Since it was so hot and since I’m getting into sea swimming, while I was away camping I went to Weston-super-Mare every evening and went for a swim in their Marine Lake. It’s a nice wild compromise – it’s still a wild swim but it’s one where there are other people around and very strict parameters as to how wild it can get. Or so I thought.
In the early 1800s, the first sea defences were built to try to tame the sea just a little for the emerging leisure class. The idea of the marine lake first seems to have appeared around 1871, to enclose some of the bays to give a safe swimming area and various other proposals followed but it wasn’t until the 1920s that they finally took their ambitious plans down to the current lake. It used to have bathing tents and water slides and lots of boats and now it’s a bit more utilitarian.
Even at low tide, the water comes up to the edge of the outer wall, which makes it an infinity lake and they claim it’s one of the largest in the world, if not the largest. At high tide, though, the barrier completely vanishes. Weston-super-Mare has such a high tidal range that even my mother knows about it – the Marine Lake website says the difference between high tide and low tide frequently reaches nearly 15m and it moves at 6 knots, which is nearly 7mph.
I knew I was unfamiliar with the beach and the tides so I figured maybe I’d see what everyone else was doing about swimming in the sea and I could always go in the lake, which I’d heard was so muddy it was almost unusable. But it was dredged in June and when I arrived, there were plenty of people in the lake so in I went. Today it’s got that causeway separating it from the sea and along the back wall is a high brick wall with a concrete walkway around the lake and another one above it around the prom. There’s nowhere to change because marine lake or not, this is just a bit of the sea, so I left my stuff on a concrete bench on the walkway, took my valuables in my tow float and waded in.
It’s still muddy. There are signs warning about the soft mud and sand and it just feels icky to walk on. I’m accustomed to smooth sand or pebbly bottoms, not wading through mud. And it was cold. The website redirects you to seatemperature.org for an estimate of how cold it actually was and on Thursday that had decided the sea at Weston was about 16°. I’ve not been keeping an accurate temperature lot of my wild swims, mostly, but Bude Sea Pool declared 18° two weeks ago and Hampstead Ponds had 20° written on their chalkboard so from the ones where I have an estimated temperature, this was quite cold.
I was there for a full moon swim but the moon didn’t materialised. It was supposed to pop up just before 9 but it didn’t. I’d been in the water half an hour by then and I was cold and muddy and getting nervous about swimming in the dark so eventually I got out. I’d had an unplanned sunset swim – admittedly, driving to a west-facing beach at sunset had been a terrible idea. Most of that drive had been done pretty much blinded, so there was much yelling and stressing and “I can’t see anything!!!” as I searched for somewhere to park but it was worth it for my first ever sunset swim.
I went back to my noisy campsite, which was still quiet at that point, washed the mud out of my swimming stuff, hung it up to dry and didn’t think much more of it.
I went back Friday night. Went a bit earlier. Parking’s free after 6pm – well, it is on the bit of clifftop parkside road where I left my car on Thursday. Free at 10pm in the seaside car parks. Going a bit earlier was a mistake, though.
The pool was much busier. It was still early enough that the sun wasn’t thinking about setting yet, it was hot and everyone was out on the muddy water. I parked myself further up and used the steps to go in rather than the ramp by the beach. The mud was worse here! I was halfway up to my knees in mud at some points and then at others it suddenly became solid and you found yourself merely up to the knees in water, where a foot or two further back to the steps it had been up around my thighs. But at last I was far enough beyond the thick mud that I could get my feet off the bottom and swim. Not that I swam a lot – I was deeply suspicious about the fate of my towel and dry clothes and kept them in reach. I was also deeply suspicious about the depth of the water. The website estimates 2-5m generally but also includes this line:
The deepest part is by the causeway (we will let you know how deep it is when we find the bottom)
Yes, that’s reassuring. I don’t like deep water – a 5m swimming pool, crystal clear and tiled, makes my blood run cold. It’s actually marginally better if I can’t see the bottom and once I’m swimming, I’m reasonably ok with not being able to reach the bottom because I guess I’m not trying to reach the bottom. But it alarms me that this lake could be so deep even the people who manage it don’t know how deep it is.
As I paddled around, it occurred to me that the water was rising. It had been a good few inches below the walkway when I got in but now it was up to the edge. It wouldn’t spill over, they wouldn’t design it like that. It’s spilling over. My bag is right up against the wall, it’ll be fine. The water is going quite a long way over the edge. I swam to the edge – easier now, the mud was further down than it had been – and discovered that the water was already less than a foot from my bag of dry stuff. I intended to put it out of reach on one of the concrete benches but some instinct told me to go up the steps to the prom above. By the time I’d put the bag down on a bench and thrown my towel-robe on and gone back to look over the edge, the walkway had vanished.
By high tide, twenty minutes later, the causeway had utterly vanished and the people still foolish enough to be walking around the concrete walkway were up to their hips in water. The concrete benches had vanished, most of the beach at the opposite end had vanished and this was no longer an infinity lake – there was no separation anymore between lake and sea. It had been less than five minutes between “huh, the water’s getting pretty close the walkway” and the walkway being submerged and now… well, now I really understood how scary the tide can be. At my usual beach at home, a high tide just means you don’t have to walk ten minutes out until you find water deep enough to swim in. This – this was terrifying!
I’ve looked it up on the website since I started writing this – yes, high tides are dramatic at Weston but this was a spring tide, an usually high tide caused by the full and new moons. High tides are extra high, low tides are extra low and it’s only every ten days that the tide completely drowns the lake like that, although I imagine your bag would get a bit wet at ordinary high tides. Moral of the story: check the tide times before you swim at Weston Marine Lake!
So again, a safe enclosed place to swim that actually feels wilder than most of my sea swims. I got a sunset swim in and I hit my target of 12 swims in 3 months and I escaped the heat in blissful – muddy – cold water.