This past week, when my wife and I went to Portsmouth, we swam in the hotel pool one day. Unlike Jeannine, I'm not a great swimmer, but I like to splash around a bit, and I find swimming on my back relaxing.
Until, that is, I bonked my head on the edge of the pool, because I had misjudged where it was and how quickly I was approaching it. As I winced and rubbed the bump on my head, I started thinking that it would be very helpful if there were guidelines painted on the ceiling -- basically just an outline of the pool itself, lined up directly over the pool. That way, when someone was swimming on their back, they could just look up and quickly get a "cue" as to how close they were to the edge of the pool, thus potentially staving off a painful bump.
There could even be a "warning" line, perhaps in red or yellow, set inside the pool's outline some distance away, maybe five feet, so as to give a preliminary proximity warning. Here's a quick illustration of the kind of ceiling graphic I'm thinking of:
Now, not having spent a lot of time in hotel pools, I concede that this may in fact be something that is already done. But in the few hotel pools I have been in, I've not seen it. -- PL
