Two weeks in advance, a sunrise swim in a geothermal pool floating in the Baltic seemed like a beautiful idea. The night before, while ill with something unpleasant brought home from Brownies, the idea of setting an alarm for 7am while on holiday and walking the kilometre and a half through Helsinki at somewhere around minus twelve degrees to have that swim seemed like the single worst thing I’d ever inflicted on myself.
I’ve been to Allas Sea Pool before. It’s set in a large wooden deck floating in the harbour at Kauppatori, the market square overlooked by Helsinki’s Orthodox Cathedral, and features an actual sea pool, a children’s pool and a geothermal lane pool permanently at 27⁰, as well as male, female and mixed saunas and changing facilities in little huts. In summer, you can sunbathe out here too. I don’t know if it’s all just different in winter or if its facilities have expanded since my last visit nearly three years ago but this time I was given a map – a map! – and directed through the restaurant and cafe to changing rooms on the solid side of the harbour. There’s a lounge between the changing rooms and the deck, with a mixed panoramic sauna and a beach outside and there’s another sauna in the unisex changing area & lounge. Then you can run down the snow-covered gangplank to everything else. The children’s pool is closed in winter and if the sea pool was cold in May, it was now well below freezing, as evidenced by it being thickly encrusted with ice. Nope. Not even putting a toe in that.
I’d brought my pool sliders and a microfibre towel for my run down to the geothermal pool. It wasn’t as unpleasant as I’d been imagining, even after a pre-swim shower in the finest Icelandic tradition. Finland doesn’t have the threatening “wash here, here and here” posters and there’s no one around giving you filthy looks for showering wrong while passive-aggressively squeegeeing the water from the shower floor but you are expected to wash thoroughly with no swimsuit. Unlike Iceland, pools in Helsinki are very unlikely to provide the soap. Allas did but I went in three other pools and none of them did.
Having touched my wet skin, the towel was wet enough to freeze solid on its hook while I swam but the water was very tolerable. 27⁰ had felt distinctly chilly in May and I’d have liked it up a degree or three in winter but 27⁰ is toasty compared to -12⁰. I slid inelegantly into the warm water and probably said something like “Oh, that’s nice!” out loud – or as loud as you get when you’re already disinclined to be loud and obnoxious in public, and haven’t realised yet that you’ve got laryngitis – this seems a good moment to say that I’d brought some kind of lurgy home from Brownies which had not vanished in the nine days I’d allotted to it and had actually spent a chunk of the past two days muttering hoarsely to myself that I hadn’t felt so ill since I had the flu in 2010 and I was really fed up with it by now. In fact, I was about 24 hours off starting to wonder if it was bronchitis. Yeah, you know better than me that maybe I shouldn’t be swimming outdoors in minus several degrees right now.
But it wasn’t unpleasant. It was too cloudy to see even a hint of that sunrise but the water was warmish and I swam slow gentle lengths, while trying to take in everything around me. The metal rails on the steps that were wrapped in velcro covers to stop your hands freezing on them, except that the covers were wet and had frozen, and were all bunched up in a way that clearly said they were going to slide as soon as you touched them and send you flying. The way the lane divider ropes rattled as the water moved with the swimmers. The swimming club with woolly hats on – my hat would be soaked if I tried to swim in it. Keeping my face and ears defrosted was as simple as sticking my head underwater regularly. Yes, this was very nice and it didn’t even bother me that it was early. No sunrise but yes, nice. Not the torture I’d spent Sunday imagining.
Because this pool is basically a massive metal tin welded to the decking, some noises echo through the water so that you can almost feel them – someone kicking the side as they grab for the ladder, for example. But after a while, somewhere around my eleventh length, I began to realise that what I was feeling in my chest wasn’t reverberations in the pool being transmitted to me through the water. And that noise – that was coming from me too. I was wheezing. Not loudly, and not in any discomfort but something was definitely happening with my breathing that doesn’t normally happen. I’d meant to swim 20 lengths – maybe even see if I could manage 40, which should be a kilometre if this pool is a standard 25m pool – but even I know that when something strange happens to your breathing, you should probably get out and see if warming up helps.
Climbing out wasn’t particularly fun. Grabbing my towel, now frozen into a 3D sculpture, was not warming. I hurried up the gangplank, into the changing rooms and switched on a nice hot shower. It did the job – that funny little noise and sensation vanished and I defrosted myself thoroughly. Now let’s go and sauna like a Finn.
Running back down to the three little sauna huts at the far end of the floating decking was out of the question. The panoramic sauna was closed for another 40-ish minutes “for filming” and that just left the unisex sauna, although I mistook that for the men’s changing rooms on first visit and had to consult the map to realise it was in the unisex area. Like many a Finnish sauna, it’s quite dark and you go up stairs because the big stove is at least six feet high and you have to sit above it. There was a mix of locals and tourists in there and one of the locals was giving advice on what to do and where to go in Helsinki. Since Lent was just about to begin, he recommended laskiaispulla, a kind of traditional sweet bun filled with cream and that for a proper Finnish sauna, you should try Sompasauna, which is quite a rustic, traditional sauna with no staff, no proper changing rooms and no running water. Any other week, I’d have tried it out but feeling like this, and in temperatures like this, it didn’t seem like the wisest option. Besides, it’s a metro and bus journey out to one of the islands.
Finnish has a word, löyly, for the specific type of steam that comes from pouring water on hot stones. Maybe I’ve just not been in a sauna that does this because only in Finland have I felt the temperature skyrocket when water is tipped into the stove. I’m a lot better at handling it than I used to be – I even find the “medium saunas” a bit on the tepid side these days. The thing is, it’s quite an unusual and special occasion for the sauna to be wood-powered these days. The ones that are seem to have a habit of being loudly and proudly called smoke saunas. Public ones are almost entirely electric. And so here’s my question: how can you pour water on an electric heater?? And yet people do. I’ve done it myself. What witchcraft or watertight seals are they employing to not result in electrocution?
Mixed saunas are also quite unusual. I tried out saunas at four different swimming establishments during my six days in Helsinki and the others all had separate male/female saunas where you’re required to shower and sauna with no swimsuit (unless you have a “licence”, a special blue and white badge that you either sew on your swimwear or wear as a bracelet and which you can buy for €3.50 on the Finnish swimming website with apparently no questions asked). This is allegedly because your suit can harbour chlorine molecules which can be vapourised by the heat of the sauna and cause breathing difficulties. Well, it doesn’t seem to be a problem at Allas’s unisex sauna, and I’d already experienced minor breathing difficulties once that hour, unrelated to vapourised chlorine. But then again, maybe that’s exactly why in Finland I have a greater tolerance for hotter saunas – because I haven’t realised that I’m mistaking chlorine gas poisoning for overheating anywhere else.
Your Allas ticket allows you two hours (not that I’m sure anyone is monitoring that in any way) but I left before one was up. Between the extreme cold and the filming, that left one pool I couldn’t breathe properly in and one sauna and even I can’t stretch that out for another hour. I did have a little photo project to do first, though.
Erisapple, on Instagram, is a maker of custom patches. She made our Nelson 1 patrol patches for Rebel Summer Camp and ever since the Self Isolation Club patches of 2020, has made an growing range of club patches every year since, as well as Halloween and Christmas ones, a set of campfire songs and bookish patches, oh, and a dozen other ranges. She sent me a club patch of my choice so I could take pretty pictures for her social media and after looking through them, I opted for Swimming Club. I’d brought it with me for a photo with the bright blue pool but unlike in the summer, when you could go up the pyramidal roof terrace and get great photos straight over the pool, there was no angle where you could really see the pool from outside. So when I was done swimming and saunaing, I went back to the changing rooms for the patch and my phone and took some very hasty pictures outside – the patch with the pool, the pool on its own, a frozen selfie with the pool. Maybe a little illicit, especially as I whisked the phone through the showers but Allas does seem to like people sharing photos, even if they seem to kind of disapprove of the taking of them.
With that done, I vanished back inside to get dried, dressed and warm. It hadn’t gone at all how I planned but I’d done my sunrise swim in the floating pool in Helsinki’s frozen harbour.
I Am A Polar Bear 