Cockles, mussels and limpets, all grand little lads and lassies, molluscs to a man/woman/whatever. Cockles are the useless shells you fill your pockets with when you are a child visiting the seaside and your daft aunt uses to make “arts ‘n crafts”. Limpets are you with your first boyfriend/girlfriend. Mussels are nice in a garlic sauce…
I felt like a ship that had been too long in dry dock, or more appropriately, beached, as little maintenance of my vessel had occurred while I was dry. The sails of my shoulders have slackened, the sheets of my arms have loosened, and the rudders of my hands have lost motive force. The wooden keel of my core has dried out, no running or Pilates can substitute. Bizarrely (to me) I develop dry skin on my feet as I was now no longer regularly immersed for long periods. And without marinating in sea water, all the showers in the world cannot make me feel clean.
Do you wonder about your favourite food or song or book? Do you ask yourself, what’s my favourite swim? Or do you maybe even tell yourself after most swims, that “that one, that one was my favourite”? Like I do? We do this, assign rankings and preferences. But I am unsure why. Sometimes it’s idle, sometimes it’s…
We have tides in the river here but we are not an estuary. Here we are above where the ocean tide meets the down-flowing stream. We are quite up the river, well away from the sea in a winding route. There is no tidal bore so the tide is backed-up river water, not brackish estuarine…
“Did you see that video on Facebook Donal? Complete tool”. “I mean what the hell Donal, is your sport all gobshites like that?” “It doesn’t matter you don’t use Facebook. It was on the news last night as well. Here it is here on my phone. Look!” “What kind of a fool goes swimming in…
The summer and autumn of 2019 and winter of 2019/2020 have been unusual at the Guillamene cove. Not for the weather or for the sea but because we had a higher number of safety incidents than previously. There were a number of serious incidents that I am aware of that required intervention of inshore rescue…
Some concepts or acts can be so fundamental to a communal activity that the members of that community can forget that they once may not have known of the concept, let alone the meaning as the activity becomes second nature. These acts, which we might call unconscious assumptions, are not ignored, but accepted, language grows…
In the years before I’d swum into Loneswimmer Cave, when I rounded Great Newtown Head, if I wanted to progress west into Ronan’s Bay, I either had to swim around Oyen reef, or through the four to five metre gap between the reef and the base of the cliff. It was the same as most…
In a year with a poor summer, any remaining prospect of heat finally slips away like an ebb tide by the second or third weekend of September, to be replaced by the next straw to be grasped in the eternal Irish hope for future good weather, that of the mythical Indian Summer, with which we…
There is an imaginary curving line I could identify starting at The Garden, that sheer-walled hint of a cove in the cliffs on the western side of Tramore Bay. Such a line would terminate over four kilometres east at Brownstown Head on the other side of the bay and it delineates where the open ocean…
I started this Open Water Swimming Year series in 2017, and did not think I would complete it all in a year. I anticipated July and August would to be the most difficult to write, because everyone understands summer, and I would struggle to say anything interesting. All writing holds this truth to be self-evident:…
I have tingles in both hands. One is from jellyfish stings, one is from sensation returning after an almost two hour June swim. I can’t tell which is which. The Blue Stinger appeared in front of me at the surface, right as I reached forward. Its tentacles enveloped my hand, arm and shoulders like a…
When you look around from wherever you are reading this, whether it’s an office, at home, on a train, you can’t see The Deep. Even if you are sitting at the coast. The words have no weight. The Deep doesn’t exist. It’s a fairy-tale with which to scare yourself. You imagine it. Step off the…
“Loneswimmer is a brand now“, my buddy and two-way English Channel and Double Round Manhattan swimmer Lisa (Cummins) said to me one day and not as much alcohol or hypothermia as you would guess was involved. Now let’s get this out the way. Having Lisa as friend is a bit of trial. You go through…
Though I had been pool swimming, I hadn’t swam in the sea in four weeks, and if I didn’t get in at the weekend I would go a month without an open water swim for possibly the first time in a decade. On Saturday the bay was lousy and blown out in howling onshores, breakers…
For some years, my New Year’s post for those taking up swimming for exercise or weight management has been one of the site’s most popular and has gone viral on a number of occasions. But like with my Christmas Swim post, I wanted to change it up this year. Like so much of what I’ve written,…
For the past few years I’ve covered Christmas swims from the practical side, aiming to give some simple advice for the irregular swimmer so they can more fully ans safely enjoy it, by prepare for and dealing with the cold during and after the swim. You can always go back and read the previous one…
The tenth of November, 2018 sees the launch of the new North Channel Swimming Association, with a public announcement by Channel Swimmer and inaugural Chairperson Antonio Argules in San Francisco (and here on Loneswimmer). Since before Tom Blower’s first successful North Channel solo in 1947 (previously covered on Loneswimmer here), North Channel swim attempts have been…
The reef. Should I say it reposes, lurks, or waits there? Whichever, it changes by weather, by season, by my direction, by my desire. It does all these things. Regardless, it posts sentinel beneath the headland of Great Newtown Head, breaking southerly seas from the eroding lower Old Red Sandstone terraces that encompass the entrance.…
Around the world, 2018 has been a hot summer. I predicted early on before the heat wave that 2018 would see a lot of jellyfish, and so it transpired. I also predict that we will see early and more noticeable Sea Lice in swimmers this year, beginning possibly as early as the first week of…
As I drove around the corner at the No Longer Red House©, I could see a swimmer in a yellow cap ascend the slipway from sand exposed by the dropping tide, and I knew with the immediacy of complete familiarity that bypasses the slower speed of thinking, and though I hadn’t seen him in a…
The open water swimming year is about celebration as much as anything more nebulous. Open water swimming celebrates for us lucky participants the glory, perennial wonder and eternal attraction of the ocean (and rivers and lakes to a lesser degree) and not least its and our moods. For some it’s a sail, for others it’s…
“How long are you typically here (in Ireland) for?“, I asked as I chatted with the US customs agent at US Border Control in Dublin Airport in late April. I stared up at the official photo of the current US President on the wall. While the agent gave me the usual interrogation about my reason for traveling,…
We claim victory. Or survival. We swim out into Bone Cold water, and we claim it. Metaphorically speaking, we mark the nadir of winter at the end of February out in the water, bleeding our skin colour into the icy greyblackgreen, exchanging heat for some ludicrous sense of playing a game with the ocean, that…
“O reader, do not ask of me how I grew faint and frozen then – I cannot write it: all words would fall far short of what it was. I did not die, and I was not alive; think for yourself, if you have any wit, what I became, deprived of life and death.” – The…
“The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the Deep”. It’s occasionally struck me that in the second verse or chapter (or whatever these biblical couplets are called) Nothingness, the Void and the Deep are all co-equal. The Deep cannot exist without the Not-Deep, without its face, (nonsensical theological…
The oceans are warming. It’s a rare winter that the Atlantic here on the Copper Coast drops below six degrees anymore. It hasn’t happened since but in the bitter winter of 2009/2010, the water temperature in Tramore Bay dropped below five degrees before the end of November. I went swimming that November while snow lay on…
Swimming was important to me, at an age when maybe some of us are past learning these things, in discovering how much we are all capable of, if we just commit ourselves. Ultimately, everything else I’ve learned and try to share is mechanics, or more easily comprehensible knowledge. There are no secrets in swimming, no secret to…
At Christmas time, many people who would never consider getting in cold water will be thinking of a Christmas Eve, Christmas Day or New Year’s Day dip. If you are wondering WHY you might or should do it, apart from; taking part in a local tradition in many places; having a hot punch at the…
This post begins a new series here on Loneswimmer.com. There are certain patterns that I’ve seen repeated over the years. There are certain experiences that recur, certain thoughts that reappear, coming anew each year. Though previously experienced, all feel fresh each time, only deepened by the growing realisation that what were once first-time or rare…
LoneSwimmer 