As part of my quest to not be scared of being in the water rather than on it, I had a go at getting into sea swimming a couple of years ago. I will never love sea swimming – I don’t love chlorine in my nose or other people swimming at the wrong speed in my lane but at least swimming pools aren’t scary.
Let me take you to a couple of sea pools to make my point. I’ve done a couple of camping trips where I’ve gone off to a sea pool. Bude Sea Pool had badges and I understand Weston Marine Lake does now but didn’t at the time.
In theory, these are the best of both worlds. They’re cold, salty water but their walls protect swimmers from the open sea. I think of Malory Towers and their famous and wonderful swimming pool carved out of the rock but now I’ve been in pools attached to the sea, I realise it was madness to let twelve-year-olds swim in that pool unsupervised – for Malory Towers never had a lifeguard, or even a games mistress to supervise.
Bude Sea Pool was cold and a bit wild. It was ok up close to the steps but as you got further out, it felt like it got deeper and it certainly got rougher and then waves started crashing over the sea wall. I’ve got pictures of me clinging to rail below water level, laughing hysterically as the waves smash my head but it was cold and it was a bit scary and since then, I’ve seen pictures of what that pool looks like at high tide and the wall utterly vanishes and effectively you’re in the open sea, only with concrete walls under water that you can’t see. That’s not fun! Well, maybe it is for you but the coast around Devon and Cornwall has some spectacular differences between high and low tide and I personally don’t enjoy knowing there’s that much water underneath me, let alone trying to fight its waves.
But then I went back the next day at lower tide, when there was half a mile of beach between the pool walls and the waterline and it was like being at a totally different pool. The pool was still and calm and you didn’t have to worry about anything smashing you off the wall. I’m bad at understanding the scale of water – because the 50m competition pool at London Aquatics Centre is also two or three times as wide as my local 25 yard pool, I’m never entirely sure whether it’s twice the length or not until I’ve been swimming for an hour and only done half my usual number of lengths. The same goes for Bude Sea Pool, which is around 90m long. Because it’s 45m wide and it’s a weird shape and it’s sometimes surrounded by sea, I find it really hard to judge how big it really is. It’s massive, it’s deep and it’s scary. Give me my shallow patch of sea at South Beach any day.
And yet Weston Marine Lake is somehow worse. I swam there two nights in a row a couple of years ago. I have no idea how deep it is but you walk down the ramp to get into the water. Once you get past the concrete, you find yourself in some thick, velvety mud and then you’re rapidly out of your depth. I clung to my tow float as if it was an actual float, I paddled around, I saw the sunset and it was all very nice. Marginally warmer, the sea stayed well away so the water was still and I didn’t even try to swim out as far as the wall. The lake is possibly even more massive – it’s over 200m long and over 150m wide and I don’t even want to think about how deep it is. I was quite happy to paddle around like a confused labrador for half an hour before returning to shore. And then I went back the next day.
All went fine at first. I paddled around and then it began to dawn on me that the water level was rising. It began to touch the concrete walkway – I think they call it the apron? – around the edge of the pool and I realised it was time to gather my stuff and flee. I didn’t get changed, I just picked up my bag and scampered up the steps to the prom that runs along the top and I got changed there. And I kept watching the water. Within ten minutes, it had risen so high that it was thigh-deep on a man walking around the walkway. Within another five, it was halfway up the steps. I looked across to the wall which had now vanished under the incoming high tide. It has a rope fence along the top so you can walk across it and the fence was just about visible but the wall itself was gone. I’ve heard that Weston-super-Mare has some of the highest tides in the country and I can well believe it.
Actually, since then I’ve learned that this isn’t actually a typical high tide at Weston Marine Lake. Their website said that the wall is overtopped around every 10 days at high spring tides and just writing that is making my skin crawl. The idea that the sea can be down on the beach one day and coming up over the top of the sea wall the next.
So, in theory, while both these pools offer safe and controlled sea swimming, they’re both far more at the mercy of tides than just being in the sea feels like. In the sea, some days you have to walk further out than others but you don’t feel like the water has risen by the height of a house. Maybe the bits of sea I swim in just don’t have such dramatic tides or maybe because I prefer to swim along parallel to the shore, rarely going too deep to stand up, it just feels safer and less dramatic. But give me either a swimming pool or an actual sea over a sea pool any day.
Bumblebee Paddles 