ginny

I'm not sure, and it's a bit more than half of the pool. The lap swimmers get about 2/3 of the pool, and then they have a big open area for everyone else to sort of do laps without ropes to separate them. (This is for the slowest swimmers who don't care about time or anything... mostly older people).

Every other place I've been to, they put ropes along the entire length of the pool. It's truly odd.

The other thing is that it's not that they rope it off. It's this big wall-type thing that sits in the pool and can be dragged into place. You can walk along the top of it, which is handy since it's about eight inches above the water and about two feet in width.

It baffles me.

Yup.