I am standing practically naked in a chest-high den of chlorine, staring at this charlatan swim instructor at Miami Dade College's Kendall campus. Seven other skeptical people are around me, as well as one woman who refuses to take a dip because five feet of water is way too dangerous. All of us are over 18 -- jobs, kids, grandchildren -- and we have all recently accepted that our inability to swim was decidedly un-Floridian.

We have imagined ourselves as the next Dara Torres or Michael Phelps, but first the instructor has to convince us that a simple act will keep us from drowning.

Look down, she says, and surrender to the water. When the instructor takes my hand, I resist. It all seemed too mystic to be true.

The drive to campus is about 40 minutes from my home, but this a journey that has taken almost a quarter-century. For no good reason at all, I can't butterfly, breaststroke, backstroke, crawl, dog paddle or even tread water. After class, my new classmates and I agree our inability to swim confounds all of us.

``I always wanted to learn and I tried to, it just never worked,'' said Lucille Johnson, a great-grandmother who lives in Miami Gardens. ``I don't know why. I would just sink like a log.''

All of us were at the point where life, destiny -- whatever you want to call it -- opened up this opportunity. Johnson, 64, took the classes to help her heal; she lost her husband in April. Ana Aspuru, 46, got caught in a rip current and was tortured by helplessness.

For me, my ignorance had become too embarrassing. At the risk of revealing a company secret, the latest version of The Miami Herald's Fidel Castro Plan -- a blueprint for coverage when the former Cuban dictator dies -- places me dangerously close to the water. I might need to swim after people to net some of the biggest interviews of my life.

I also wanted to silence the cynics who posited many theories on my lack of aquatic aptitude. Family members looked at my weight -- I'm a lithe 5-foot-11, 140 pounds -- and said I'd never truly float. Colleagues asked where I was from -- the Bronx -- and considered my lack of swimming skills some standard city-kid folly. Friends looked at my skin tone and just shook their head.

``I had no idea you were a statistic,'' joked my friend, Will Jones.

Will was mocking the stereotype of black people not being able to swim. I was interested in how true this was, so I tried finding some national data -- which is hard when it comes to swimming ability in adults.

The most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is 15 years old. Turns out, the study concluded, that one in four people between the ages of 18 and 24 could not swim from one end of a 24-yard pool to another. Between the ages of 55 and 64, about half could not do it.

When it comes to ethnic background, some 60 percent of black people could not do the task. Neither could 32 percent of whites or 45 percent of Hispanics.

These numbers probably don't cause such a frenzy in the landlocked Midwest. But in Florida, the state health department estimates almost 400 people will drown each year. Two out of three drowning victims are adults, like me.

Even as I lost every childhood game of Marco Polo, I always loved the water. Drowning was never a true concern because I was always surrounded by buoyant people. As the youngest in my family, I believed I was too precious for someone to allow me to slip away.

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