I did my Wild Swimmer badge! I did my Rebel Wild Swimmer badge! I went wild swimming, in the sea, lots of times!
This is my fourteenth completed Rebel badge and it’s possibly the one I’m proudest of, which is mostly because this is one that I’d firmly put in the “Nope!” category when I first went through the book. And then suddenly I was doing it and then suddenly it was the fifth in the Wild series and I can now claim my Wild collective patch, which you get for doing a certain number of badges in each theme. I’d hoped that Wild would be my first and now it is!
I swim quite a lot. In the summer, I try to go to my local (heated) outdoor pool twice a week and swim a mile, mostly out of… well, spite, I guess. My boss is a year-round cold water swimmer who goes several times a week and last summer I casually mentioned to him that I’d done a mile the night before. He said “I did a mile last week and I was exhausted!” So it’s a mile mostly because I want to show myself that I’m actually a better swimmer than him.
But I don’t think I’ve ever been swimming in the sea, or any open water. I have a vague memory of holding a snorkel on the edge of Lake Garda, which I don’t remember being particularly warm, and the campsite in Austria where we spent my teenage years had a swimming lake on the other side of the road – but the only time I remember swimming in there was in a full, and too big, wetsuit. I paddle – by which I mean, I splash around up to my ankles, as well as that I partake in paddlesports like kayaking, canoeing and SUP. But I don’t swim. Or I didn’t.
Which is how this got started. I’ve mentioned before that I want to be a kayaking instructor and part of the training process is your Foundation Safety & Rescue Training – for which you have to capsize and self-rescue and also spend part of the day in the water being rescued by your fellow trainees. I really don’t like cold water. The thought of being completely submerged and upside down panics me. So as part of my preparation for the FSRT, I figured I’d have a go at open water swimming and try to at least get over the profound dislike of being in cold water. Being upside down is another matter but the cold water thing is dealable. I found my local Bluetits, an informal cold-water swimming club with “flocks” all over the place, and one evening when I was camping five miles away and had run out of excuses, I went off to the beach.
There was only one Bluetit there that evening, our local chief Bluetit. She was very happy for me to wear a wetsuit and she was so brisk and matter-of-fact about everything that within about five minutes of wading into the water, we were at “shall we dip now?”, which you can’t refuse and once your shoulders are in and she’s saying “Shall we swim now?” you find yourself swimming whether you planned to or not. So that was my baptism into the world of sea swimming. I returned for a second swim two days later, where there were more Bluetits but without the Chief and her steam-rollering, I spent most of it refusing to put my hands and arms in the water.
Swim 3 was at Hampstead Ponds, where I had to climb down a ladder and just drop into water too deep to ever even find the bottom, in a swimsuit. No wetsuits here, because I couldn’t carry a wetsuit around London all weekend. I couldn’t walk slowly in along a very gently shelving beach, inch by inch. Can I use the phrase “baptism of fire” about something that’s the literal opposite of fire? I clung to that ladder for dear life until I’d stopped hyperventilating and could have a go at swimming and once I’d let go, I was fine. But it took a good five or ten minutes to be in a condition to let go.
By now, it had dawned on me that I’d accidentally started working on my Wild Swimmer badge. There are ten clauses but the big one is to swim regularly and if I was doing that for other purposes, I might as well do the rest of the badge. Swim at least once a week for three months. Well, I knew from the start that I wasn’t going to manage once a week so I decided to average it out and go for twelve times in three months. To be honest, I had no idea how I was going to achieve that because if I wasn’t going at least once a week at first, I was going to have to go multiple times a week later on but that’s the sort of detail you can figure out later.
And by the time I was back with the Bluetits for swim 4, I found I was going once a week, except the week I sprained my ankle because when it was still fresh and agonising, I wasn’t going to walk half a mile from the nearest car park for the guest location Friday night swim – our regular location gets busy with holiday-makers on Fridays so we move around. This week I’ve done four swims in five days and the week before I did four swims in eight days.
So, my first swim was May 20th which meant finishing 12 swims by August 20th. And here I am on August 16th with 14 open water swims under my belt. Quite a few have been in sea pools – Bude & Weston – but they’re not swimming pools and the badge syllabus says “if you are swimming alone, please do so in a designated open water lake”, which I think is an adequate description of two pools I found more wild and scary than swimming in the open sea, what with the sea crashing over both of them. Shallow sea where you never go out more than about a foot deeper than you can stand up in is so tame compared to sea pools that flood at high tide! I swam in the sea alone once – no Bluetits turned up for the regular Friday swim one week! (swim 10, the one appearing in the featured image.)
I was sort of hoping to maybe be out of the wetsuit by the end of the twelve swims and I did get a tiny bit of pushback from an interfering Bluetit – not a regular – at swim 5. But actually, that was the last time I routinely wore the wetsuit. I put it back on for my second swim at Bude, because that’s apparently perfectly normal in that pool and the weather was bad that day, but it didn’t come out again for any other Bluetit swim. I’ve added a “wetsuit?” column to my log and I wore it for five of the fourteen swims.
Another part of the syllabus is to swim in at least three different open water venues. Tick! I’m at six so far and I entirely see why – I had never really realised how vastly different even three bits of sea within twenty miles of each can be, let alone what a sea pool can be like. I planned to swim at Nauthólsvík while I was in Iceland – it’s the sea, it’s open water but there’s a trickle of geothermal water coming in, so you can stay warm if you can keep within the trickle – but in the end, I just couldn’t fit it in and besides, it would have involved driving in central Reykjavik. There’s a blog post coming in which I’ll tell you about my feelings towards my LHD car. But I did do the cold water plunge at the Sky Lagoon five or six times! In April, I got in up to my ankles before fleeing. This time, shoulder deep every time and the fourth, five and sixth times I made an effort to count slowly to five before hurling myself back into the warm lagoon. That’s something I couldn’t have done pre-wild swimming.
I don’t have a photo of that. For now, have this unedited clip filmed by a stranger. Later, that’ll be part of an actual vlog and made much better.
And ultimately, doesn’t that mean I’ve achieved what I set out to achieve? Ability to submerge myself willingly and ably in cold water and without the hyperventilation that marked my first few dips?
There’s more to it than simply wild swimming regularly – I won’t list the other clauses because if I tell you exactly what I did for every single badge, you won’t need to buy the book yourself if you decide to join the Club. Suffice it to say, most of the rest is about equipment and safety and first aid and actually having an idea of what you’re actually doing. But I will tell you about clause 9: learn how to tow someone in the water.
How do I achieve that? Well, first I have to watch some YouTube videos to get an idea of the theory. But I feel like the learning part of it has to involve a certain amount of practical trying-out. Have I really learned to tow someone if I’ve never actually towed anyone? Can I ask a Bluetit who’s next thing to a total stranger to let me manhandle them in the sea? Would Catherine let me use her as a body to test the various holds? Then I went to the pool one Sunday morning and caught a private swimming lesson before the lane swim. I’d seen Tim’s lessons last year but he seems to have progressed from some kind of triathlon training to lifesaving because there he was towing a dummy down the pool! Just as I was seeing that one last clause in my badge and wondering what to do about it. So I emailed the teacher and we made a plan for me to have a very basic “how to tow” lesson, just a quick half-hour with Tim so we could use each other as bodies. At eight o’clock on a Sunday morning!
It was pretty quick and basic. The teacher got Tim to demonstrate the three tows he’s learned so far and then I did them – the long arm tow (was it called that?), which works pretty well on humans but not so well on the waterlogged dummy; the vice, which takes both hands and only leaves your legs free for swimming both of you to safety; and the underarm, which works ok on the dummy until it’s full of water, at which point it starts sliding around sideways. I towed Tim across the shallow end by holding his chin with three fingers and he did the same for me, although his started with “What if something happens, what if something happens??” (I’m in the shallow end of a swimming pool. If something happens, I pull free and stand up.) Nothing happened. I got safely and successfully towed, although with the wrong grip on my chin. I didn’t drown, I didn’t get pulled under the water or waves washing over my face and I could just lie there like a limp but slightly more manageable dummy. Then we rescued Bob from the bottom and towed him. Then we towed each other the length of the pool and then rescued Bob from the bottom of the deep end and towed him back. I’d already covered the basic tenets of “learn to tow someone in the water” by then and we finished with above-water front crawl, which means you don’t put your head in the water. Perhaps it’s slower but it means you can keep your eyes fixed on the rescuee.
Some badges are about giving myself something to do. Some badges are about doing something new. Some badges are about expanding my own life skills and the Wild Swimmer definitely falls into the latter category. With the caveat that jumping into the water and towing someone should be an absolute last resort, I have a new and potentially genuinely useful emergency skill and my own confidence in the water is another step on my journey to becoming a paddlesport instructor and I’m so very proud of having this badge sewn onto my blanket.