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…
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…
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.…
“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…
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,…
Introduction I haven’t previously tackled the subject of water exits specifically, though I have covered it in general terms in a number of articles. Especially those articles which try to condense the basics of open water swimming considerations for beginners and irregular swimmers, such as beginners or triathletes I haven’t written about exits because anyone…
I stand and I watch and I look. The sky is blue. The sky is grey. There are clouds, there are no clouds. There is wind. There is always Father Wind, always Mother Ocean. Wind blows onshore, a santoku knife chops up the water surface, spray and solid lumps of water scatter. Wind blows offshore…
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…
There have been many searches about open water swimming into LoneSwimmer over the years, from the humourous to the technically inquisitive to the cryptic. I have in the past written articles based on some of those searches. But Goggle started encrypting searches in 2013 in response to the out-of-control NSA revelations by Edward Snowden that Google’s search had…
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 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…
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