My dad was in the Navy in WW II. The ship’s chef was black and didn’t know how to swim. He and some of his fellow sailors thought they would teach him so they threw him overboard. Said he stirred up a lot of foam so they had to haul him out. Didn’t learn how to swim. I never thought to ask him how his next meal tasted.
When I was 14 and going to swim off a ferry pier in Lake Champlain, some idiot was trying to convince a 15 year old boy that all he had to do was jump in and nature would teach him how. A few minutes later I was swimming and the boy came hurtling past me into the 20 ft deep water. I thought, “Oh, how stupid.” Then I saw bubbles and finally the top of his head at the surface, then down again, more bubbles and the top of his head which again went down. The third time his head surfaced I swam over and tried to grab him. He wrapped arms and legs around me as I screamed and we both went down. Although I had lost a lot of my air, I just relaxed and sank while he climbed up me to my shoulders, whereupon I slipped behind him and came to the surface. We were about 8 feet from the ladder. I was a good swimmer, but had not had life saving lessons. I grabbed the back of his shirt and started pushing him toward the 10 foot ladder. The minute he touched it he was up like a terrified squirrel. I climbed out and there was the idiot who almost killed us both. He said, “You ought to hug that girl and give her a big kiss, she saved your life.” The boy and I just looked at each other and shook our heads in disbelief. Some people are too stupid to waste words on.
At any rate I had learned basic water comfort at the NJ beaches as a child, and had formal swimming lessons at ages 10 and 11 at summer camp (in a Massachusetts lake with an occasional leach). I urge everyone to learn basic water skills and floating, and swimming too, and be sure your children learn.
Here is a link giving details about this dangereous microorganism Naegleria fowleri.
http://www.medicinenet.com/naegleria_infection/article.htm