The Copper Coast is 30km of beautiful coastline in County Waterford on the Irish Coast
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…
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:…
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.…
I need you to believe me on these two things. To the best of my knowledge, the only three people who have really seen the Yellow Sea, are Tramore inshore fisherman, skipper of the Little Tern John Stubbs, local (international record-holding) kayaker Mick O’Meara …and myself. Three of us three who haunt the Copper Coast,…
The car park, being a winter mid-day, was empty. I was later to arrive than the “two-minute-dip polar bears”, who’d been and gone. I’ve often thought and written about these days, the empty days of open water swimming, no souls but mine and the ocean’s, grey days when getting in the water takes all my…
Rolling across the water from somewhere in the distance I could hear the sound of bells. Under the water’s surface the luminous dial of my watch showed six PM. So. The Angelus Bells, the Catholic call to prayer. Sound travels far across water. It must be coming the whole way from the church in Fenor…
The weather on Saturday the second of July was horrible. The air was cool, a mere 14 degrees. It had been raining for three weeks, and the early promise of summer, a sly murmur spoken over a mere four days at the beginning of June had long vanished and the water temperature had dropped back…
“On behalf of the President and people of Ireland, I’d like to welcome you to our shore” said the Newtown and Guillamenes Open Water Swimming Club President to me. The gentleman speaking was the eighty-five year old who has been swimming at the cove for over seven decades and the man who probably invented the original Ice…
Part I. July saw a trip to the North Channel to crew for Finbarr Hedderman’s successful North Channel solo, and where I was to return later in the summer for another solo crewing task (which ended differently, but more importantly safely). After the North Channel I spent the rest of July on the Copper Coast enjoying…
I’ve been out for the water for some time. Just as the temperature starts to drop and the weather decay, a critical time for an open water swimmer to be out of the water if they plan to swim through the winter. One more day and it would be four weeks since my last sea…
Sam Krohn is an Australian open water swimmer, resident in the south-east of Ireland since his family moved here when he was young, Sam’s a regular swimmer at my own usual location of Tramore’s Newtown and Guillamenes coves. He’s also a regular reader of and the most regular commenter to this blog. Sam and I kept missing opportunities to go…
Part I. Starting a little late, the swimmers entered the water about 9.30am on the beach just outside the small harbour. At the time, not recognising it as the start of my current burn-out and long dark night, I’d been injured and disinterested during the previous week, so I decided to go out really easy for…
The origin of the Champion of Champions (CoC) format swimming race and it’s rather hyperbolically overblown title lies with the British Long Distance Swimming Association (BLDSA) who have run it as an annual event for many years often in Dover, the home of Channel swimming. The CoC is a three-part (“Two and a Bit“) race and given…
Sometimes an idea is so obvious you wonder why it hadn’t occurred to you previously. Ideas or inspiration though are often just a product of two things; timing and interest. It was a few years ago that I first heard about San Francisco’s South End Rowing Club’s Bay to Breakers swim. Ten kilometres swims are rarely…
Swimming is a lot of things to different people at different times, even to me. But what it isn’t, is a method of travel. We may travel long distances while swimming, we may even be swimming to a destination, but we are not traveling per se. But somehow, I’d traveled. The buildings stopped before I…
Instead of a beach, shadows loomed over me and the water went from gold to black in sudden deep shade. A wall of dressed stone met my fingertips and loomed two metres over me. It was a pier, stone mooring bollards along the edge. There was another pier twenty or thirty metres away to my…
Winter reduces my range. I swim at the Guillamenes, along the cliffs and shore of Tramore Bay. Maybe, just maybe, I might get down to Sandycove for a lap. Days pass when I see no-one, arriving, swimming and leaving without a soul. Spring comes with almost imperceptibly warming water and air and increase in the number…
This is the second part of a three-part series of a pictorial exploration of the Atlantic Ocean as I know it, primarily on Ireland’s south and south-east coasts. As with the last time, these images are best viewed individually at a larger size. All will be added at full resolution to my Flickr account. Atlantic…
The Atlantic Ocean is in me. For almost 20 years since it got its hook into me, I’ve been haunting, (in a moderate non-weird way), the Irish Atlantic coast, primarily the west, south and my own Copper Coast in the south-east. For many years, in the depths of grim nights, I have stared into the…
Cork Distance Week has become increasingly well-known over the past few years since it started by Ned Denison in 2009, succeeding the Champion of Champion races of the previous two years. I’ve been involved every year either as a swimmer or a volunteer and last year I hoped to bring the Camp swimmers over to the…
Real spring arrived most tentatively and late in Ireland this year, following the coldest early spring in 50 years. The water has been cold at its usual lowest point in late February, but recovery from the bottom took longer to occur than usual and many of the coldest days swimming have occurred after the normal…
In the weeks since I published the article of the despoiling of the Guillamene Cove by the addition of shoulder-high stainless cattle-crush, meetings have been held between Newtown & Guillamenes and Tramore Town Council and radio and newspaper interviews have been done. Many people read that article. (A couple of people have told me I…
First Corner and Comalees. Second Corner Stand of trees. Red House Yellow Bungalow. Guillamenes and Sandycove. Say my little swimming ditty out loud, it both scans and rhymes, a major achievement for me. 🙂 (It works for me, but you see, I really can’t write good poetry). When you swim the same open water locations…
I have no plan to swim into every cave on the Copper Coast, and no plan to subject you all to every one. But we have almost covered all the most interesting ones that I’ve swam to date: Some are obviously above high water mark and inaccessible, and some are too small, and there are…
LoneSwimmer 