I spent the weekend (my birthday weekend!) camping in Devon. On Friday, having finally arrived at my campsite two and a half hours later than planned thanks to everything going wrong with the traffic, I decided to drive over to Bude for the evening. I fancied getting a wild swim in while I was in Devon but I’m still a bit nervous about swimming an unfamiliar bit of sea alone and I’d heard Bude has a sea pool.
And yes, Bude is in Cornwall. I was camping in Devon. Bude is only about 40 minutes up the road but you do cross the county border so I did “want to get in a wild swim while I was in Devon” but I achieved this by going to Cornwall. Just to be clear that I do know where I was.
To get to Bude Sea Pool, you park at Summerleaze car park and then instead of ambling down to the beach, you go up and over the cliff, past the beach huts and right out to the edge of the headland, where steep steps take you down. I suppose you could swim out to it from the beach but I had no idea how deep it was, how difficult it was – oh, and how to keep all the dry stuff dry. Besides, I was here very specifically to not swim off the beach – although even at 7pm there were so many people swimming, bodyboarding and paddling that it would by no stretch of the imagination have been alone.
I’d seen the signs to “historic sea pool” on my way into the car park and so I was expecting it to be Victorian. It feels like something the Victorians would have built. But no, it’s a baby. It was only built in 1930, so it hasn’t yet had its hundredth birthday. There’s the pool itself and then there are terraces built into the cliffside for sunbathing, changing and hiring beach huts to just enjoy the view. It even has a lifeguard box with a loudspeaker, although by 7pm they’d gone home for the day. Just as the sea is open 24/7, you could come to this pool and swim at 3am if you fancied it. I think a sunset swim here could be very beautiful.
Where to leave my stuff? I was perfectly happy to leave my towel and clothes on the side somewhere but what about things like my phone, car keys and wallet? I’d brought my dry bag and tow float with me. I didn’t get the float for safety or visibility – those are both good things but I bought it so I could keep my valuables with me and not have to worry about leaving them on the beach while I swam. It’s so much more comfortable swimming knowing that if anyone nicks your bag, you’d have to drive home in your swimsuit but you do have all the important stuff to be able to drive home and you don’t have to spend the rest of the day on the phone to getting cards cancelled and locks replaced.
But this is a pool. It looks really weird to take a tow float in. Why did that bother me? Would I really rather risk my phone and car keys than look weird? Yeah, apparently. I did put them all in my dry bag but then I shoved the bag into my backpack and left it by the side of the pool where I could easily see it.
I keep calling it a pool and it is but it also counts as a wild swim. It’s a concrete wall that separates an area under the cliffs from the full force of the open sea but at high tide, the waves crash over the barrier, replenishing the pool with new water, seaweed and the occasional jellyfish. This is what the pool at Malory Towers would really be like, if the waves splash into it.
One of the things that Darrell liked best of all was the big swimming pool down by the sea. This had been hollowed out of a stretch of rocks, so that it had a nice rocky, uneven bottom. Seaweed grew at the sides, and sometimes the rocky bed of the pool felt a little slimy. But the sea swept into the big natural pool each day, filled it and made lovely waves all across it. It was a sheer delight to bathe there.
Wow, this was ferocious! How were people – children! – standing on the wall and not being knocked into the pool via a major head injury on the concrete? I was struggling hanging onto the steel grab bar bolted to the side of the wall. Even gentled by the barrier, these waves were easily strong enough to wash me away.
It’s a bit terrifying. The waves coming over the wall, even on a reasonably calm day like today were easily strong enough to break my hold on the wall and hurl me into the middle of the pool while crashing over my head. And the force of incoming water made a current in the pool that was strong enough to make it difficult to swim out to the wall in the first place. I’d never really appreciated how calm and flat – and shallow – my usual bit of sea is. No wonder people get into difficulties so easily. This pool is about 45m wide at its widest and it seemed to have taken me an indecently long time to cross it. If you got swept out to sea, you’d be too exhausted really quickly fighting the current to get back to dry land. I knew that – I live close enough to the sea to have the local paper filled with all the ways people have got into trouble on the water – but this was the first time I’d really felt it for myself.
I realised a few weeks ago why wild swimming in three different places was a requirement of my Wild Swimmer badge – no two bits of sea are the same, even if they’re only a few miles apart. Even in the supposedly-tame environment of the sea pool, the water was rougher and more threatening than anything I’d ever experienced before. It was also a little on the seaweedy side and what finally drove me out and back to get dried and dressed was spotting a jellyfish floating around in the shallows. You don’t get ickies like that in a real pool!
I thought that was it for this post but I went back on Sunday to find it was low tide at Bude. Not only was the bay utterly empty, a huge beach had been revealed where on Friday there had been hundreds of swimmers and paddlers in the water. You could walk to the sea pool which was now utterly isolated from the sea, calm, still and with neither waves nor currents. Had it been like this on Friday I’d have questioned if it counted as a wild swim. But Friday absolutely did and therefore Sunday must too.
The Friends of Bude Sea Pool were there with their little shop and I crowned my visit by discovering they sell little cloth badges that I can put on my camp blanket!
