You can’t see far when you’re swimming in the ocean in rough water. It’s like lying face down among a herd of agitated hogs, closing one eye, and trying to find a way out. Breathing to the left, your left eye momentarily breaks the surface as you suck air. Your right eye stays always submerged, and on a rough day the water is generally opaque, so it sees nothing. Even on a calm day through your left eye your vision is piecemeal, snatched as an accompaniment to oxygen. “Was that the Aireys lighthouse? Or a kayak?”
But when the water’s rough, vision is worse. You heave up and down in kinetic chaos, a plain of pyramids rising and collapsing around you, with water always peaked above you. You’re usually down in a hollow, isolated, alone. You lose your swimming buddies quickly in rough water. Where is everyone? You started with seven other swimmers, but they were lost to you by the time you were through the wave zone and out into rough water.
Credit: Robin Cowcher
Sometimes the water gets so choppy, it’s almost enmity, and no fun at all. You’ve got to be fully focused just to keep going, keep moving, stay alive. Swimming on days like those, you won’t be thinking of Iran’s proxy wars or your cholesterol. But deliberately, regularly, moving outside your comfort zone and overcoming the anxiety involved in that pays off. Each rough swim is a lesson in coping, it adds another memory of adversity to overcome and recharges your self-regard.
The sky is often dull on the Surf Coast on days when the sea is rough, and the water, then, is coloured the many steely shades artists use when painting graveyards. On such days, I measure distance by fatigue. If I’m buggered, I’m surely getting close to the beach. Aren’t I?
The coldness of the water in the middle half-year is a spur. Why is your heart beating so fast? Because you’re thrashing along like a steroid-addled sprint queen. An involuntary attempt to try and outswim the cold and ward off entropy. Hypothermia is nibbling at your toes, reminding you that this is the rude temperature to which the universe insists you return one day. So keep moving, burn energy, stay ahead of the big chill. But the shock of the cold, as well as speeding you up, immediately strips all the quotidian silt from your mind and makes you think of only this, this now …
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Nick Cave, who’s been dealt double anyone’s ration of heartbreak in recent years, wrote a lyrical explanation of his love of cold-water swimming. “This encounter obliterates all anger and worldly woes. To quote Roger Deakin’s beautiful book, Waterlog, you plunge into the lake with all your raging devils and clamber out ‘a giggling idiot’. In icy water, with our adrenaline and endorphins running riot, we are returned to our innocent, primordial selves via an internal ecstatic screaming to be born defiantly afresh. We become tiny creatures in the shock of nature, and we are made happy!
“As my friends and I make our way back through the woods, borne on the wings of God’s laughing angels, in the grip of some massive dopamine surge, we understand we are better now. This sense of delight, this shivering joy, will remain with us as we go about our day.”
I think we ocean swimmers all know this feeling – it’s a pastime that demands your total attention to cope with its extreme exoticness. You’re in zero gravity, essentially flying, which is a technically demanding feat, while pulses of energy are heaving you this way and that, and if you don’t concentrate, you won’t be flying, you will be drowning, but never mind that, you are flying … for now.
And, thus, it takes you from this life awhile, away from what ails you, bedevils you, fascinates you, from what you love or regret – to a place as uncluttered as childhood, a detached moment.
You should see our group emerging from the brine, scalping our caps from our heads, chattering like idiots; we are architects, firemen, retirees, franchisees, publishers, lawyers, beer hucksters, yoga gurus – one of us is a spy, though he insists he isn’t, which is how we know he is. And we are all coming back from this peculiar watery elsewhere, a place we go to escape and unknow our lives for a while. We are happy to have gone there. And happy to be back, cleansed, and ready again for this.
