In Tramore bay, Waterford, Ireland. My main open water swimming location.
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…
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 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.…
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…
“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…
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…
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…
When I left you at the end of the last post, I’d also left the LE Orla, setting out for the water under Doneraile Head and park where I could see the local RNLI and Tramore Inshore RIBs on weekly training exercises. A couple of weeks before the bicentennial, I’d been at another memorial, the annual…
The Internet sucks, doesn’t it? There you are, doing your best and still struggling. Everywhere you look online everyone else is telling you how amazing they are. That’s how I feel about it most of the time anyway. Just considering swimming, everyone else says they are swimming farther, longer, faster and better. They are also swimming colder and…
There is no swimming in this post. I really wanted to get swim just for the fun of it, but there was no safe exit point except at the pier and I knew I’d cause mass panic there, probably resulting in Rescue 117 being called out again. Does this mean I am growing up? Surely…
The weather in Ireland has been broken for the past five days. It didn’t operate as normal. It’s the end of March and instead of the usual dull cold grey, it’s been warm, bright and sunny. So like quite a few others I changed to a few days of sea swimming and even did a…
Steve Munatones posted a list of possible features on dailynewsofopenwaterswimming.com for a good open water swimming spot some time back. 1. Year-round conditions 2. Summer conditions 3. Abundance or absence of marine life. If marine life is known, how does the abundance or absence of sharks, dolphins, turtles, jellyfish, Portuguese man o’ war positively or negatively…
2:25 p.m. I’m just in home within the last few minutes. It’s one hour and 13 minutes since I got out of the water at the Guillamene. 8 a.m. I weigh 75.5 kg. I have dropped 2.5 kg since I resumed pool training seven weeks ago. I forgot to check my pulse after I woke, (yet…
An Indian summer was predicted for Ireland and the UK for the last week, and the UK certainly reaped it, along with much of Ireland. The south coast though, as I mentioned last week, had either blanket fog for days or continuous rain. In fact I decided to take a break from swimming. But this…
Problem: Out of ideas of what to write about next. Solution: Go for a swim. From the Guillamenes down to the pier and out the headland, ( the “Guillamenes Double” as I call it, though I only went halfway out to the headland yesterday, due to Half-Claw). Water was 9.c C under the ladder, maybe…
LoneSwimmer 