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…
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…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
Recently, Alan Clack & I hiked up to Coumshingaun in the Comeragh Mountains, as part of his Channel taper in Ireland, and because we were looking for some cold water. The silence from Alan as we hiked upward was deafening. “What the hell are we doing”, I could imagine, and worse, going through his head. Coumshingaun is…
Hook Head is one of our favourite places in Ireland. I’ve been lucky enough to finally get a new halfway decent camera so I wanted to take a visit to the Hook for some long-hoped-for photos for the site. A long flat low bare almost treeless peninsula in the south-east, at the other side of…
You know, in all the swimming I did last year, I never really wrote about ordinary swims that much. Every swim was part of a structure, a plan, the wet road toward Dover and the Strait. I tended to think more about big swims and tough swims, or swims which marked some milestone. I often…
LoneSwimmer 