Related articles

• Ichthyophobia (lilyblu.wordpress.com)

Image via Wikipedia

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 tears in your eyes reading this … well, all I can say is I did.

Image via Wikipedia

SUPPORT STEPHEN! Please consider donating anything at all to help the horrendous costs.

Related articles

• “I Know Nothing” – Amazing Stephen Redmond talks about 2011 (loneswimmer.com)
• Stephen Redmond’s own Cook Strait report & GPS – Widowmaker swim (loneswimmer.com)

Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night. Oil on canvas, 73×92 cm, 28¾×36¼ in.

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 still large-scale Eddie currents existing within or spinning the larger currents.

Earliest known map of the Gulf Stream (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gulf stream map (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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 problems waves present for many swimmers.

As we’ve seen in the previous articles waves occur where an open ocean swell meets where water gets shallow, on beaches, reefs, and rocks. Waves are somewhat unpredictable even in good conditions and care must be taken of them. So entering the water in the presence of waves requires some degree of caution, dependent on wave size. Trying to exit on rocks or reefs, in even small waves, is fraught with danger.

So why do waves present such difficulty? It’s simply because water is dense, denser than a human, and heavy and anything heavy has a lot of inertia. Difficult to start, divert or stop.

Everyone has probably stood on a beach in waist high waves and felt how easily the waves can push one around.  One cubic metre ( 1 metre x 1 metre x 1 metre, a fraction of a whole chest high wave) of water weighs one thousand kilograms. Did you ever try pushing against even a small car weighing the same? You are not as powerful as water, a six foot tall man is weaker than a five foot tall wave.

Children learn to jump as the waves approaches to go over the top, or to jump into the wave and let it take them, or to stand with one foot and chest forward to try to hold their position. These are all approaches to the mass of the wave and all and more can be used by swimmers.

Rob Dumouchel shared the video below with me, which perfectly illustrates the problems faced by swimmers unfamiliar with waves.

I hope you noticed the guy on the left at the start, who disappeared pretty quickly. He knew what to do. Instead of standing around like a scared duckling, trying to progress by hopping forward and getting pushed backward, he went under the waves.

Power within a wave is concentrated when it is breaking in the crashing top of the wave. Waves breaking into shallow water, even without being large, will travel fast and slow movement with a lot of lower density white water being pushed ahead.

The water in front of a wave is sucked up into the wave face, while the wave is moving forward so you may get a quick sensation of speed just before the wave hits. You can use this speed to your advantage to get under the wave. Just duck down and forward under the wave and then up and you will pop out well behind the wave lip and past most of the drag of the breaking water.

Remember that water being dumped on beaches by waves needs to escape back outward, so most beaches will have “channels” (some steep beaches will  instead have dangerous undertow).

The trough in front of a wave is lower than the average height, whereas the water behind a wave lip is higher. So if you plunge into a wave face and exit behind, you will be higher up, but if you come up just behind the lip of a crashing wave, you have to be careful not to get dragged back over the edge, “going over the falls”, though is generally not a problem unless you are very close.

In this image of Annestown beach, though the waves are only waist-high, one can see that the shingle isn’t all the same height, some is banked. The areas between the banks are more likely to be deeper, and more likely to be channels as this trough extends outward. The difference will usually look somewhat subtle, but is pretty consistent. If you notice in the image, where the arrow starts, the sand extends further into the shingle as this is a lower trough and this recurs along the beach, so there is actually more than one channel, more visible the more water is trying to escape. However Channels tend to exist closer to the beach and as you escape beyond the initial whitewater, the effect will dissipate.

Wave water escape channel at Annestown beach

• Don’t panic. As I have said before, there is no situation made better by panic and most will be made worse, especially at sea.
• Don’t try to get away from waves. You won’t win. Face them and work with what they are doing.
• Look for channels, the narrow and usually deeper areas where waves aren’t breaking, where the incoming water has to escape back out to sea. That’s your easiest way out. But once in a Channel, don’t try to swim back in against it.
• In water where you can walk, angle your body sideways to oncoming whitewater, and brace yourself as you move outwards, moving out in the intervals between the wave fronts.
• Once you reach chest deep water, if you are over sand, it becomes harder to progress by walking even with no waves, so get swimming.
• The best approach when going out from a beach is to dive under the oncoming waves.
• Don’t take a huge intake of air, it’ll be harder to submerge. Instead hold the air into your lungs instead of trying to hold a mouthful. Popping under and behind a big wave is a pretty quick task.
• Don’t try the same thing with waves breaking over rocks. Because idiocy.
• Swimming against a rip current is a poor decision. Change your angle by 45 to 90° and you will quickly move out of it.
• As you progress out pass the breaking waves, triangulate your position so you know where you started, might need to finish. Line up two objects, one of front of the other, a house and tree or similar, and you will be able to tell your position along a beach. otherwise you can be 100 metres to either side and it will still look like the same place.

Related Articles:

Waves for swimmers, Part 1 (loneswimmer.com)

Waves for swimmers, Part 2 (loneswimmer.com)

Exploring freak waves (loneswimmer.com)

Grid waves (loneswimmer.com)

Tides for swimmers, theory (loneswimmer.com)

Tides for swimmers, local effects (loneswimmer.com)

What’s wrong with me that I like looking at all the scary things in the sea?

A few months ago, I collected some the related fears of open water, and suggested we use Megalohydrothalassophobia, as a name for the fear of underwater creatures. Here’s another one for the causal list.  The Cascade creature, aka deepstar enigmatica, or the Placental jellyfish, apparently though not rare, but only seen intact a few times. Checking around it seems like it’s about 50cm in diameter, and is usually a more common bell shape, but the turbulence from the submarine turns it inside out and give it that really creepy motion.

Anyone who’s ever had an unexpected encounter with a plastic bag while swimming will shudder at this one. Plastic bags are scarier than jellyfish.

More details/speculation on the creature here.

All the Megalohydrothalassophobia related articles:

List of open water fears (loneswimmer.com)

Anomalocaris. (loneswimmer.com)

Eel Shark. (loneswimmer.com) (My favourite)

Giant saltwater crocodile (loneswimmer.com)

Conger eels (loneswimmer.com)

Sea lice. (loneswimmer.com)

Now THAT’S a jellyfish. (loneswimmer.com)

Powerstown head from the Guillamenes

Sea Thrift that is, Armaria maritima, also known as sea pinks.

First thrift of 2012

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.

Growing on otherwise clear stony rockfall

It’s a perennial which has a high drought and salt tolerance, in fact it seems to do best in the driest, most exposed locations, especially along cliff edges.

Faded Thrift on clifftop above Kilfarassey

Older plants will grow larger clumps of leaves and roots.

On top of a rock spire at entry to Gararrus

It’s apparently highly copper tolerant, and flourishes along the Copper Coast, and in fact if the Copper Coast were to have an icon flower it would have to be the thrift, which displays a subtle range of colour from pink to mauve and purple from plant to plant.

Its season is early summer, so the coast is rampant with it at the moment, one of the signs of summer for a south-east open water swimmer, water reaching 10 degrees Celsius, and passing the thrift on the steps down to the Guillamene.

When I think of it, and therefore the photographs I take, are as I most commonly see it, silhouetted against the sea or the sky, framing events in the sea, or faded but still present during the winter, and always standing against the onshore Atlantic winds.

Thrift & Sheep Island, sea, sky and flowers.

When you can appreciate thrift in such extraordinary scenery, why would you want to trap it in a domestic garden?

Thrift against sea and canoes at Kilfarassey

It seems I’ve taken a lot of pictures of thrift (there are 98 tagged in my library so far and many more I still want to take, so you can image it was difficult to choose just a few), from early season buds, to summer blooms and late season stragglers to dead winter flowers.

Winter Guillamenes thrift

Apparently … I love sea thrift.

I got a bit creeped out in the water recently. It’s a rare enough occurrance that I can’t remember the last time.

When I arrived at the Guillamenes, I noticed something odd out in the bay. The wind was light, Force Two, SSW, meaning the side of the bay was fairly flat and calm, nice for a change.

There was a long (maybe 1500 to 2000 metres) arc of rough water about a kilometre out from the shore. I’m used to seeing the cold water currents (the Scarf) out in the bay streaming inwards. The Scarf was also visible and this was around the same location, but different, as when the Scarf is visible it tends to be slightly differently-coloured than the water around it due to density.

Look at the video, it’s very clearly visible (select HD), the water I’m referring to is the dark grey arc. You can also see the lighter shades of the colder currents in the bay.

As I swam out toward Newtown Head, about half way I swam into a patch of very unusual water. The water jumped what much have been a degree, changed colour completely to become much more yellow and there were clumps of kelp and a lot of floating matter. It was so unusual I stopped to look but I couldn’t see. As I continued outward, I was swimming in and out of similar areas, one minute the water would be a cooler and clear green, next yellow, warmer and full of stuff.

Local fisherman John Stubbs was hauling pots on Little Tern, his boat, under the cliffs just beyond Chair Cove, before Newtown Head. I haven’t swum past John this year and we haven’t talked since about October, though I’ve seen him out, so I stopped for a chat. We only meet when I’m swimming and him fishing, we started talking after a few years of us going past each other. John was the person who told me lobsters stop moving in the autumn when the water temp drops to 11 degrees.

John said he had watched this weird rip approach his boat, pulling seaweed, and getting rougher, and how strange it was. This man spends even more time in Tramore Bay than I do, and between us we probably know the waters better than anyone else. As we talked his boat suddenly started getting dragged closer to the rocks by a suddenly appearing current so he had to move off. I swam to outside Oyen Rock below Newtown head and stopped for a check. As I threaded water, I could see that I was being pushed west into Ronan’s Bay quite quickly. When I’d swum Ronan’s Bay only a few days previously on high tide the tidal current around Newtown head was running the opposite direction and it took me 35 minutes to swim 800 metres toward Ilaunglas on the other side of Ronan’s.

Since I’d planned a longish swim, I figured swimming back against a current would be one way to pass some time, and if the current was bit too much work I had to alternative possibilities, swim out deep and around it, or head closer into stacks and cliffs where it would probably diminish.

However as I swam across Ronan’s Bay, it didn’t seem strong, weakening as I moved away from Newtown Head and the water got cold and cleared up again. After I stopped at Ilaunglas to take some video, and started back, the adverse current was not too strong, only slowing me a bit.

I realised this because I stopped to check progress. At that point I saw that the strange water was approaching from the east/Tramore Bay/South east direction.

Where I was swimming, the water was rippley but calm, a low Force Two water condition on a small swell. Only metres away and moving toward me the water surface was entirely different, like house paint stippled upward by a paint roller, all short sharp peaks and under the water again yellow and full of matter. I filmed the transition. The confusing thing was there was no change in wind.

.

I started to think of Megahydrothalassaphobia, of Leviathan, of China Mieville’s Avanc (below), of Tennyson’s Kraken;

“Raising the Avanc” by pluutozz-d22nnsh on deviantart.com

Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber’d and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

And thus I gave myself the creeps while swimming, imagining Leviathan moving beneath me, and I just a speck swimming above the world-eye of the beast.

It was long way from Ilaunglas to Tramore beach and back out to the Guillamenes, over two hours , the water condition did not improve much. Inside Tramore Bay was all choppy and it was only on the slog out from the beach that it abated somewhat. I passed John again almost two hours later, nor more precisely, he passed me.

But all this is not about the creeps. or me getting the creeps, but that I don’t understand the water conditions, the very localized nature of the change without any apparent wind change. I’ve been at sea, particularly on a surf board or boat, when a localised wind squall appeared and it wasn’t such.

It looked from the cliff and felt like some kind of narrow current moving into the bay and coast from the South East, but not driven by a local wind. I’ve never seen this before.

Update: I met John Stubbs a few days later at the same place, low spring tide and I asked him if he’d ever seen anything like it before of it he knew what it was? He said in all hos years fishing (and he’s a full-time inshore fisherman) he though he’d seen something similar once. he said it looked to him (from the greater height vantage point) that it was an incoming current.

Always be careful with the sea, it will surprise you.

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 not.

Storm season is a nice phrase. Like Earthquake weather. And like the reality of  earthquake weather, storm season in Ireland is 12 months long, (as it seems for the past five years anyway).

Still, a couple of times a year we get a really big blow that hits the south and south-east. It’s half way though August, the month most Irish people take their hollyers (annual vacation), and a big low depression out in the Western Approaches drove a howling short-duration south-easterly Storm Force 9 onto the south coast. A south-easterly always provides a spectacle on the Waterford coast. Two trees were lost on the Loneswimmer Estate, and the brand new replacement diving board at the Guillamenes was snapped off, a board so heavy it took 6 adult men to lift recently.

High tide was late afternoon, and the wind increased from mid-day, luckily not hitting the maximum Storm Force until a few hours after high tide had passed. Anyway this is just an introduction. Everyone loves storms pictures. I took a lot of photos (400!) at the Newtown and the Guillamenes, Tramore Pier, Ladies Beach, and both ends of the Prom and managed to whittle a few I liked from the lot. (I’ve held a couple other back for future use, including my favourite). Long time regulars might have noticed I starting reducing resolution earlier in the year, to save me uploading full resolution images which weren’t required, it saves me time and WordPress Server space, and  saves you trying to load a 200 MB panorama pic. (I still have to go back and tidy up some of those, housekeeping isn’t fun).

Newtown Cove was wild before high tide and despite the rising storm, the sky was blue and the day was warm.

The sea breaking down onto the Newtown Cove platform. The blue sky only lasted a few minutes later than this image and was disappearing by the time I walked back to the car park.

Outside the Cove it was pretty big, waves looked about five to six metres, with occasional set waves at maybe seven to nine metres.

With the howling onshore, this meant breaking waves with spray reaching up to about 80 feet high.

The Guillamenes platform was completely inaccessible as waves exploded over it, occasionally even breaking over the top of the changing alcove. It wasn’t safe to go down past the first couple of steps, and it certainly wasn’t dry.

No wonder the diving board snapped with the volume of water bearing down on it.  Normally the board would be removed before the worst of the storms hit.

The bay provided a nice canvas. Tramore is a shallow bay, it was this type of onshore storm that was responsible for the loss of the Merchant Marine vessel the Seahorse in the late 19th Century in the Bay, and led to the erection of the pillars on Newtown and Brownstown Heads at either side of the bay, pillars you are well used to seeing here, the indicators of my swimming home.

The bathymetry of Tramore Bay is a long sloping sandy bottom with sandbanks going out a long way, which cause waves to jack up and break far out in these conditions.  And of course the bigger a wave the farther it reaches down to touch bottom, the slowing of the bottom of the waves is what causes it to break from the top as the lip spills over.

By the time I reached the pier, there were rain showers and photography became a bit more difficult.

From Newtown Head, past the Guillamene and Comolene rocks, into about a hundred metres in front of the pier under the cliff, was the direct straight line from the incoming south-easterly waves. The bay is shallow in front of the pier and there also are reefs and heavy thick kelp beds to suck the energy from the waves before they hit the cliff under where I was standing. And I finally got a decent image of something I’ve long been trying to capture; direct line of an onshore storm.

Taking pictures of just the sea is bloody difficult. Like you always look heavier on camera, photos often strip the power, grandeur and pure scale from the sea. This image isn’t as showy a photo as big breaking waves, not as obvious as most of my shots here, but this is a sea-lover’s image, at least, this sea-lover anyway.The beaten-steel grey-green of the Atlantic, Mananán Mac Lir howling and driving his chariot led by his white horse, Aonbarr of the Flowing Mane.

I shot some brief video above the pier, but with nowhere in the deep cliff-edge grass to anchor the small tripod and the wind buffeting me, I had to keep it short. I took also some video on the waterproof camera, but I haven’t reviewed it yet.

I moved into town, but got no good images at Ladies Beach. I’d gone through most of the lens wipes in my camera bag trying to keep the lens clear.

The town end of the Promenade and seawall is always popular during onshore storms, waves breaking on the wall, and you can get close enough for reasonable photography because there’s a nice dry spot right at the end of the prom. This time I didn’t spend too much time on the usual photos from here, and focused on some other stuff, life a father and son running and laughing and racing the spray over the wall. And the spray itself. I got really lucky on this one.

I went around the prom and onto the beach beyond the Surf Centre for a contrary view with the town providing the backdrop. I still miss the yellow and red of the lifeguard centre, the white roof is characterless.

I wish I’d been able to wish Hook yesterday, it must have been fun out there.

I really wish I were a better photographer, but I’ll keep trying. About 15 good images from 400 is an improvement on my previous rate of 1%. I have high resolutions of these images, if anyone want to purchase any by the way.

If anyone cares, someone(s) nominated loneswimmer.com for four categories in the Irish blog awards.

The categories for which I’ve been nominated are;

• Getting Cold And Wet While Covered in Sheep Grease
• MAMIL (Middle-Aged Men In Lycra)
• Special Category for Inventive Use of Baby Dolphin Juice
• Doing Stupid Things While Devilishly Handsome But Also Cold And Wet And Still Wearing Sheep Grease And Lycra

I’m told the award for the last one is a rubber statuette.

Maybe. Categories are never what they should be. LoneSwimmer.com will pass 150,000 views within a week and that’s not including the direct subscribers. I’ve got you readers, you keep putting up with this nonsense, ergo … je suis tres contente. Thanks again to you all.

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 points were valid but subsequent to that assertion, his arguments became suspect.

Now despite my deliberately somewhat provocative title, yes there are such things as freak waves. However while they are long reported, they are an only recently confirmed open ocean phenomenon, and more commonly known as rogue waves, (twice the height of the significant wave height around them).

But here we are discussing so-called freak waves at the coast, the interface of land and sea.

Every year we read or hear stories of coastal drownings caused by freak waves, where people at the coast are caught by a wave seemingly out of scale or size to the preceding waves, and swept off rocks, out to sea or suffering a fatal concussion from rocks. These are tragedies, but I have long had a problem with this reporting because it perpetuates a myth about the sea, and somewhat shifts the responsibility of care away from the person into a force-majeure situation, an “act of god“.

If there are freak waves, how can an average person realistically protect themselves except to stay away from the coast? If there aren’t freak waves, then the responsibility shifts to people themselves to be more vigilant.

The phrase freak wave implies that what has happened is unusual and unforeseen, neither of which are the case. Ask any surfer. So we need once again to talk about waves and safety at the coast.

Most waves are caused by wind. Wind blows over the water surface and the friction pushes the water. The distance of water over which the wind blows is called the fetch, and the longer the fetch, and the longer the time and stronger the wind that blows, the bigger the initial waves. If the wind continues to blow, as the waves grow, they present even more surface for the wind to push. The waves continue to grow.

Waves are an energy pulse that travels through the water and will continue to travel unless something stops them. That something from our point of view, is land.

I said initial waves above, and that’s really important. Wind that blows in a Western Atlantic storm cause waves, which if unimpeded by other contrary weather, may blow those winds toward Ireland and Europe, across 2000 miles of open water. 

We need to think about the fundamentals of a wave.

Imagine the wind blowing and causing waves.

• The height of a wave is called the amplitude.
• The greater the amplitude the more energy in the wave.
• The number of waves in a particular time is called the frequency.

Waves of different amplitudes usually have different frequencies. The higher the amplitude or height, the lower the frequency.

The bigger the wave, the longer the time between them and the less frequently they appear.

Waves travel at different speeds. Wind that cause waves nearby can have lots and lots of chop, small waves really close to each other.

Now the critical things about waves of any kind, not just water, is if they are even fractionally different heights they will travel at different speeds. What happens if two things, in case waves, are travelling the same direction at different speeds? The faster one will pass the slower one.

The further away the initial wind, the further the waves will travel. If a faster waves catches a slower one, the basic physics means that they will be added together. The amplitude, the height of the waves, will become the two combined heights.

A one and half metre wave catching a one metre wave, will become a two and half metre wave.

This wave, in surfer’s parlance, is called a Set Wave. Surfers don’t see them as freaks, but as normal aspects of the ocean’s behaviour.

Long groundswell  waves at Tramore pier

This doesn’t happen quickly but when you have hundred or thousands of miles or kilometres in which it can happen, it doesn’t have to be quick.

Waves reaching Hawaii from the Aleutian Islands

The result is that you have a wave that is now a third higher than the higher of the two previous waves. And that may be higher than all the surrounding waves. And the bigger it is the faster it’s travelling but the longer time between them, so there can up to many minutes between large waves like this. Any experienced surfer can tell you that the period between the largest set waves could be up to 15 minutes.

Now we’ve explored the formation and irregularity of waves, we’ve seen that these are not freak waves, but normal ocean behaviour.

The important thing becomes that the responsibility for understanding this lies with the person on the shore, just as it lies with a pedestrian crossing a road, except the ocean can’t see or react to you like a motorist can even when you are in the wrong.

Therefore the most important action to watch the water. Always.

This is NOT expect the unexpected. This is how the ocean works.

It should be noted, unlike beaches facing directly into the swell, at reefs and rocks, especially those that are not directly facing the oncoming swell, set waves can be difficult to see. if the water around a reef or rocky shore is deep, the first indication you may have is the wave actually breaking onto where you are standing

A wave seems to appear out of the flat surrounding sea at Tramore. Easy to see on a beach, not so easy to see elsewhere.

Watch the water for twice as long as the waves are high (in imperial measurement).

If the waves look to be two feet high, watch the water for four minutes before venturing close to the shore.

If the waves are two metres high on initial appraisal, you should (approximately) convert that to feet, and watch the water for six to seven minutes before getting close. Do this regularly and you will start to gain a better appreciation for the sea and its rhythms. And more importantly, you and the people around you will be safer.

Coastal safety is your responsibility!

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 apparent extremities of a higher tidal range in other locations. I therefore think a better understanding of tides is important for open waters for safety reasons.

To understand tides better is to increase your knowledge, your range of options and responses and locations and therefore your safety around the coast. Combined with this is that tidal knowledge is sometimes incorrect, that people make very basic incorrect assumptions, that the tide goes directly in and out from the shore regardless of the coastal position, is amongst the most common misconception (which is only true in some locations).

Because of this North East Atlantic tidal variation, most experienced Irish and United Kingdom sea-goers are used to checking tide times when the sea is not immediately visible to them daily.

You can revisit some of the more detailed tide articles I’ve written but for a brief recap let’s remember that each tide is about six hours and fifteen minutes, which means that high and low tide times change each day. A practical consequence of this is that Sandycove, which is usually swum above half-tide, usually only swim times designated for group swims every second weekend. (I am luckier at the Guillamenes as it is deeper water and can be swum on any tide).

Let’s a look at some graphs and data of a daily tide cycle, for the week I’m writing this. This data comes from MagicSeaweed’s Tramore tide report.  The undulating sine wave indicates the rising and falling tide. You can see that there are four tides in each 24 hour period and that each tide on this current cycle varies from just under six hours to about six and a half, with rising tides being longer than falling tides. On each chart you can also see the tide heights of high and low tide. As the four days pass the range between high and low decreases, and the high tide gets lower as the low tide gets higher, all indicators that the tide is moving from a Spring tide to a Neap tide, this pattern of changes from springs to neaps and visa versa repeating every two weeks.

Tide programs and applications are usually similar in this presentation and a good understanding can mean a quick glance at a tide table can tell you a lot. Since I know that spring tides here are over 5 metres, I can tell immediately from this where in the lunar tide cycle we are. Lower tidal range means lower tidal currents, (not usually a concern for me anyway), important information for some locations.

The other usual tide tool, which I prefer myself, is an annual national tide table. These are currently about €3.00 for the pocket-sized book and I keep one in the car. There are two types of tide table books. Those often issued by the local port or regional publishing company, and a national one. Ireland is small enough that a localised tide table is too specific and of little utility if one is visiting the far side of the country.

I find physical Tide Tables more utilitarian. Always to hand when needed, and useful for longer term planning many months in advance. Free and online tide apps usually don’t provide future tide times.

More importantly in Ireland, the island nature of the country makes the tidal situation far more complicated than many people realise, with the tides washing around the coast in diverging or even opposing directions. Therefore the Tide Table is sub-divided into five regions with further tide time offsets (delays) to even more localised ports. This provides a level of forecasting that gives a far greater level of accuracy.

The detail is of the same type, date and day, high and low water (tide), with tide heights and in this case, moon phase to indicate more easily the spring and neap tides. On the page above can also be seen the variation of other locations from the Cobh location, Cobh being the Standard (reference) Port, i.e. the main tidal location, for the south-west to south-east Irish coast. A fuller list of Secondary Ports for each region is also included.

What’s equally important about these tide tables, and hidden in a note inside the back, is that the data is compiled from the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office, which, bizarrely and which I haven’t mentioned in a couple of years, owns the tide data for all of the United Kingdom and Ireland, and from which it must be licensed. Not that I am in favour of this arrangement, but it does mean you can be sure of the table accuracy, unlike with many free tide applications where license fees haven’t been paid.

A local sources of tidal information if you are unsure or without any better information is to check any RNLI  or local inshore rescue stations across Ireland and the United Kingdom which at least usually display the month’s local tide times on the outside of the stations. These always use the accurate UKHO (below) tide data. Some broadsheet newspapers can carry the information also in the weather section.

The important points therefore are:

* Tide tables are essential for coastal safety in area with high tidal ranges, such as across the continental European coast.

* When using tide tables note the tidal height as well and high and low tide times.

* If you are using tide prediction tools, safety is important and to this end, the origin of the data is vital.

Related articles

• HOW TO: Tides for Swimmers, part 1 – Theory (loneswimmer.com)
• HOW TO: Tides For Swimmers, Part 2 – Local Effects (loneswimmer.com)
• Explaining a critical open water swimming factor: Tidal Range (loneswimmer.com)
• Circles (loneswimmer.com)
• Tide Tables. Copyright and Safety (loneswimmer.com)
• There’s no such thing as a freak wave – coastal safety is your own responsibility (loneswimmer.com)

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 mysterious and superior and even willful personality led to pantheons of gods both large and small.

The bigger the personal import of an aspect of nature, the world or even Universe on the lives on humans, the more likely that aspect was to reign high in each pantheon. Beyond and literally above all was the Sun, immediate, live-giving and over all. But across peoples of the coasts, Sea-Gods also loomed large.

While modern humans seem to retain much of the superstition of yore but in different forms (lotteries, miracles, luck, UFOs), outside specific polytheistic religions such as Shintoism or Hinduism, and following the Enlightenment with a growing understanding of the mechanisms of the world, we’ve slowly lost that personification of nature’s forces.

Open water swimmers get very close to Sea and one of the greatest and most widespread of those anthropomorphisations of nature, applying human nature to something not human , is the water deity or the Sea God. Many of the pantheons had multiple water deities of different aspects of water, from springs through storms and rain, to the ocean, far too many to itemise here.

Neptune, the classical sea god image

The Greek and Roman pantheons are most familiar to western cultures. Rome’s god of both the Sea and freshwater was Neptune. The Greek pantheon equivalent was Poseidon. Both are similarly depicted as powerful men who carry a trident. Unlike Neptune, Poseidon’s domain was more exclusively the Ocean. Like all gods of the seas, both are powerful, and mercurial. Quick to anger, and also capable of unexpected mercy in extremis. Both must be placated to ensure safe passage but such appeasement could never be completely effective of course…

Oceanus

The Greek water deities were very many and due to the use on Greek root words, many still reside with us in our language.

Of the most important or memorable were: Cymopoleia, goddess of giant storm waves: Aegæon, god of storms, cognate with the Aegaen Sea: The Gorgons, malevolent sea spirits, of whom we best know the Gorgon Medusa of the stone gaze, and the Harpies, sea-spirits of sudden wind: The Hippocampi, the elemental horses of the sea: the Nymphs, of whom the Nereides (not the Naiades) were the sea spirits: the Sirens, whose call epitomises the call and hold of the Sea over many of us: Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea: Triton, son and Herald of Poseidon. Thalassa, primordial goddess of the sea, now fittingly part of our name for the primordial sea, Panthalassia. And of course the monsters Scylla and Charybdis, the “rock and a hard place” of modern idiom. And finally, Oceanus, son of Uranus and Gaia, Titan and god of the river that encircled the earth, from whom we derive Ocean.

Water deities flood our world.

Mesopotamia had many, of whom the two with whom we are most familiar through mythology are  Enki, god of water, who appears in some of the oldest surviving myths, and Tiamat, mother goddess of all the gods, saltwater and chaos, who name has been appropriated by pop culture stories.

In Indian Vedic religion, Varuna is god of water and in Hindu god of all forms of water, of the ocean and also of the Celestial Ocean.

The sea of night, the ocean of stars. The boundless limits of the world’s seas mirrored in the sky.

In Shinto, Suijin the Water God is the benevolent deity of water while Susanoo-no-Mikoto is the god of storms and of the sea.

In Mãori religion, Tangaroa is god of the Sea, one of the great gods, and son of Sea and Sky. Like Oceanus, Tangaroa was son of Gaia and Uranus, also gods of  Earth and Sky.

The ocean, born of the earth and of the sky. Interesting that idea should repeat around the world.

Celtic triskele, symbol of Manannan

Irish  mythology is the most extant oral mythology in the world outside Greek. The main Irish sea gods were Lir and his son Manannán. Lir actually means Sea in old Irish but he is himself obscure in tales, more a distant figure. Manannán Mac Lir, i.e. Manannán son of Lir, is the more familiar, but as with others of the pre-Christian pantheon, and unlike many of the other pantheons, is more a heroic figure, like a hero-sailor, than an avatar of the sea. Manannán rides Aonbharr, his white horse of the sea, his boat is called wave-sweeper or foam-rider and it needs no sails or oars, to Manannán the sea was as land. His symbol, the triskele, represents along life, death and afterlife; the intersection of Earth, Sea and Sky.

In Scandanavian lore, Aegir was the lord of the endless sea. With his wife the sea-goddess Ran, they had nine daughters, the Billow or Wave Maidens, all named for different types of waves. I mourn the loss of this poetic conceit. I’m not a scholar, but in anything I’ve read of the Scandanavian mythologies of the Nine Maidens, I see little evidence that those doing the interpretation of names really knew the sea. The Maidens were:

Bylgja; Billow. I imagine this as representing a sea with groundswell, the long period undulations hiding a power that catches all those unaware of the real nature of the sea.

Bylgja?

Blóðughadda: Bloody Hair, apparently representing the blood in the sea after a battle. I imagine also an encounter with Finbarr at Sandycove’s Second Corner reef brings Blóðughadda. I also wonder if it could have referred more simply to a Red Tide, a sudden growth of plankton.
Dröfn; Comber or Foaming Sea. Comber is just another name for wave. The most common wave shape is either crumbly onshore or groomed offshore depending on prevailing wind type so the original meaning may have referred to one of those.
Hefring: Riser. A waves that rises has usually hit a reef. Surfers call it a jacking wave. Hefring should be the Maiden of Surfers.
Himinglæva: That through which one can see the heaven. Almost Celtic in its long description which imparts little. I image this is the water of no wind, the flat calm of a stationary high pressure, it reflects the sky and invites a sea swimmer like little else. Oh, Himinglaeva, you temptress.
Hrönn: Welling Wave. Groundswell waves on a steeply rising beach? So much fun, so enchanting.
Dúfa: The Pitching One. What I’d call a scending wave, what others might call a pitching wave.
Uðr: Frothing Wave. A frothing wave has lost most of its power. The water ours over the falls, it’s chaotic but weakened. It is fun, but never to be dismissed.
Kólga: The Cold One. The dangerous one, I think. The one we European winter swimmers know too well. If I had a boat, I’d name her Kólga.

The oceans not being sufficiently populated, there are other old and new mythological water spirits, demons, and beasties who are not deities but who populate our imagination and our seas: Leviathan. Hydra. Moby Dick. The Kraken and the Aranc. The Midgard Serpent. Cthulhu and Dagon. The Bloop. Godzilla. Davy Jones. Jaws. The Peist. We will invent more.

All these and more. Gods and spirits and monsters and stories, ancient and modern.

We fill the waters, trying to measure our imagination against the raw power and untouchable vastness of the seas. It’s a crowded ocean.

Peist from John Speed’s 1611 map of Ireland

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Creeped out on the Waterford Coast

Here Be Map Monsters

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 of people. The winds slacken, swim time gradually extends. The rest of the Copper Coast calls out to me, to return and see what the winter has wrought, to find new experiences and new memories.

Burke’s Island & reefs, Kilfarassey

Kilfarassey and Burke’s Island are always my first Copper Coast spring swim away from Tramore Bay. My playground of the island and reefs sits just a short swim away at high tide, a full circumnavigation of all takes only forty-five minutes, with optional paths around the reefs to lengthen any swim.

There was no-one else around, the tide was dropping and the sky was blue with a few actual white puffy clouds, not the usual grey-bottomed bringers of Atlantic rain usually visible. The water wasn’t quite calm, a light easterly Force Two breeze ruffling the surface and adding a nip to the air as I walked the hundred metres from the car down the slipway, crossed the stream and beach and left my sandals burdened under rocks on the sand. I lined up the zero triangle and minute-hand on my watch to indicate departure time and waded in, then dove into an incoming mushy wave.

The water was about ten degrees Celsius, according to my built-in skin thermometer. The cold shock associated with such a temperature dissipated within a minute or so as I swam out toward the windward east side of the island, stretching out my arms and shoulders.  Within a dozen minutes I’d reached the nearest shark-fin-shaped reef, and instead of a longer circumnavigation around the outside reefs, I turned west across the back of the main island. The water was a clear cool mint and jade in the cross-shore breeze, submarine reefs reaching up, old friends from previous years welcoming me back.

Another few minutes and I passed the main island and reached the inside end of the channel that divides the easterly and westerly reefs.  I was at the east side of the largest reef, a north-south ridge some seventy five metres long and reaching in places up to ten metres above the surface. Populated by birds and guillemots, mostly by Black Shags, who have always vocally disapproved of my unaccustomed irregular appearances, they threw themselves from the reef into the air, wheeling and dive-bombing and screaming their indignation at my arrival in their offshore haven.

I was swimming to The Keyhole, my nickname for the first rock arch I’d ever swum through. It’s an east-west narrow-waisted arch in the ridge, only ten metres long at the water’s surface, with a bare dogleg between the ends. There’s not much of a roof,  cut away as it is to the sides. When conditions are right, the arch, which is too narrow for most kayakers, compresses the flow and a swimmer can shoot through like a fairground water ride.

The easterly breeze wasn’t enough to shoot through at speed but the clear water gave me hope of seeing an anemone clinging to the rocks under the low tide mark, so I decided to swim through without breathing, to extend my underwater investigation.

With head underwater, I cruised west  through the arch, feeling the water flow keep me clear of the harsh sides. The quality of the sub-surface light changed, surely a cloud filtering the light entering the water, transforming it to a rich golden hue.

Under the surface was so crisp, so clear. The sand of the bottom, the encrustations of thousands of generations of barnacles on the rocks, this reef their universe, our air their outer space. The kelps and weeds waved in the backward and forward tidal stream. Ochre, umber, sienna. Jade, olive, phtalo green. Marl and charcoal. A merman’s palette of literal water colours. No fish were visible in the clear water this day, but here was every child’s daydream of swimming in an aquarium’s watery castle. No plastic scuba or treasure diver was required to perfect this idealized underwater scene.

All for me, just here, just now. All this time to see so little and yet so much. Only a double-handful of strokes on one held breath from arch end to end.

You can’t eat scenery, they say in Ireland. I was a child when I first heard that and I still knew they were wrong. Not with your mouth. But you can eat it with your eyes and your mind and your imagination. You can use it to create your soul, to fill your self.

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 Kilfarassey, but surely the arch only dog-legged slightly? The mid-day Sun should have been to my left, instead it was ahead. I filled my lungs and swam on, out past the surrounding reefs for a few metres, until I could swing right, to the north, back toward the beach.

Out past the rocks I swam, so that I could see past Burke’s Island to the coast almost a kilometre away. The beach. Where was the beach and the cliffs? I kicked and sat up, threading water, my hands sculling as I peered right. Was the glare on the fogged and smeared goggles, which seemed so clear underwater now deceiving me? I couldn’t see the beach. Where’s the beach? I didn’t think anything. Involuntarily my head whipped around and as it did, mere fractions of a second, I saw the dark line of the coast ahead of me.

Wait. Wait. The Sun was ahead of me and the coast was ahead of me. What? That can’t. That can’t. This wasn’t just forgetting details from last summer. This Copper Coast is in my blood, no-one, no-one knows it like I do.

Don’t panic. Everything I know about the Sea kicked in. Everything learned, every time I risked a rock or a tunnel or a cave or a sketchy entrance or dangerous exit, every time in rough water, big water, unknown water, when I was by myself, testing myself, everything clamped down inside into “stay calm, you know this, stay calm“.

I felt it in my gut. My stomach twisted but I stayed calm. The reefs looked the same. The gaps were where I expected, the reefs all lined up in relation with each other. I looked behind. The Keyhole Arch was there, of course. The raucous guillemots still wheeled and the herring gulls still cried. But when I looked again, the coast was still in front, the  green of the fields and cliffs blackened and flattened by the back-light of the Sun overhead. This was not possible.

Nothing else happened. I looked around. I felt the clamp inside my gut, controlling me, my own internal governor. The light breeze had slackened and I noticed that the surface has glassed off to an oily silken sheen, inviting me forward. A swimmer’s version of bubble-wrap waiting to be popped, the water pleading to be pierced by my arms.

Swim, it’s what I do. Just swim in, figure it out later. I’d only been in the water twenty-five minutes or so, I’d passed two-thirds of the distance already. In the ten degree water, I wasn’t more than lightly chilled as I hadn’t stopped until now.  I couldn’t be severely hypothermic, I had none of the signs. Twelve to fifteen minutes swim, and a packet of jelly dinosaurs waiting in the glove compartment. The clamp relaxed just a fraction. Stay calm and swim.

I stroked ahead. Okay, swim in. Don’t think about it. Things happen in your head when you’re alone in the water. Things you don’t tell anyone. Things you will never tell anyone. Things they would never understand.

The water was glorious. I felt the edge, the finest sharpest molecular blade-edge of cold. That perfect feeling that cold water swimmers know, and can’t understand that others don’t appreciate. Like a fire on your skin, like when you have exhaled all your air, you can purse your lips and get that fraction more out. Like a drug or a mystery. Use everything and the cold gives you that tiny bit extra. Take a surgical scalpel, and draw the back of the blade down the inside of your forearm for a hint of that edge of cold.

Under the water the water was green suffused with argent, rich like ripe avocado. I was bathing in glory and brine, swimming in light as well as water. The light poured over me and basted my skin. I could taste the light in the water, in my mouth, like salty caramel. I could hear it. I could hear the golden light. Not with my ears, but with my proprioception. When I lifted my eyes to navigate, the light blasted my goggles and made gemstones of the world, sapphire, onyx, emerald and turquoise. The light cascaded and boiled into my lungs and filled me up. Every sense, new senses, filled with the golden light.

We swimmers know how low twenty metre tall cliffs look from just a kilometre away.  How a coast become flat, every part the same distance away, three-dimensionality lost. We know both how close and how far a kilometre is. A kilometre is a short swim but twice the distance required for a swimmer to become invisible to others on the shore.

The coast closed quickly as I swam. The light gave me a grace I’d never known. I didn’t just cut through the water or slip through the light. I became the water and the golden light. I was water and light swimming in water and light.

But when I reached the coast, when I could finally see under the glare, there were no cliffs. There was no beach.

Golden light

Previous part

A Further Shore – I – The Arch

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. Tiny Annestown rested well back from the sea on a road up a hill, a village so small that it had neither a shop nor a pub nor a church and only a dozen houses. Bunmahon lay beyond a stream behind a beach. Stradbally was a kilometre from the shore, and anyway I knew all those villages. I just kept thinking; “I know this coast, I know this coast“. Those villages had tarmac roads, cars, electricity. Modern buildings. All I could think was to seek explanation, comparison, but I had none. My mind whirlpooled around the same vortex. “I know this coast”.

I stood there, a middle-aged slightly overweight man, on a sunny warm afternoon, wearing nothing but Speedoes which were already almost dried in the warm breeze.

It was quiet. Not silent. Peaceful. The breeze was barely audible on various surfaces. The Sea muted its gentle song behind me. My bare feet scraped the sand. I heard the guillemots croak. But I saw no-one. It felt empty. But not deserted. Everything was well maintained. It felt how the Guillamenes feels on mornings I am there by myself. Not abandoned, just that I arrive and swim and leave, without ever seeing anyone, or being seen.

You can feel a temporary emptiness, feel the lack of people, even when you can’t see all the possible locations where they may be. You’ve stepped into your own time and space in a location. Your house isn’t really empty, it’s just that everyone else is out. As I was here. Everyone was out, and I was here alone.

I didn’t look back at the Sea, but I moved forward. I ignored the building on the seafront and entered the lane leading up to the town.

By now I’d dried, but I wasn’t cold. No Afterdrop, no chill. But this was Spring wasn’t it? I should have chills, should need to be dressed. But actually I was warm. The Sun gently warmed my face and chest, feeling like a good Irish late July afternoon. The Sun not strong enough to burn. The swim cap started to feel tight and I took it off also, catching and snagging a few tiny hairs on the back of my neck in the now dry folds of the silicon.

My head scanned left to right, right to left. I was on the main road. Occasional lanes snakes off between houses. At a fork, the right hand road seemed to leave the small town and lead along the coast until it quickly curved back left out of sight. I stayed on the main road up through the town.

I looked at the houses. Individual, well maintained, but overall similar, even differences in size or shape weren’t so broad. The houses were stone of various grey hues. Roofs of slate. Brightly-coloured doors, some full, some half doors. Some half-door tops stood ajar, but I did not consider entering. Square and rectangular wooden-shuttered windows on ground level. Two or even three-storeyed, the lower floors had narrow mullioned windows while the upper floors had circular windows, and many upper floors had hints of turrets. There were flowers in window pots and stone troughs along the roadside.

There were two predominant sounds. The breeze soughed across the slate, a slight susurration. Everywhere was the murmur of water. There were small fountains between houses, and dotted in the centre of the road, with surrounding pools and low walls. Embrasures led from the fountains and narrow runnels ran down stone coursings in the lanes, joining but never widening, only deepening. What happened when there was a rainstorm?  There were shallow open rain gutters in the stone on the road sides but the house were without downpipes. The streams gurgled, fed into and out of the fountains, casting a melody of gently-playing water over the town.

On some stone beside doors, over windows, in the street on slender obelisks, were graven character or letters or runes. There were no hard angles, instead they seemed organic, flowing. I couldn’t comprehend the origin. They weren’t the ancient pre-Celtic Ogham runes. Were they addresses or names or titles? There were no apparent commercial buildings. No signs hung outside. No windows to display wares or attract custom.

I continued on. The lane wound around and switch-backed upwards.

Previous Articles

A Further Shore – I – The Arch

A Further Shore – II – The Golden Light

A Further Shore – III – The Harbour

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 reached the top of the hill. There was no apparent difference in size or appointment between the lower down houses and those higher up.

I had not seen a single person nor heard any sounds of people. It was like everyone has just stepped out back, at the same moment.

Quite abruptly I passed the last house. How long had I walked through the town? This prompted another thought. What time was it? Checking the elapsed time of a swim is such an ingrained habit for me, yet I hadn’t looked at my watch since I’d passed behind Brown’s Island. I checked my watch. The watches start triangle was where I’d set it, at twenty-five minutes to twelve. The minute hand was a few minutes past twelve. Twenty eight minutes? Or an hour, two hours, three hours, and twenty-eight minutes? I looked around for the umpteenth time. Nothing changed. I looked at the watch again and now noticed the second hand. It wasn’t moving. Had my watch stopped?

Beyond the building was the hilltop. The crown was simply covered in a lush green lawn. The road stopped but a path was worn to the top. From up here I could see that the lower road which had led off right out of sight and disappeared had done so because the Sea reached inwards beyond that point.

I never considered stopping, the entire town seemed draped below this green crown like a mantle, with the summit the culmination of its layout. The gradient was now steep but consequently the distance upwards to the zenith was short. The steepness forced my eyes down in front and so the sudden lessening of the slope as I reached the summit was surprising.

The fifty steps up the cliff from the Guillamenes to the car park has regularly left me breathless, adapted as I am for swimming. I felt nothing similar here. The greensward opened out in a circle. There were no signs or seats or anything except grass. To my right in the distance though I could see the Sea. The lower road had curved away because there was no more land only a couple of kilometres beyond the town. I looked left and saw the grass summit descend in a gentle ridge. With the Sun ahead of me, that meant right was north and left down the ridge was south. The harbour and town were situated close to the north end of either a large island or a long peninsula leading from the south.

Ahead of me the hill fell away very gently. The slopes were covered in a patchwork of meadows, variegated vegetation delineating the boundaries, no hard fenced fields, the various colours indicating a variety of vegetation, from the vivid green of summer barley,  to dusty  ripening wheat and tall corn stalks, all different stages of growth apparent at the same time.

But ahead of me, beyond the meadows, to the West? The Sun was well down the sky. The photographer in me assessed the golden light and the shadow I threw behind me. It was a good way from setting, and a longer way from morning.

The quilted fields on the western slope ended at the Sea, which stretched left and right, sparkling into the hazy distance. I looked out over that Sea, argent and aureate. A Sea like none I’ve seen or swum. Molten metal and liquid air and lifeblood. Sacred like lifeblood. The light blazed at me again. The light blasted me. I closed my eyes, and the light did not diminish. Then, opening my eyes, I saw through the haze.

Previous articles

A Further Shore – I – The Arch

A Further Shore – II – The Golden Light

A Further Shore – III – The Harbour

A Further Shore – IV – The Town

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 or two, to a further shore.

I cannot say much about that shore. I am moderately farsighted, growing gradually worse with age, age that I now notice.

I stood there, skin tanned from sea swimming bared to the golden light and the sky. And I saw, I saw… I don’t know. I saw different colours of gold and green.  A blackgreen that is either the colour of the abyss or distant forests. Layers of blue purple and grey that must have been mountains beyond. And further beyond, yes, I know I saw a peak. Mighty, astonishing, partially enrobed in clouds, a peak from the Young Earth. But this description isn’t what I saw, any more than a map is  the location.

Battlements and bastions of rock. Shoulders piled up, higher and higher, minor spires throwing spindrift that being so far away must have been hurricane-sized. Close and far at the same time. Higher up, the summit itself was lost to sight, a subtle interplay of colours and cloud, blending with the golden light-filled sky.

I saw a golden Sea. A tall Mountain. A Sea and a Mountain such as none have described. So little to say.

At some point I bowed my head, conscious suddenly of my breathing. I inhaled deeply, looked at that Sea again. This time I saw motes. Motes leaving the further shore, motes on the Sea. Boats or ships. The town’s inhabitants? Returning from the further shore. I could not look at that Mountain again. To sail on that Sea was incomprehensible. To swim in it inconceivable.

I must have turned down the greensward toward the town. I was dazed. I  did not hurry and I was not afraid. As I left the greensward I looked right, surely to the South now. I saw the town and harbour were situated in a shallow bay which swept south, the coast dotted with pearly turquoise sand inlets.

I looked out and saw, just outside the bay, innumerable tiny islands, scattered like pearls on silk. It vaguely reminded me of Clew Bay as seen from high on Croagh Patrick but Clew Bay’s three hundred and sixty-five islands were a pale imitation of this vista. Eastwards the sky was a vivid deep blue, almost purple. The colour of late northern evening, though the light, the time of day felt earlier.

And then I saw the Ship of the Moon risen from the east. Not the Moon. Not our tarnished recalcitrant orb. I saw the Ship of the Moon. Not a frigate or barque or clipper but a bád mór. With a bluff prow, high gunnals, a raked transom and a single main mast and foresail. Sailing into the sky, lambent, coruscating and argent. The purest silver, a colour beyond white or platinum or mithril.

I do not recall returning through the town. I saw the Ship of the Moon, then I was once more standing on the pier by the water’s edge. I looked out and saw the nearest islands. A rounded small hill, grass topped rock. A series of reefs and ridges leading right, leading south. Overhead the Ship of the Moon threw a beam, a silver road between me and the reefs. Where the beam touched the reefs I saw a vertical opening: The Keyhole Arch. A silver road, the Moon Road, that led directly from my feet over the water to my arch.

I pulled on my swim cap, my goggles. I turned back, briefly and looked at the town and the hill. The town was sinking into shadow. The green summit of the hill still caught the golden light from beyond but it threw a shadow across the harbour. Then I heard the summons of a herring gull, that plaintive wail that snares all those who go down to the sea.

I set my cap and goggles, breathed deep and dove. Out, out I flew, into the air and then I sliced the water. No cold shock, I glided to the surface and swam. I swam that silver beam toward the reefs. No longer made of light I was still made of water. Just behind my feet was the line of shadow thrown by the hill, seeping out into the bay with me. I swam, a direct line and very quickly I was approaching the reefs. Under the water the white sandy bottom showed hulls and keels, shattered and worn.

The line of reef which held The Keyhole was metres from me. I knew its hourglass shape, the narrow pointed top. I looked behind. The town was no longer distinguishable in the shadow beneath the hill. The greensward was a hint of pure emerald against the light behind the hilltop. I glimpsed left, to the north. Boats were rounding the island’s curve. White boats, with bright sails, dancing on the water. Silhouettes moving on the decks.

When I passed through The Keyhole, all I noticed was that the shadows of the entrance enveloped me, the water beneath was not as clear as earlier and it was cool. Light silt swirled around and the bottom wasn’t visible. I exited as usual into the reef channel. Brown’s Island was to my left, blocking further view. The Sun was overhead to my right, bright mid-day, no shadows. South.

I swum left through the Channel, passed close to Burke’s Island, and saw the Copper Coast cliffs and the Kilfarassey beach ahead, six or seven hundred metres away.

On the sand, my sandals were still there under the rocks. I looked back, south, to Brown’s Island, left and east, right and west. I looked at my watch and it was twelve twenty five. As I walked to the car park, I felt the familiar post-swim chill reach out for me.

I looked east again. There was no Moon in the eastern sky.

I have swum back to the Keyhole Arch since. I have even taken others there but it merely leads through the reef as it always did previously.  Somehow, somewhere, somewhen, I swam through some fracture, some interstice. Some combination of tide and time and light and mind. I swam a straight line where there were only turns, or a straight line where there was only an invisible maze. I swam beyond the sea and entered a different Sea. The other side of the Sun, the far side of the sky, beyond the wind. I do not know.

I keep trying to find my way back. My directions are no longer cardinal and I am cast adrift, knowing my arms and shoulders are not measure of this world. I could not stay but I should never have left and I am bereft.

I still dream of the sea and the swell, but now I also dream of golden light and silver water, of dancing white boats with bright sails, and a tall Mountain on a further shore, past a hallowed Sea.

Previous articles:

A Further Shore – I – The Arch

A Further Shore – II – The Golden Light

A Further Shore – III – The Harbour

A Further Shore – IV – The Town

A Further Shore – V- The Greensward

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 for swim together in 2013, but at the end of this (2014) summer, he and I were due to meet for a swim out to the caves so that Sam could do a bit of filming.

September in Ireland in 2014 was extraordinarily good, the best I’ve experienced since I started swimming. We’d set a day for the swim out, not too concerned about weather, used as we both are to the local conditions.

But the day was gorgeous and warm with a little movement in the water and a bit of a breeze. We had a very enjoyable swim starting around low tide. It was entirely relaxed and fun, one of those days when open water swimming is about the pure enjoyment of the water and the glorious Copper Coast. As we swam I strove to avoid Sam’s filming in the cave and around the coast.

Over the years, I have on occasion tried to convey various aspects of the sensations of open water swimming. Not the mechanics of the How To articles, not the marathon and Channel swimming stuff, essential as they are, but the feelings and experiences and joy and essential life-enhancing experience of swimming because I enjoy it.  Only occasionally have I felt that I’ve succeeded.

I think that Sam, partly because I was unknowing of what he was actually doing, caught the pure essence of our enjoyment of open water swimming and for that I am very grateful and humbled.

Out, out from the Guillamenes, past the Metalman, beyond the cliffs and the bulk of Great Newtown Head, alone around the stacks and into the caves, extremely unlikely to be seen from land: we were in no hurry. So we swam and stopped and chatted and swam.

It may be that this film only means anything to Sam and I, but I hope you watch it. It’s 18 minutes long and it absolutely requires sound as becomes really obvious later in the film.  If you do watch it, I’d ask that you do it when you have time to watch it through and don’t skip or fast forward.

Don’t analyse my stroke (I didn’t swim hard or think of stroke, speed or distance once that day). Don’t think about racing or distance or wind or doing it better. Just … go with it.

Uaimh an tSolais & Uaimh na nÉan are Irish names and mean the Cave of the Light and the Cave of the Birds.

Try to feel the sensation, the essence. 

And if you are so inclined please leave feedback for Sam, either on Vimeo or here.

Edit: Uaimh an tSolais & Uaimh na nÉan and Sam and myself have been nominated for the 2014 WOWSA Offering of the Year Awards. If you want to vote please follow the link.

Vimeo link

YouTube link

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 are aware of it) dislike. Some aren’t aware of it and it can mostly be chalked down to local weather. Some few, like it (in theory anyway) for races in the short to ten kilometre range (though I generally dislike it for training, as it can be hard work). For long distance marathon swims wind against sea is an accepted fact of life, and generally not pleasant, though usually manageable.

As I mentioned above, racing in wind against tide, doesn’t mean that I like choppy water (I don’t, I prefer rough or calm) it’s just that I like to think others will hate it more. I’ve previously equated it to cycling time trials into a head wind. Every cyclist likes a time trial on a flat course on a warm day, but a wind day makes some give up early. new and intermediate open water swimmers and triathletes need experience with and develop skills in swimming in rough water (fortunately, I’ve written a How To swim in rough water).

What is wind against sea?

The ZC2 buoy in the English Channel amid wind against tide chop

Well, it’s quite simple: Wind against sea means a breeze or stronger wind blowing in one direction while the tide or current is running in the opposite direction. As such it’s also more often called “wind against tide”. The two clash to form a choppy rough surface which is disruptive  to swimming. Using sea instead of tide does actually show that it can happen on currents are well as tides.

Examples include the annual Cork to Cobh marathon swim in Ireland, which sometimes suffers wind against tide for the final mile, as the course swings east past the island of the Hawlbowline Naval Base on a dropping tide, and the swimmers who are swimming on a dropping tide in the estuary, are suddenly exposed to wind across the large expanse of Cork Harbour, Europe’s largest natural harbour.

Similarly English Channel swims which start on a high tide regularly suffer wind against tide during the second (ebb) south-east direction tidal leg of a crossing. The Manhattan Island Marathon Swim can have coastal onshore blowing up the estuary against the ebbing flow of the Hudson river once swimmers round Spuyten Duyvil to head down toward south Manhattan in the last leg of the swim.

In many cases with a swim of sufficient duration or during a particular it is possible to predict wind against tide conditions. Tides last about six hours and fifteen minutes∗ and all locations have a prevailing wind direction, which explains the above examples.Also worth remembering is the onshore winds are more common on coastal areas in mid-day and afternoon in warm weather as the temperature gradient between land and sea reverses. With early morning calm offshore condition, the breeze blows from land to sea and calms the waters, but as the Sun warms the air over land the flow reverses to cause “sea breezes” which blow from sea to land. The warmer the coastal climate the earlier sea breezes will develop during the day as land temperatures change daily whereas the sea is more thermally stable.

∗ Semi-diurnal tides, that is, two (almost) twice-a-day tides of almost equal height, both high and low. The period is more accurately about 12 hours and 25 minutes, but that varies slightly by location in semi-diurnal locations and some diurnal locations only have one of each tide per day. It is the twenty-five minutes doubled that moves high tides back by about fifty minutes per day. See this previous post for a consideration of tides, a subject to which I’ve been considering returning.

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 may be limited, it was more important to partially cover something, rather than leave it undone.

The environmental challenges and threats to the ocean environment, as you should know even if you deny them, are profound, complex and far-reaching, and generally seemingly intractable. From ocean warming and acidification to biodiversity loss, pollution, habitat destruction, climate change and more. Each aspect has been worthy of huge amounts of research and work, discussion and debate. We still have even more to learn and understand. Yet for someone who writes about swimming in the natural world, there is little direct reference to many of these challenges and threats.

I love the sea. More specifically I love the Atlantic, my ocean. I have what Tolkien called the “sea-longing“. I don’t love the sea the way people love a golf course or a football team. I love it more the way a sailor loves it, the way a fisherman loves it. It’s part of who I am, and what I am. It is, for want of a better comparison, some kind of almost spiritual thing. Despite their apparent klunkyness, I choose such loose words carefully, “kind of an almost thing“, because I don’t really want to name it or compare it to something constructed by others which will give you some notion extracted from those labels. My feelings about the sea, whatever it is that opens up inside me when I am beside, on or in it, isn’t actually spiritual or religious. It’s just difficult to name or to explain. It’s not that the words don’t exist, it’s that I’m not trying to find them, not trying to circumscribe those feelings. They may be laughable to everyone else, and I’m perfectly fine with that.

I was surfing one day, well over a decade ago in Tramore at the Bay’s main surf spot, a series of breaking lefts and rights, right in front of the beach. It was May, one of the best surfing months with warming summer weather and very long northern latitude evenings. Swells from the tail-end of winter storms roll across the Atlantic, one waves catches another and doubles in size, two others destructively cancel each out, and over the course of one or two thousand miles, the period between waves grows as does the amplitude, and the surfer’s desire of groundswell develops. If the winds co-operate, if some other weather pattern doesn’t interfere, the ideal result is a series of regular, powerful waves hitting a coast. If the sea and weather collide, there will be a slight offshore breeze to groom the waves to shape, and if the sea and weather gods are particularly favourable, the air will be still. If the air is still the water will glass-off. The surface will be like an oil-slick. Lack of wind is rare on Irish coasts.

I lay on my board, waiting and hoping that the small regular waves were the precursor of a larger swell to soon arrive. And as I lay there I saw a mass in the water really close. Maybe a couple of metres around. And brown. It was obvious what it was. Speaking with one of the Tramore surfers, I was informed that there was a sewage outlet behind the beach, which was irregularly dumped into the sea when the tank was full.

I wrote some letters to media, print and broadcast, the only outlets my Mr Angry of Tonbridge Wells, and many others have in the short-term for expressing shock, outrage and generally ineffectual anger at the bewildering world around us. In my angsty missives, I focused on the pressure points of commerce. How could a town which relied on tourism and sea deliberately and wilfully pollute that very resource? And to do it in such a way that it directly risked the health of people and therefore the reputation and commercial viability of the local economy?

There were denial and contradictory responses from officialdom. “No, we don’t do that“. “No, we only do it on high tide“. “No, it goes far out into the bay“. “No, we already started a new treatment plant“. My favourite was “he’s lying, the water is still too cold for swimming and he would have died“, someone who’d never heard of those new-fangled wetsuit things. Individuals supported me, local commerce was silent and local politicians lied and denied it all, even the one who’d been elected on that specific issue.

One personal effect was to understand first-hand just how vested interests at the most local level will close ranks in a short-sighted bulwark to stand against perceived threat from outside, yet delude themselves as to their own complicity in the cause. A microcosm of global environmental issues. It took some years, the loss I’d predicted in that original letter of Tramore’s prized Blue Flag status, (originally an EU scheme which designates good quality bathing locations, taking a range of factors into account, to improve water quality and other indicators) and much more prevarication and local protectionism and nimbyism before the new Tramore sewage treatment scheme was built and bay finally cleaned up. Inspired by the events during that time I completed a post-graduate environmental science degree, though I’ve never subsequently worked in the area, nor been directly involved in any environmental campaigns outside some of the day-to-day changes I made in my own life, some years before some of those became mandatory.

One of, if not the biggest challenge of anyone working, studying or simply interested in environmental issues, is realising the scale of the multitudinous threats. Each such person stands before a world in crisis, and in ourselves we feel overwhelmed. How can one or even some of us stand against centuries of depredation of the natural world, the effects of which grows year on year, threat on threat, consequence on consequence? How can we make a difference, especially since most of us aren’t those special people who can change the world?Despair and depression are a natural human responses to the realisation of the magnitude of the environmental crisis, and the other is denial. Maybe if we were united as a species, or even as countries to respond we could slow the effects. But we aren’t united. The Tramore town council and Chamber of Commerce scale up. The lies and misdirection occur on transnational and global scales. Environmentalist becomes a caustic insult as well as a badge of revolt. On the one side you have eco-warriors in dreadlocks, on the other populist politicians and industrialists in starched shirts. Divisive, and antagonistic, short-sighted and self-serving.

What do average people like us do? Give up, ignore the problem, leave it to the future. Or you can, as  so many others have, fall back onto the environmental adage, that seems clichéd and trite: Think globally, act locally. If there is a maxim for environmental action, that simple precept has alleviated the despair of many.

Environmental action needs big thinkers and big doers and it also supporters of each. For those ordinary rest of us, when we realise the threats, we can hide from them, and push the problem, as most have done, into the future, or we somehow take action. Environmentalists, (even the term is exclusionary at best) like the supposed American First Nation adage that the world belongs to the seventh generation of our descendants, and we are merely caretakers.

I’m not asking you to do anything big. I explained my own journey above because I wanted to put some context. To put some personal feeling and emotion into a discussion. To make it individual. Because I do want you to do something. Maybe more than one thing. But like I said above, I’m not asking you to do anything big. I want you to take a few simple personal actions, and then you decide from there.

Self-righteousness isn’t a solution. We do what we can, and try to improve. None of us are perfect and if we try to improve incrementally then we are making progress. A few plastic cups overboard? Not good, but not deliberate, and far less damaging that the insane traffic levels of Texas or California, and the larger repercussions thereof.

Try to improve, try to connect, try to protect.

What do I want you to do?

• I want you to swim in the sea.

Yes, really. The odds are that if you read this you do at some time anyway. But I want you to think about it as you do it, to try to feel that connection I always have when I am there. I want you I suppose, to swim in a “mindful” way. To feel just how being in the sea, preferably without a wetsuit, makes you feel so much more part of the world around you. Just for one day, forget about speed or distance or stroke or plans or ego (especially ego) or even dreams. Just try to feel part of the sea. Swim with your eyes open, swim with your eyes closed. Feel the movement that’s utterly unlike a pool. Look at the way the light diffracts, thinks about the microscopic flora and fauna that surround you that are the base of the chain of all life on earth. Because if you do it, really really do it, and feel the way I do, then you too will feel the sea-longing, the sea love and you will want to protect the ocean, to see it protected. If you don’t live near the ocean? Swim in a lake. Try to replicate it. And the next time you are near the ocean, try it. Please. Because the ocean is our mother, and many of us need to remember that.

• Take simple protective actions.

Make those local changes I mentioned. Which ones? Here are a couple of easy to implement suggestions:

• Stop using scrub washes/soaps/exfoliants with micro-particles or “microbeads”, (unless it says on the packaging that the particles are something natural like ground seeds). Many scrubs actually contain plastic beads (sometimes up to 300,000 particles) which do not degrade, and the tiny particles are washed through rivers and lakes into the ocean and are hugely harmful to marine creatures.
• Stop or reduce use of moist toilet tissue or wet wipes. This is another personal product which contaminates the seas due to its longevity. These things don’t break down in my compost heap (yeah, I actually have two compost heaps, and I’m not even a hippy) so why flush them into the sea?
• There are others of course. You could consider your refuse, your travel or fuel use, your ecological footprint,.

Finally, don’t turn away. By which I mean, don’t ignore the problems. We don’t have to be environmental experts to realise that those who deny the problems do so out of self-interest, even if the self-interest is often no more than not wanting to feel any personal responsibility or guilt, rather than anything more sinister. Swim in the sea, learn to love it, and then take the steps that arise from that love, steps either small or large.

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 two degrees. The only two memorable features of a 90 minute swim in Tramore Bay had been how cold I was by the end with two complete Claws, and thousands of stinging jellyfish in the bay, more than I’ve seen in years.

Sunday dawned with rare sunshine, so I wanted to drink in some much-needed sunlight. The cars of the fair-weather swimmers missing the previous day had returned and dotted the car park and as I walked toward the cabin (“what happens in the Cabin stays in the cabin” posted inside the door, an intriguing promise I’ve never seen made good) I saw a Navy ship out in the bay maybe a mile from the Guill. Inward from our position she lay toward the beach and well off the pier, something I’ve not seen previously as the bay is too shallow for large craft with deep drafts, and even yachts with moderate keels are unusual in the bay. With the tide almost low, she wouldn’t be going anywhere soon, as a long sandbank stretches across much of the outer bay, utterly invisible until you steam, sail … or swim over it, when it catches and amplifies any swell.

I knew I had a new swim destination for my swim. I would swim out, circle the ship and head back to Doneraile Head under the park, then return to the Guillamene into the incoming tidal current, an easy round trip of three to four kilometres.

Conversation in the cabin informed me that the ship was present for the bicentennial commemoration of the wreck of the Sea Horse.

Irish Navy LE Orla in the distance

Just before I set off from below the diving board out toward the ship, she blew her siren twice, a sound marathon swimmers will often associate with the start of a swim, as I heard in the middle of the night on St. Margaret’s beach, and other locations, and with other people, as I stepped in the water. And with this sound and my own memories and the memorial of marine tragedy,instead of my more usual swim along the coast, I set off away from the shore.

The wrecking of the merchant marine vessel The Seahorse is an event still notable in Waterford and Copper Coast culture. Less well-known is the larger tragedy of which she was part. For those of us who haunt the bay in our various capacities and interests, though it happened two hundred years ago, the Sea Horse is not forgotten and looms over the town, in names and memorials, both figuratively and literally. Doneraile park on Doneraile Head, under which I swim whenever I swim to Tramore beach from the Guill, holds the memorial obelisk for those lost at sea that dreadful day in January, 1816. Indeed there was a memorial service held just the previous evening by and for the families of those lost all those generations ago.

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Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo in June 1815 and after twenty years of war, peace returned to Europe, and with peace, the various armies returned to their homes. The 2^nd Battalion of the 59^th (2^nd Nottinghamshire) Regiment has been in a supporting role at Waterloo but had fought in the Peninsula (so possibly with Wellington), and had returned to Dover and Deal (another place I’ve swim) up the Channel for a couple of weeks furlough, before embarking once again to Ireland for garrison duty (essentially a force to keep the Irish subdued). Two marine transports, the Lord Melville and the Sea Horse being the vessels. The larger Lord Melville took 450 people while the 293 ton Sea Horse took 394 of whom 16 were officers with 287 men, 33 women and 38 children, both leaving port on January 25th. They were joined in Ramsgate, (home port for some of the current Channel swimming pilots) by another ship, the Boadicea. These three ships though were only part of a larger fleet of thirty troopships estimated to have been carrying up to 10,000 people.

They rounded Lizard Point in Cornwall just after darkness fell on the 28th (where youngest ever Irish channel swimmer Owen O’Keeffe completed a pioneering 10k swim) and entered the Irish sea and what later came in WWII to be called the Western Approaches. The weather had been good and I can well imagine it, the calm steel grey surface under a low sky, the light pale and low even in the mid-day, January the month of lowest light and Sun elevation, the Sun seeming barely above the horizon to the south. But on the 29th the weather changed and the wind freshened from the south south-east.

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I’ve occasionally remarked that a south-east wind is the worst for swimming on the Copper Coast. But locally, amongst those who know the sea, surfers, sailors, and this one lone swimmer, know that the worst storm for the south-east of Ireland may not originate out in the Atlantic, but instead in the Bay of Biscay. Prolonged storms off the coast of France are notorious for their destructive nature and the fetch is far enough to only amplify the storms waves sent north-west to Saint David’s Channel and the Celtic Sea, that stretch of sea along the south Irish coast. I do not know if that was the origin of the tragic storm, but my years on this coast makes me wonder.

By late afternoon the Sea Horse was approaching Ballycotton Island and lighthouse (Ballycotton is home of what later came to be one of the most decorated RNLI rescue stations anywhere) heading toward Cork Harbour, Europe’s finest natural harbour and home of the Myrtleville Swimmers, Cork’s most egalitarian open-water swimming pod). The Lord Melville and the Boadicea had fared better and progressed onward. The Sea Horse was alone.

Then the Mate of the Sea Horse, John Sullivan, a local man by that oh-so Cork name fell and died soon after, a vital loss of local knowledge of the coast. James Acland, one of her crew found him “with scarcely an unfractured bone; he was senseless“.

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Do you know a coast well? Do you know all its features? Do you know what it looks like from four miles out, or even a mile? Do you know where the reefs and currents are? All coast looks much the same from out at sea, all you can see is whether it’s high or low coast, cliffs or fields. Swimmers planning a first crossing of Tramore Bay think they’ll just head for Great Newtown Head. Never do they realise that from only a mile out, Great Newtown Head is invisible from the east, despite the name. Experience is everything, whether swimming or sailing.

With a push from the SW breeze to which I was exposed now I was offshore and no longer protected by the cliffs on the west side of the bay, I reached the grey Navy ship in about 25 minutes, just about a mile out. I’d stayed on her port side as I approached, pointed as she now was out to sea, having shifted mooring. I was not willing to cross her bow line until I knew it was safe. Once I got to within 100 metres away I could see her anchor lines were still out so I crossed her bow to her far (offshore) side for some photos. I wanted a photo of her with Doneraile Park and the memorial in the distance. The LE Orla is almost three times the displacement of the Sea Horse, with a crew of 39, over twice the crew of 18 of the Sea Horse. As I took my photos, I waved to the Bridge Officer out on watch out keeping an eye on me. I threw a quick hello and comment across the water to him. As I swam toward the stern I heard the call over the tannoy; “swimmer on the starboard side“. A mile and half from the beach, I’m sure the contrast with the reason we were both indirectly in that location struck him as it did I.

LE Orla at Sea Horse bicentennial with Doneraile Park in background over her stern

I pulled up again behind the starboard stern to shoot her with the Metal Man in the distance. Then I waved again to the crew working on the rear deck and set off for Doneraile Head and the orange boats of the RNLI inshore rescue RIBs I could see on exercise in the distance below the park. As I headed toward the shore I thought briefly of what more I could remember of the story of the tragic ship and the account of James Acland, one of her crew.

Minutes later, not wishing to over-egg the pudding, I once again had a very close call at sea.

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