(Title credit goes to the children’s book by Linda Jane Keegan.)
One of the reasons some people prefer to swim in pools is that there’s less… stuff. Our oceans are teeming with life, from microscopic phytoplankton to ginormous blue whales. In fact, the sea is so vast that we (as in scientists and humankind, not me personally) are still exploring new depths containing decidedly odd-looking creatures.
When you start swimming in the sea and go past ankle-depth, you’re more likely to encounter different types of marine life. At first, I was pretty squeamish about this. In fact, I was hoping not to see very much at all.
Here’s a journal entry from January 2021:
Under the water, even for a few seconds, the beach noises disappeared and there was just a hum, a thrum. It was green and clear with only sand below me (I was not deep). Ahead was nothing visible. This was reassuring; being new to sea swims I am nervous about the sudden appearance of Jaws, or the stingray that surprised Steve Irwin, or an unavoidable collection of jellyfish (what is the collective noun?) [It’s swarm, smack, or bloom]. At times I have literally been afraid of my own shadow, or a tendril of red-brown seaweed gently curling itself around my ankle like Ariel the Mermaid’s hair.
In other words, my pop-culture-rich imagination was much more stressful than anything I was likely to deal with in real life. Sometimes it still is; as a child of the ‘80s, I perpetually hear the Jaws theme whenever I’m in deep water. But my perspective has changed: I am a visitor to the ocean, the ocean sustains us, and most sea-dwelling creatures aren’t the slightest bit interested in me. And, as someone jokingly pointed out recently, I’m quite skinny so a shark wouldn’t get much of a meal.
Now I appreciate seaweed and know some of the different types (bull kelp, sea lettuce, Neptune’s Necklace…) and, rather than finding it a bit yuck, I value it. It absorbs carbon emissions, sustains other types of marine life, and can be harvested for food and fertiliser. Seeing different creatures also adds to the fullness of an open water swim and makes me want to learn more about them. In the past 12 months, I have seen (in the sea and on the beach): hermit crabs, salps, moon jellyfish, reef and cushion starfish, blue fish and spotted fish, stingrays, leopard seals, orcas, and dolphins. How lucky are we to get to see all these amazing and diverse species? How can we better look after them? (I’ll attempt to answer this in another post.)
Reef starfish
A few months ago, I was in the water and saw a shark fin emerge about 50m away. At least, I assume it was a shark. The fin wasn’t particularly big, but dolphins usually swim together. I could have run yelling out of the sea, but it disappeared again and I was only waist-deep so I just carried on. Rig sharks are quite common in the harbour at this time of year. They can bite, but only if they feel threatened.
In deeper water, I feel more vulnerable. But I feel the same when driving on unfamiliar roads, or talking to a group of people I don’t know, or sitting alone in a small room with a headset and radio mic, answering questions about my books and knowing thousands of people are listening. (I’m not complaining, I enjoy those interviews and the adrenaline that comes with them. But it’s definitely sweating-palms territory!)
I’m a member of several open water/ocean/wild swim groups on Facebook and sometimes people share images or poems that have moved them in some way. Here’s one of them, a poem about things we find in the sea by e e cummings (all of his casings and spacings were deliberate):
maggie and milly and molly and may (1956)
maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach(to play one day)
and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles,and
milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;
and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and
may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.
For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea