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…
Amongst the omissions or subjects I have yet to tackle, one of the more obvious has been relatively little coverage of environmental issues. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, they say. I’ve tackled many open water swimming subjects here, sometimes because I didn’t know enough to be daunted, or because I thought that while my knowledge…
A regular blog reader (hi Gabriel!) left a comment wherein they mentioned wind against sea. My first reaction was that I knew right then that Gabriel was an experienced open water swimmer. My second reaction was to kick myself for not mentioning wind against sea previously. Wind against sea is a condition that most open water swimmers (who…
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…
I can say I saw another sea, but you will not understand. I do not understand. That Sea was not the sea I know. The sea is sacred to me, but this Sea was more than sacred, it was hallowed. Beyond was not Sea open to the horizon, but only kilometres, miles, a mere league…
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…
Subconsciously, I’d pulled the goggles from my face, feeling the familiar discomfort around my eyes as the suction released. They dangled weightless from my fingers. Above the seafront buildings rose a hill and a town. A road led through the near buildings to disappear into tiered houses that fronted a low hill. I was stunned.…
I’d swum a double handful of strokes on one breath, and seen so little and yet so much. Only water, rocks, kelp, light? You don’t understand. Time to breath and navigate, I lifted my head. Golden sunlight dazzled me, washed over me. I know it had been months, the previous autumn since I’d last swum…
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…
It is unsurprising that primitive peoples, faced with a world whose range and patterns they couldn’t comprehend or predict, imbued all aspects thereof with a supernatural aspect. Before the development of monotheism, the belief in a single god, often traced to Egyptian Pharoah Akhenaten in the Fourteenth Century B.C., that desire to invest every natural force or occurrence with a…
Because I live and swim in Ireland, I am constantly made aware of the large tidal range here. I’ve written extensively about tides previously because I feel they are an aspect of open water swimming not appreciated by enough swimmers and because global variations can mean that many people never see nor even realise the…
I was reading a letter to Tramore Town Council, about the new Guillamenes cattle-crush, from someone who’d been involved in International Water Safety for many years. In the letter the person pointed out how someone had been “swept off the diving platform by a freak wave”. I said the Club Secretary Aidan Farrally that his…
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…
I got a bit creeped out in the water recently. It’s a rare enough occurrence that I can’t actually remember the last time. The sea is my home, not in Man From Atlantis way, but in a “it’s where I feel most in control” way. When I arrived at the Guillamene, my reguler training location in…
Sea Thrift that is, Armaria maritima, also known as sea pinks. Ireland’s Copper Coast has a lot of it, growing all along the coast on the cliff edges, in rock crevices and stony ground where nothing else grows. It’s a perennial which has a high drought and salt tolerance, in fact it seems to do best…
This phrase is a consistent Google autocorrect search term that bring people to the site so I thought I would use it directly. I’ve previously written a couple of posts on understanding waves, theory and some practical. Writing recently about the 2010 eight hour pool-training swim followed by a sea swim, I was reminded of the…
A fantastic visualization by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre of the ocean surface currents around the world. The Gulf Stream, the Labrador Current, the Agulhas current, can all be seen (even though they are part of the thermohaline circulation system) and remind one of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Of particular interest are the localised but…
Another week, another swim and another swim report from Stephen, to whom, as always, I am indebted for sharing this with me and therefore you. Untouched as last week, (Stephen writes this stuff on his phone always). I still can’t get over Stephen doing both these swims only 8 days apart. If you don’t have…
I was thinking about the fears that hinder open water swimmers or potential open water swimmers. It always amazes me how many non-swimmers (or even swimmers) have a seemingly visceral fear of even the idea of swimming over deep water, swimming in the dark or imagining themselves over a deep section of sea with potential…
Another of those great images of sea phenomena that I like, cross (or grid) waves, which occur when two sets of waves travelling from different directions cross at an angle of 45° or more. This creates very steep short-crested waves that can be dangerous for shipping. From the European Space Agency. Put some Channel Swimmers out there,…
This is a one subject site, open water swimming. Everything on the site relates to open water swimming. But since open water swimming is part of my life, sometimes other parts of my life or some of my interests get pulled in. They may look tangential but it’s because I’m trying to contextualize my swimming…
Recently I wrote about how I consider safe entry and exit points and possibility of swimming at all tide times to be a critical requirement of a good open water swim location. Kids growing tend to think the whole world is the same as their local experience. Though I didn’t live by the coast growing…
We’ve all heard (at least in Ireland) the unfortunate announcements of people losing their lives at the coast due to “freak waves”. Freak waves and rogue waves are the same thing, and are generally not what take unsuspecting people at the coast, since those are more generally set waves, which I’ve written about before, and…
I get asked various questions related to cold because I like to write about it. Those questions often inspire further writing ideas. One thing I realised was there was no good agreement on cold water. A poll of open water swimmers by DNOWS gave the following results. Under 5ºC (41ºF) – 0% Under 10ºC (50ºF) – 7%…
The Celtic Sea is that section of the Atlantic off the south Irish Coast. The Irish Sea is the sea between Ireland and the UK. The Western Approaches is the large rectangular stretch of water south and west of Ireland and the UK, i.e. the Atlantic Isles, including these two seas. The term Western Approaches…
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