", and other "wrap-around" sections of the site. Given the other changes we're looking at, we'd better start pretty soon!

New Listings of Note:

A site user in Norway turned us onto the new Tromsøbadet in Tromsø, Norway. (See Tromsøbadet.) Its own website boasts that it is the northernmost 50 meter pool in Norway; as we point out in the listing, we're pretty sure it's the northernmost 50 meter pool in the world, 217 miles or 350 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle.

Database Statistics:

As of October 31, 2019, the database lists 24,700 swimming facilities in 204 countries and 13,558 cities. In total, those facilities have 26,889 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,642 listings in the United States, 2,315 in the United Kingdom, 1,590 in France, 1,499 in Germany, 1,441 in Spain, 1,121 in Italy, 1,012 in Canada, 902 in Australia, 885 in Japan, and 618 in Poland. Those ten countries have a total of 19,025 listings or 79% of the entire database!

September Site News:

Google Maps Fees:

September GoogleAds revenue fell short of Google's charges for using its mapping service by $26.83!

You can help to maintain free access to Swimmers Guide by making a contribution to our GoFundMe campaign.

September Database News:

In September, we took a week off to go to the beach and visit with family at the Jersey Shore, but still were able to complete our review of the listings in the states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island and began reviewing Connecticut. We added 31 new listings to the site during the month and deleted 26, for a net increase of only five listings.

In October, we expect to finish Connecticut and then move on to the 184 listings in the German states of Lower Saxony and Mecklenburg-West Pomerania. After that, it's back to Australia to review the 289 listings in the Northern Territories and Queensland.

Somewhere along the line, we're going to need to update the "About Us", "FAQ", and other "wrap-around" sections of the site, we're just not sure when...

Database Statistics:

As of September 30, 2019, the database lists 24,632 swimming facilities in 204 countries and 13,533 cities. In total, those facilities have 26,813 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,624 listings in the United States, 2,314 in the United Kingdom, 1,590 in France, 1,485 in Germany, 1,440 in Spain, 1,121 in Italy, 1,011 in Canada, 902 in Australia, 885 in Japan, and 618 in Poland.

August Site News:

Google Maps Fees:

August GoogleAds revenue exceeded Google's charges for using its mapping service by $50.04. That pays for about 20 minutes of programmer time.

You can help to maintain free access to Swimmers Guide by making a contribution to our GoFundMe campaign.

July Database News:

We completed our review of the listings in the state of New South Wales, Australia, moved on to the German state of Hesse (Hessen in German), knocked off the UK dependency of the Channel Islands, plus the counties of Bedfordshire and Berkshire in England, and finished off the month with the Canadian province of Alberta. We added 74 new listings to the site and deleted 21, for a net increase of 53 listings and 68 pools. It was a busy and productive month.

We're on to Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut in September, then it's back to the German states of Lower Saxony and Mecklenburg-West Pomerania.

Somewhere along the line, we're going to need to update the "About Us", "FAQ", and other "wrap-around" sections of the site, we're just not sure when...

Database Statistics:

As of August 31, 2019, the database lists 24,627 swimming facilities in 204 countries and 13,525 cities. In total, those facilities have 26,802 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,618 listings in the United States, 2,314 in the United Kingdom, 1,590 in France, 1,488 in Germany, 1,439 in Spain, 1,121 in Italy, 1,011 in Canada, 903 in Australia, 885 in Japan, and 618 in Poland.

July Site News:

Google Maps Fees:

July GoogleAds revenue exceeded Google's charges for using its mapping service by $32.78. Changes made to the site to reduce our calls on Google Maps and, hopefully, reduce their charges do not appear to have been particularly successful. While our net was better in July than in previous months, that was probably due more to heat waves around the world than to the changes we made.

You can help to maintain free access to Swimmers Guide by making a contribution to our GoFundMe campaign.

July Database News:

In July, we added our first listings in Kyrgyzstan (11 of them) and in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, expanding our coverage to a total of 204 countries!

We began our review of the listings in the state of New South Wales, Australia, at the end of June and have made it about two-thirds through the 280-some listings there.

As we mentioned some years ago, we relaxed the listing requirements for pools in Australia because their summer swimming season is longer than most places in the Northern Hemisphere and there are a lot of pools that were not being listed that we thought you'd like to know about.

One of our concerns about relaxing listing requirements is that in the old site format, it was difficult to "flag" a listing that was included on an exception basis. When we changed the site in August, 2018, however, we were able to add a field into the map dot text and the list of listings beneath the maps, in color, to highlight pools that may be outside the norm for Swimmers Guide listings. So, as we go through the listings now, we're making sure to include text such as "Open from October through March" to let you know that the pool is not open for eight months of the year - the standard for the rest of the world.

And, as we've been going through the listings, we also brought that treatment to the pools that are "Ocean Enclosures", as those unheated facilities may be open year-round, but call for stiffer mettle than most of us can call on in the colder, winter months. While we were at it, we also did a bit of research on sea water temperatures in the vicinities of our listed ocean enclosures and added that information to their listings. Depending on the depth of the pool and the prevailing weather conditions, the water in an ocean enclosure may be a couple of degrees warmer or cooler than the sea from which its water is drawn but now we can give you some idea of what you might be facing if you want to try one out.

When we finish reviewing our New South Wales listings, we'll head over to the UK to check out the Channel Islands and a few counties in England, to bring them up-to-date. Then it's back to Massachusetts (and maybe Rhode Island), before returning to Germany, where we'll tackle Hessen, Lower Saxony, and Mecklenburg-West Pomerania.

Database Statistics:

As of July 31, 2019, the database lists 24,574 swimming facilities in 204 countries and 13,495 cities. In total, those facilities have 26,734 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,609 listings in the United States, 2,315 in the United Kingdom, 1,590 in France, 1,470 in Germany, 1,439 in Spain, 1,121 in Italy, 1,006 in Canada, 885 in Japan, 890 in Australia, and 618 in Poland.

Regular user will have noted a significant change to the Swimmers Guide website. Last night, July 15, we eliminated the maps on the Home Page and at the top of each of the facility listing pages. The reason for the change was entirely economic. At the beginning of the year, Google started charging websites that use its maps a fee for every hit on its mapping application. While they allow a generous $200 per month credit against the fees to be charged, our site has been calling on Google so often that our monthly charges have been approaching our monthly Google Ads revenue.

We are still using Google Maps but, in a cost saving measure, we have eliminated unnecessary, automatic calls to the mapping application. Now, on the Home Page, "Find a pool near me" will not appear unless you have your browser set to allow its location service to determine where you are in real time. If the location services feature is not enabled, only the "Enter a location to search here" search box will appear. Irrespective of your browser's settings, however, no map will appear until you decide whether you want to find a pool near you, in by clicking on the "Find a pool near me" bar or you enter another location in the text space "Enter a location to search here". As soon as you make your choice, the page will come back with a map that has the pools pinpointed, as before.

We have also eliminated the small, large-scale maps at the top of each pool's listing details page. This eliminates an unnecessary, automatic call to Google Maps that was a nice touch but, because the map was so small, it was useful only to people familiar with the immediate area of the facility. The clickable, small-scale "Targeted Google Map Link" in the Location section of each listing still works, costs the site nothing if you click on it, and was built in a way to put the location in the context of the entire community where the pool is located. If you're a traveler, you probably know roughly where you are on a map of the city or town, the Targeted Google Map Lind will take you to a map that shows the facility's location pinpointed on a map that shows the entire town or city.

We hope that the changes will save us A LOT of money without inconveniencing our users. If it does, we have a few more changes we're discussing with our programmer. If it doesn't, the future of the site is in serious jeopardy. Stay tuned...

Sad News:

I don't think Swimmers Guide had been online for more than a month or two, back in 1996, when I first heard from Charlie van der Horst. One of the types of people for whom the site was designed, Charlie traveled a lot and swam a lot. He was also extraordinarily generous: When he found a pool that wasn't on the site, he was always willing to take the time to let us know about it, so we could add it. When he swam somewhere already on the site, he sent updates, contacts for Masters swim teams, and succinct and helpful reviews. His contributions to the site, one way or another, covered hundreds of pools in the United States, Europe, Israel, and Africa.

When I moved to Raleigh, NC, in 1997, I found out from the local newspaper that Charlie was a medical doctor, UNC Chapel Hill Medical School professor, and a prominent AIDS/HIV researcher. His work wasn't limited to the classroom or the laboratory, he also worked with patients in South Africa and Malawi.

After 2010, when North Carolina took a political turn to return to the social and economic policies that would have made George III proud, Charlie joined the Moral Monday Demonstrations and got himself arrested protesting our General Assembly's wrong-headed approach to just about everything, but especially the ignorant, purely political decision to not take advantage of the Medicaid expansion available under The Affordable Care Act, i.e., Obamacare.

Charlie died from what is believed to have been a cardiac event on June 14, while participating in a marathon swimming event in the Hudson River, in New York/New Jersey.

Although we spent 20 years or more living within 25 miles of each other, I never met Charlie. And I regret that. What I regret even more, tho', is that his life was cut off before its time. For more about this amazing individual, see his Raleigh News & Observer Obituary.

June Site News:

Google Maps Fees:

June GoogleAds revenue exceeded Google's charges for using its mapping service by $23.04.

You can help to maintain free access to Swimmers Guide by making a contribution to our GoFundMe campaign.

June Database News:

In June, we added our first listings in Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, expanding our coverage to a total of 202 countries! Looking at the map in that general area of the world, we see that there are a number of "stans", Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, etc. that we haven't found a pool in, yet. We'll try to make some time in the next few weeks to correct the oversight.

We finished going through the list of swimming pools in Poland that we had received in May, adding another 118 listings in that country. Including May's additions, we added 224 listings there bringing the total to 614.

We then went back to British Columbia to complete the review and update that had been interrupted by the Polish diversion. Then we did the states of New Hampshire and Vermont, in the United States, and Brandenburg, Bremen & Bremerhaven, and Hamburg in Germany.

We're going to take a look at New South Wales in Australia, next, followed by the Channel Islands and a few counties in England, to bring them up-to-date.

Database Statistics:

As of June 30, 2019, the database lists 24,510 swimming facilities in 202 countries and 13,461 cities. In total, those facilities have 26,644 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,606 listings in the United States, 2,316 in the United Kingdom, 1,589 in France, 1,472 in Germany, 1,432 in Spain, 1,121 in Italy, 1,006 in Canada, 885 in Japan, 867 in Australia, and 614 in Poland.

May Site News:

Google Maps Fees:

May GoogleAds revenue exceeded Google's charges for using its mapping service by $20.64.

You can help to maintain free access to Swimmers Guide by making a contribution to our GoFundMe campaign.

May Database News:

Well, we finished reviewing the listings in the German states of Bavaria and Berlin, then knocked off Canada's Yukon and Northwest Territories. We had a good start going with British Columbia, when a fellow from Poland sent us a PDF copy of a report titled "Plywalnie Kryte W Polsce Inwentaryzacja Bazy Sportowej" or, in English "Swimming Pools in Poland: An Inventory of the Sport's Base". The report, which was prepared by the Polish Ministry of Sports and Tourism in April, 2015, actually has a complete list of every swimming pool in the country, including street addresses and reasonably good guidance as to the size of each pool.

So we began plugging the addresses into the Google Maps search box to see what we could find. And we found a LOT! We've been through 32 pages of the 69 page pool list (covering 6 of Poland's 16 provinces), so far, and we've picked up 116 new listings. We don't know how many more we'll get from that list, but we're going to finish checking out every one, before we go back to finishing-up British Columbia or starting New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts. Our guess it it'll take about 15 or 20 days...

Database Statistics:

As of May 31, 2019, the database lists 24,375 swimming facilities in 200 countries and 13,371 cities. In total, those facilities have 26,503 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,608 listings in the United States, 2,316 in the United Kingdom, 1,589 in France, 1,470 in Germany, 1,432 in Spain, 1,121 in Italy, 1,006 in Canada, 885 in Japan, 867 in Australia, and 506 in Poland, which pushed the Netherlands with 403 into the eleventh position in the Swimmers Guide "Top Ten".

April Site News:

Google Maps Fees:

We mentioned, last month, that Google had started charging us for the use of Google Maps on the Swimmers Guide website. Our agreements with Google preclude us from disclosing any information about what Google Ads pays us, but they don't preclude us from telling you that the difference between what Google pays us for the ads we run on our site and the amount that Google charges us to use Google Maps was $11.64 for the month of April. That's not a typo, folks, you read it right $11.64!

You can help to maintain free access to Swimmers Guide by making a contribution to our GoFundMe campaign.

April Database News:

We're currently working on our second-round review of the listings in Germany. So far, we've been able to review all of the listings in Baden-Württemberg and about half the listings in Bavaria. Although our monthly statistics, below, indicate no change in the number of listings in Germany, that's a bit misleading; we've been weeding-out listings of facilities that are unsuitable for lap swimming and probably shouldn't have been included, in the first place.

Recognizing that the bulk of our users are in English-speaking countries and being aware of the fact that it's taking a long time to go through all of the listings world-wide, we've begun a third-round review of the listings in the major English-speaking countries - even as we work through the second round of reviews of listings in non-English speaking countries. The objective is to minimize the amount of stale data in the sections of the database that are most frequently accessed.

Accordingly, in April, we completed our third-round review of the listings in Maine and the Australian Capital Territory. Our next stop, after completing the review of Bavaria will be to move on to Canada, taking on one or two provinces before heading to New Hampshire and Vermont.

Database Statistics:

As of April 30, 2019, the database lists 24,244 swimming facilities in 200 countries and 13,290 cities. In total, those facilities have 26,361 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,603 listings in the United States, 2,315 in the United Kingdom, 1,588 in France, 1,470 in Germany, 1,432 in Spain, 1,120 in Italy, 1,005 in Canada, 885 in Japan, 867 in Australia, and 403 in the Netherlands.

March Site News:

Another Year Gone By:

The first edition of the book that formed the basis of the Swimmers Guide website was published in March, 1993, and the website, itself, went online in March, 1996; so March marks the 26th anniversary of Swimmers Guide and the 23rd anniversary of its online presence.

Google Maps Fees:

Have you noticed that a lot of websites, other than our own, are showing partly-shaded Google Maps on their "How to Find Us" pages? Did you wonder what went wrong? Well, I'll tell you: Google has started charging websites that include Google Maps for the privilege. If a site has a Google Map on its website  and hasn't made arrangements for Google to collect its fees, that map is being shaded out and largely disabled. And it's not just the big, corporate sites that are subject to the charges, it's every site! They allow up to $200 of free use but, if a site uses more than $200 worth of maps data, the website operator is charged for the excess. We knew the charges were coming, but we didn't know how much it would cost us - if anything. January and February's charges were minimal, but they socked it to us  in March, eating up a substantial portion of our advertising revenue.

We'll be keeping an eye on the charges as time goes by, and we may be compelled to revise certain aspects of the site to reduce our costs, but users should be aware that these new charges are jeopardizing our ability to continue maintaining the site as a free resource for all users.

You can help to maintain free access to Swimmers Guide by making a contribution to our GoFundMe campaign.

Country Notes on Facebook:

We made our second "Country Notes" posting to our Facebook page in March. If you're going swimming in Spain (or France, the subject of our first note) click HERE. There will be more.

March Database News:

We finished reviewing all of our listings in the state of Virginia in March - Virginia was the last of the U.S. states to be re-examined in this second, full-database review, which began in November, 2014. Now we're working on the listings in Germany. We're managing to get through about ten or eleven listings per day, on average. Even though we don't speak the language, German websites are pretty easy to negotiate using the Google Translation service and German sites are incredibly complete in terms of the data we think is important for a listing; we have to send very few emails to collect missing data.

In March, we added only 18 new listings (net) to the site, but there were some good ones, including one in El Segundo, that will be of interest to our Southern California readership. Check out the El Segundo Wiseburn Aquatics Center listing for full information.

We're half-way through the German state of Baden-Württemberg; when we're finished there, we'll go back to Maine to begin the cycle of U.S. states, then to Bavaria in Germany, then to Massachusetts, etc.

Database Statistics:

As of March 31, 2019, the database lists 24,224 swimming facilities in 200 countries and 13,289 cities. In total, those facilities have 26,335 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,602 listings in the United States, 2,314 in the United Kingdom, 1,588 in France, 1,470 in Germany, 1,426 in Spain, 1,120 in Italy, 1,005 in Canada, 881 in Japan, 868 in Australia, and 403 in the Netherlands.

February Site News:

Early Closing:

We're off on a quick trip to visit family beginning on February 27, so we're moving the month-end closing up a couple of days, to February 26.

Country Notes:

One of the enhancements we had hoped to bring to the site in our last update was a list of Notes for travelers that would show up under the "Facility Notes" section of the listing to give swimmers some 'helpful hints' about customs in the listing country that might surprise visitors from elsewhere. When we ran out of money for the programming, we had to ditch the idea. Then it occurred to us that we could use our Swimmers Guide Facebook page to do that. We made our first posting, about swimming in France, in February. To check it out, click HERE.

February Database News:

We're continuing on the second, complete review of every listing in the database that we began in 2014. We've completed the reviews of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Spain, and Portugal. We're now working on reviewing the listings in the US state of Virginia, then will return to do Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy...

In February, we added 49 new listings (net) to the site. We finished the last 70 (of 330) listings in Portugal then, as promised, we got into Virginia, the last of the 50 U.S. states to be reviewed in this go-round. We're more than half-way through the 216 listings in Virginia.

Because listings in the United States are the most numerous and because the vast majority of our site users are in the US, we'll go back to New England and re-start checking the US listings again, between the European countries. Germany has almost 1,500 listings, so we may do one or two federal states there, then jump to a US state, then do another German federal state or two... so the US listings don't get so stale.

Database Statistics:

As of February 26, 2019, the database lists 24,206 swimming facilities in 200 countries and 13,284 cities. In total, those facilities have 26,306 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,598 listings in the United States, 2,311 in the United Kingdom, 1,589 in France, 1,469 in Germany, 1,426 in Spain, 1,119 in Italy, 1,006 in Canada, 881 in Japan, 867 in Australia, and 403 in the Netherlands.

January Site News:

Site outages:

Regular users of the site may have noticed occasional "500 Internal server error" messages. We think we've tracked down the problem and we're hopeful that we've fixed it but, if it happens to you, please contact us as we are not always online and/or may not have experienced the problem. Use the "Messages" tool on our Facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/SwimmersGuide/ to reach us.

Advertising:

Regular users will also have noticed that we made some changes to the advertisements on the site in January. We dropped the Amazon Ads, because Amazon pays only when users actually purchase products using the links - and you all didn't purchase much (mild understatement) over the several months we hosted the Amazon Ads. We replaced them with Google Ads, which pay us "per click"; and we added another (3rd) Google Ad at the top of the listing pages, but not the home page. We're sorry we felt it necessary to do that, but a model where a website brings in a dollar or so a day yet requires the full-time commitment of its webmaster plus tens of thousands of dollars in programming and infrastructure costs is not sustainable. As much as we hate having to subject you to so many ads, we are not a charitable operation - someone has to pay the bills to keep the site going and growing...

January Database News:

We added 57  new listings (net) to the site in January, continuing to concentrate on reviewing all of the listings in Portugal, where we have 70 listings (out of 320) to go. Then, as promised, we'll get into Virginia (the last of the 50 U.S. states to be reviewed in this go-round), then on to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, ...

Database Statistics:

As of January 31, 2019, the database lists 24,157 swimming facilities in 200 countries and 13,259 cities. In total, those facilities have 26,250 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,590 listings in the United States, 2,310 in the United Kingdom, 1,590 in France, 1,457 in Germany, 1,424 in Spain, 1,119 in Italy, 1,006 in Canada, 881 in Japan, 867 in Australia, and 402 in the Netherlands.

December Site News:

In December, we added ten new countries to the site: Bhutan, Burundi, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Mauritania, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and South Sudan. We now have coverage in 200 countries around the world!

We added 76  new listings (net) to the site in December, but somewhere among them was our 24,000th and we found another 100 after that, bringing the total number of listings to 24,100!

During the month we concentrated on updating the listings in Portugal, where we now have 315 listings.

After Portugal, we'll get into Virginia (the last of the 50 U.S. states to be reviewed in this go-round), then on to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, ...

Database Statistics:

As of December 31, 2018, the database lists 24,100 swimming facilities in 200 countries and 13,240 cities. In total, those facilities have 26,186 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,585 listings in the United States, 2,305 in the United Kingdom, 1,591 in France, 1,454 in Germany, 1,423 in Spain, 1,118 in Italy, 1,006 in Canada, 881 in Japan, 863 in Australia, and, 402 in the Netherlands.

2018 Overview:

In 2018, we reviewed 3,675 of the now 24,100 listings on the site. We added about 1,300 facilities, but had to delete 200 that had closed or no longer met the site's listing criteria. We added listings in 21 new countries and 539 new cities.

In September, after approximately five months of work, we debuted a completely new version of the site, which combined the best features of the previous version's menu and map-based interfaces. There were a number of additional enhancements we would like to have incorporated, but we ran out of money.

The Site Update

The site is now stable and operating as it should.

There are some enhancements we'd like to add, but we've already spent far more than we've received in GoFundMe contributions (see link above), so we're pausing our upgrade program until we (or you) have caught up.

One example of what we'd like to do is to add to the listings are "Geographic Notes" - something along the lines of the "Facility Notes", but geared to letting foreign travelers know about swimming customs that may differ from what they're used to at home. For example, most pools in France won't let a gentleman swim in boxer-style swim trunks. Japanese swimming pools won't let you swim if you have a tattoo that isn't covered by a bandage. Greek swimming pools usually require multiple medical certifications (general health, dermatologist, and sometimes even gynecological certifications) before allowing you to swim.

It would be nice to be able to tell summer visitors where they may be able to find out about seasonal pools in cities they may be visiting.

It is not practical or efficient to enter that sort of information into every listing individually, but an upgrade to the database and the addition of some code to the listing template could be easily (but not inexpensively) arranged.

Please $end money through the GoFundMe campaign, so we can give you the best site possible.

November Site News:

In November we added six new countries to the site: Angola, the Central African Republic, the Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Liberia, and Sudan. We now have coverage in 190 countries around the world!

We added only 52 new listings (net) to the site in November, but somewhere among them was our 24,000th!

During the month we completed a review of all the listings in the US states of Tennessee and North Carolina and we're now working on updating the listings in Portugal.

After Portugal, which has only 304 listings, we'll get into Virginia (the last of the 50 U.S. states to be reviewed in this go-round), then on to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, ...

Database Statistics:

As of November 30, 2018, the database lists 24,024 swimming facilities in 190 countries and 13,201 cities. In total, those facilities have 26,105 full-size, year-round pools (as we define those terms in our FAQ).

There are now 7,573 listings in the United States, 2,304 in the United Kingdom, 1,591 in France, 1,454 in Germany, 1,422 in Spain, 1,118 in Italy, 1,006 in Canada, 881 in Japan, 854 in Australia, and, 402 in the Netherlands.

A Quick Note About the Recent Site Redesign

The new site has been online for a little over two weeks, now, and I'm happy to say that the response has been almost uniformly positive.

When the redesign went online, we had a problem with our coding conflicting with something in the Google Ads code that caused pages not to download properly. It took a couple of days to get that resolved, but the pages now seem to be downloading properly. To those of you who took the time to alert us to that problem: Thank you!

The few other complaints we've received were due to misunderstandings rather than real problems. Those of you who use hand-held devices, tablets and smart phones, should find the orange boxes at the top of the country, state/province, county/region, and city/town selection lists a godsend to allow you to skip through long lists to the name of the geographic area you're searching. Some people have not understood this, but if you play around with it, you'll see what a great tool it is. I often use it with my desktop machine, too. Thanks to everyone who has provided feedback, it's helpful to us and, as those of you who hated the mailto links should now have noticed, we were listening.

The other significant source of complaints has been from people who think we are connected with the facilities in some way. That's been a problem since "Day 1" of the site. Unfortunately, people neither follow the "Important Notice - Please Read" link at the top of every listing page, nor are they able to discern from the context of the page that there's no connection between us and the listed facilities. We don't think we'll ever overcome that problem.

And another...

Because of the way the site was reindexed every week in the old system, it was not possible to "bookmark" any of the geographical pages in the site. Although the country and state IDs remained relatively constant, over time, the addition or reclassification of a county or city at the lower end of the alphabet would cause a change in the ID of every county and city that followed it alphabetically, irrespective of what country, state, or province the new listing was in. Now that the database is permanently hosted on the server, the indexing is permanent. If you want to bookmark the search page for all the listings in England, for example, you'd go through the search to http://www.swimmersguide.com/default.aspx?SID=187 and bookmark it or, if you want to use it as a link on your website, you'd simply use the URL as a link to that page. It should never change again and links to it should always give you the list of Counties and Cities in England.

Geocoding Update

With all the business getting the new site online, we suffered a real slowdown in getting the latitudes and longitudes for listings in March. We were able to geocode only about 200 listings last month, which brings us up to 63.7% of the total. But the new site go-live wasn't the only distraction we had to deal with last month, read on...

"The Scraper"

Over the course of the years, we've come across a number of sites whose information bears striking resemblance to our own listings, but in February, we found a site whose content was so perfectly identical to ours that we felt it necessary to call on the assistance of an intellectual property attorney. The operator of that site is a plagiarist who has taken our content, wrapped it in "English as a Second Language" quality text, added pay-per-click ads, and is attempting to fob off our content as his own. As best we can determine, he has added nothing to our information, in fact, some of the things in our listings that we think most important to you have not been included in his site's listings!

We've been working on this database since February, 1992, most of the time uncompensated, the rest of the time earning something in the neighborhood of $4.00 per hour, before expenses. Over the course of a few days or weeks, this plagiarist unleashed a "bot" on our site, skimmed off the information he wanted, inserted it into a template, and is now reaping his unearned rewards.

So, as we work to have the SOB taken down, we will have less time to work on the geocoding or other projects we have in mind.

Swimmers Guide went online in late May, 1996, since that time, the number of pools in the database has nearly quintupled, but the interface you have seen and the way the information was created and stored on the server have gone virtually unchanged. We decided that with the resources we had available we could devote our time to creating content or we could devote our time to creating a visually pleasing site, but we could not do both – so we opted for content.

Although we’re convinced that our decision to choose substance over style was correct at the time, the Internet has changed and the “back of the house” software we had been using all along couldn’t support some of the innovations and improvements we want to implement. So, after 16 years, we hired a programmer to bring Swimmers Guide into the 21^st Century.

What has changed?

In the listings, aside from the obvious - narrowing the screen, changing colors and layout, putting the advertisements that pay for the site on both sides of the listings - we’ve also eliminated the “mailto” links that used email messages for you to send us updated information about the listings’ web links, telephone numbers, prices, map links, and your reviews. Now, there’s an “Edit” button on the right side of every data point in a listing; click on the Edit button and a screen will come up prompting you for input that, when completed, will allow us to review, accept or edit what you’ve sent, and to add it to the listing in real time!

Do you want to tell us about a team or club that trains at the facility? On the old site, we could fit only two or three clubs of each type into a listing; now, we can accept an almost unlimited number of swimming, diving, water polo, and synchronized swim teams for each listing - and we've added  several more types: triathlon, life saving, fin-swimming, underwater hockey and rugby teams, and SCUBA diving clubs.

On the old site we had a 500-character database field-size limitation for reviews and comments; that limitation is now a thing of the past. The site will allow as many reviews of as we want to have, and, with the field-size limitation gone, we’ll be able to begin adding the date received to each review. In about a year, we’re going to delete all the undated reviews – some go back ten or more years – but we’ll leave them for a while because we think that most of them do have value.

The “Add A Pool” tool on the old site hadn’t worked for years, and the work-around of asking you to copy a questionnaire from a page on the site to an email message, then type answers to a multitude of questions, then email it to us has finally been replaced! The new “Add A Swimming Pool” tool that you can access from the home page is much easier to deal with from your point of view and ours. Fill in answers to the questions and hit the “Submit” button - the information will be instantly available to us. We’ll be able to see what you sent and, if the facility meets our listing criteria, we’ll be able to add it to the site in real time. No more waiting until the weekly site upload, everything can be done in a matter of minutes.

Have you ever wondered how many listings we have – or how many we have in a particular country? Check out the “Site Statistics” page. The information on that page is updated in real time – every time a pool is added to or removed from the database, the information on that page will be automatically updated.

Although the site is still less smart phone-friendly than we’d like, we’ve added a small tool above the scrolling (or drop-down) lists of countries, states, counties, and cities, to allow you to type in the first few letters of the name of the place you’re interested in and the list will automatically scroll down to the places you typed, hit the “Select” button, and the next list (or the listing) you’re looking for will come right up. If you’re using a tablet computer or a desktop computer, this tool works on them, too!

We’ve changed the set-up of the “Pools in [city name]” so that all the listings in a city are shown on a single page, as opposed to multiple pages with no more than 15 listings per page. And the new list, which comes sorted by postal code by default, can now be sorted in ascending or descending order by name, neighborhood, primary pool length, postal code, accessibility by the general public, accessibility by hotel guests, and whether or not the facility has club or team contact information.

More important than all the changes we’ve written about above, the ones you can see, are the ones you can’t see. The site is now permanently installed in an SQL Server database using asp.net programming. The change from Cold Fusion/MS Access to asp.net/SQL Server, not only allowed all of the can-see changes, but will enable us to implement a tremendous number of site enhancements. We can now develop a truly smart-phone friendly site. We’ll be able to implement some controlled database searches that depend on variables other than just geographical situation: How many 50m pools are there in Nassau County, NY? Where can I find a 50m, outdoor pool in Germany? What listings in New York City have Masters swim clubs? We haven’t begun that work yet, but now it’s doable. When we finish geocoding the site, we’ll do a map-based graphical user interface that will render artificial, political boundaries irrelevant in a search. If you’re in or going to an area close to a national, state, or county boundary, you’ll be able to tell if there’s a pool on the other side of the border that’s close – without doing another “Find A Pool” search! (We’re at 62% geocoded as of March 4, 2013, 23 months into the project, so that’s only a year or so down the road.)

What hasn’t changed?

Behind the hardware, software, and data, itself, the individual who created the site hasn’t gone anywhere. He now works full-time to keep the site as current and useful as he possibly can. He will continue to do the same work, simply using a better tool.