After a beloved swim group founder is killed, her community regroups.

As a storm rolled in on Tuesday, Dec. 23, I spent part of the afternoon at Lovers Point in Pacific Grove, looking at the expanse of gray ocean and dramatic clouds beyond. The sea was flat, and a pair of otters swam by. It was beautiful, and strangely peaceful from this vantage point.

I say strangely because even as I took in the scene, a handful of divers were underwater, searching for a swimmer who never returned to shore two days prior.

Erica Fox co-founded the ocean swimming group the Kelp Krawlers 20 years ago. Fox, a successful triathlete who excelled at not just swimming but also bicycling and running, was an effervescent presence, always smiling and quick to laugh. She appreciated and loved the ocean deeply, through an intimacy obtained only with many hours and many miles of immersion. And she shared it with many of us, including me.

On a regular Sunday swim at Lovers Point on Sunday, Dec. 21, a group of 16 swimmers left the beach at 11:30am. As we returned to the beach, a gaggle of firefighters were waiting for us; they’d received a 911 call reporting a shark sighting just off the point, and wanted to make sure everyone out recreating was accounted for.

We quickly realized that everyone was not, and that Fox was missing.

I have spent many hours in the days since then trying to make sense of something I always knew could happen, but have also spent hours actively willing out of my mind while swimming. Like the others I was with in the water on Dec. 21 – a calm day in the ocean, and exceedingly clear – I was shocked only after returning to shore to learn that a fellow swimmer was gone. There had been no hullabaloo, no chaos to react to.

Of course I know that in the vast ocean, cycles of life and death are always playing out – I’ll never know how many times while swimming acts of predation were happening right around while all I heard was the sound of the water. I am acutely reminded that in this vast food web, we humans are ultimately just biological organisms too. It’s a startling reminder of that to enter the water with a friend and then to exit the water without them.

Chris Villanueva had been swimming with Fox since just about the very beginning of Kelp Krawlers. He is not only a regular fixture of ocean swims multiple times per week, but also a prone paddler who takes his board out, often alone, often miles from shore.

She helped many of us learn to love the ocean.

“There’s nothing else out there besides you and the water,” he says. “To some degree you feel vulnerable, but you get a sense of individualness when you are by yourself out there.”

Fellow Kelp Krawler Steve Bruemmer survived a shark bite in 2022, and as I sat gazing out at the horizon on Tuesday, he joined me to reflect. His story is quite different – it became a story of recovery and resilience, and the luck of survival, in which a millimeter’s difference could have changed everything.

Bruemmer has also spent some time thinking about the fundamentally fleeting nature of life, and what it means to live knowing that we cannot take tomorrow for granted, like the complex food web happening just offshore all the time. Some of it is lending the same kindness that helped him through a lengthy recovery: “Anything you say is valuable, if it’s from the heart,” he says. “Say something, do something, send a card, make a call – it will be appreciated by the grieving person or the recovering person.”

Fox lived a life she designed very much in keeping with her own values and vision for how to be, a template I think all of us can emulate. She chose a career path in healthy and organic food, most recently working at Elroy’s. She pushed her limits as an athlete, and encouraged others to push theirs. She helped many of us learn to love the ocean and its wildness.

A community is grieving for her and also for what it will mean for the Kelp Krawlers, as members of the group reassess whether to swim, where to swim and when to swim.

“I hung up my wetsuit on Sunday and thought, I’m done for now,” says Jeffrey Weekley. “I am grieving for Erica, and for our experience as Kelp Krawlers. I’ll deeply miss the privilege of sharing the ocean with her and my fellow swimmers, but I can’t continue.”

SARA RUBIN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@montereycountynow.com