by Joe Minihane
It was a Sunday and the white sandy cove was rammed with revellers, all determined to toast themselves to a crisp on what could easily have been the last hot day of the year. As at Mothecombe back in June, windbreaks provided homey privacy for families and solo sun worshippers. These little beach bothies looked the ideal place to idle away a few lazy hours.
We laid our towels just out of reach of the waves and looked out to see swimmers far off, tacking out to distant rocks or face down with snorkels, searching for marine life.
Roger swam out to a sandbar just off nearby Logan’s Rock, and I fancied something long and soothing myself, so strode in with purpose, the water shelving to shoulder deep within a couple of strides. An extra push and my feet dangled beneath me. Only swimming could save me now.
Molly made for the edge of the cove and the cliffs where walkers were scaling the heights and peering into the depths. I went for a more straightforward option, swimming hard against the strong tide to see how far I could dare myself to go. This wasn’t quite in keeping with the safety-first approach I’d taken at Godrevy and somewhat flew in the face of my complaints about swimmers taking too many risks. Still, there were others beyond me, taking long strokes or just lying on their backs, borne up by the heave of the Atlantic.
I was a few hundred metres out from the beach when my bottle went and I decided to turn back. The sandy bottom was visible but far off, the water a bright turquoise such as I’d never seen in the UK. I looked back towards the beach to see a group of teenagers flouting the ‘No Inflatables’ rule spelt out on the big board by the lifeguards’ hut. Despite being so far away, I could hear their happy screams of laughter as they splashed in the shallows. The lifeguards didn’t seem to mind.
I staggered out, the waves pulling at my ankles, and collapsed onto my towel, deciding to attempt a bit of late-summer bronzing myself. If it was good enough for my fellow beachgoers it was good enough for me. I slipped into a doze to the natter of kids daring each other to perform underwater handstands and other watery tricks. The only other sound was the quiet slump of the waves.
I could have spent the whole day alternately getting soaked and drying off at Porthcurno. But we only had one afternoon left before setting sail for the Scilly Isles, and another of Roger’s swims to investigate first. I had enjoyed how varied his Cornish choices were, how they were spread right across the county and in such different places too: the dirty duet on the Red River, the busy harbour at Fowey, the refreshing pool at Treyarnon. Each one was a testament to the variety of wild swimming, capturing his long journey in microcosm.
Our next stop was another sea swim: one with a stunning view, but in a more open setting. Marazion, just along the coast from Penzance, was where Roger had come to revel in childhood fantasies, exploring the knackered old Pullman carriages, parked near the disused train station, which had doubled up as holiday homes back in the 1950s. He had longed to stay in them as a child, but had never done so, bemoaning their sorry, dilapidated state on his visit.
Before setting off to Porthcurno from Molly’s parents’ home in Falmouth, I’d asked Molly’s dad about these old coaches, but was told they were no longer there. A quick search on the web showed that the remaining carriages had been broken up in 2006 and replaced with holiday cottages, the old Marazion train station now converted into a private home.
St Michael’s Mount looked like a mirage in the afternoon heat, quivering green on the horizon. Molly wanted to do as Roger had done and swim all the way across, half a mile there, half a mile back. To me it looked an awful lot further. It was all part of her new ‘go big’ swimming strategy, one which I had been keen to indulge, but was less fussed about as I settled myself into a deckchair on the beach, breathing big gulps of salty air.
Molly waded in, trailing seaweed behind her, and scooted off towards the distant castle walls while I took my time taking in the scene. I decided to ape Roger and go for a long walk before getting in. I stomped off in the direction of Penzance, Molly now a dot on the green-blue sea. A few hundred metres along the coast, I slid in and immediately felt cold as my shoulders dropped and my feet struggled with the rocky bottom. Three days of swimming still hadn’t helped me fully acclimatise, but I refused to listen to my body’s pleas for mercy and swam in Molly’s wake. She had made it about halfway across before turning back, and now she was heading straight for shore, swimming against the angle of the waves. I watched as she pulled herself free while I swam on, eyeing canoeists and speedboats.
I had to admire Roger’s fearlessness in taking on such huge swims at great personal risk. But as I had learnt over the course of this two-year journey, we were very different swimmers. Maybe not in style or technique, but certainly in approach. Perhaps my predisposition for anxiety meant I could never do as he did, swimming hard, far and fast. But I could at least see where he’d done it and remind myself that it was he who set the standard for all wild-swimming adventures.
Parked in my creaking deckchair, wrapped in a towel, I sat drinking tea with Molly, watching boats come and go from faraway Penzance harbour. One of them was the Scillonian III. As we stared at its slow approach, Molly told me all about her trip to the isle of St Mary’s the previous year: the pretty gardens, empty beaches, quiet lanes. I drank the last dregs from my travel mug and tried to imagine Bryher, the little island where we would be staying. The most distant destination in Waterlog was within reach.
Firethorn was bobbing at the bottom of the stone steps in St Mary’s harbour. We inched down and wedged ourselves onto the hard wooden benches at the back of the boat, the youngest members of the Bryher-bound crew. We were early, having almost missed the Scillonian in Penzance thanks to a mixture of our own incompetence and a nonsensical parking app.
Molly had left the car opposite the Jubilee Pool, the town’s stunning lido, shuttered for the summer following the massive storms of the previous winter. This classic, triangular pool, so nearly tarmacked over in the 1980s, had borne the brunt of some of the worst winds this town had seen in living memory.
As we rushed to make the ferry, I glanced through the metal gates to see it drained and destroyed. Local swimmers were campaigning hard to raise the funds to get it reopened as soon as possible, but this was going to be a huge undertaking. Thankfully, funding had been secured, with bold plans to offer kayaking and water polo alongside swimming when the gates swung open. But for now it meant I would have miss one of the key sites from Roger’s Cornwall itinerary. Had I lingered any longer we would have been stranded on the mainland. The Scillonian’s gangplank was pulled away just as Molly and I stepped aboard.
Such intense weather was impossible to imagine as our little vessel chugged out of St Mary’s harbour and over Tresco Flats. The sky was cloudless, a light breeze causing me to reach for a jumper as we stood up and peered over starboard into glassy, electric-blue seas, white sand clearly visible on the bottom. The captain swerved firethorn wildly as we entered the narrow strait, Tresco to our right, avoiding shallow sandbars and rocks, before we gently kissed the little jetty which stuck out from Bryher’s sandy eastern reaches.
Roger made swimming here sound like the apotheosis of his Arcadian dream, an island of dozens of little coves and bays all within easy walking distance of each other. Having found some places to be somewhat dissimilar to his descriptions over the previous two years, I had a certain scepticism about what we would find as we threw our tents and bags into a farm vehicle and followed its slow chug up to the campsite.
My pessimism was punctured as soon as we crested the hill which the campsite clung to, views down to Stinking Porth and Great Popplestones Bay opening out and inviting us to choose which one we’d like to swim in first. Still high from three days of Cornish swimming excess, Molly and I ran screaming like excitable toddlers down the sandy tracks, turning off at the now swanky Hell Bay Hotel and onto Stinking Porth. It had taken us ten minutes to cross the island. The whole of Bryher was ours to explore and, although we had just a day to do so, we felt u
nhurried, relaxed – feelings I usually struggled to tap into when life moves at a fast pace.
Stinking Porth lived up to its name. The piles of bladderwrack at the back of the beach gave off a heavy, damp stench as we walked over them and onto the sand. Back in Falmouth, Molly’s parents had told me about how cold the water was on the Scilly Isles, no matter the time of year. Roger came in April in the hope that it would help him ease his way into his long summer trip. He wound up clad in his wetsuit to stave off the biting cold of the Atlantic after one skin-tingling dip.
Despite being forewarned, I struggled to believe that after spending a summer under the sun the sheltered water of this little bay would be much colder than that of Porthcurno or Godrevy. But as my feet sank into the wet sand and the water reached my calves, my thighs, my unmentionables, I was close to screaming, and not in joy. The cold was absurd, pinching at every sinew and causing me to gasp hard for breath. I battled against the urge to run out and forced myself to dive. Total immersion brought with it a burst of adrenalin, but I knew as soon as I surfaced that I’d be swimming without protection for no more than a few minutes. Molly was next to me, head out, breathing like a golden retriever, all air seemingly shoved from her lungs the moment she’d joined me in the water. Being a toughened Cornish swimmer, she powered on when I told her I was retreating to the beach to get togged up in full neoprene. Usually the first to berate me for my willingness to rubber up, she nodded her approval and swam off into the deep cove.
Dressed in wetsuit and boots, snorkel clamped across my face, I strode back in and slid under without the chill nipping at my toes. Flippers would have come in handy as I set out for distant rocks, face down and swimming a speedy freestyle. I marvelled at the clarity of it all as I got deeper and deeper: the clearness of the water, the ridges of white sand visible despite the depth, the gentle sway of long tresses of seaweed.
I soon found myself above a kelp forest, its long strands stretching away thirty feet below. I lengthened my stroke and pushed my arms deeper to touch their tendrils. Normally I would have headed for shore at the uncertainty of what was beneath me, but I felt part of this little corner of the Scillies, just another creature in its waters. The snorkel aided this sense of being at one with it all. There was no need to pull my head from the icy water, so I stared down and let the incoming tide push me and pull me in whichever direction it fancied.
Molly had gone climbing on the rocks which burst up from the beach, pushing herself through a tiny arch as I took a slow walk back along the beach to where we’d left our bags. I felt stoned, unable to imagine a world beyond Bryher, its Tempest-like beaches and bays. If Cornwall had felt distant from London, the Scilly Isles were truly otherworldly.
Dried off but ready for more, we took the short walk around the coast to Great Popplestones Bay, past the freshwater Great Pool, where huge shoals of fish created havoc on the surface, splashing hard as if the water beneath them was evaporating, their life force being sucked up by the sky. Strange stone sculptures marked our way, pebbles balanced atop one another every metre or so, leading to a little maze which swirled in on itself as the path turned from grass to open sand.
Roger came across these intricate pebble creations further south at Rushy Bay, and it pleased me that this fresh effort stood here all these years later. It added to the ethereal nature of the place, a mystical set of islands detached from the average daily realities of mainland Britain. I enjoyed the fact that someone would need to come and lay out these little mazes and precarious sculptures every time a heavy storm blew in. There was a commitment to it that made me happy, a sign that people on Bryher cared about more than tourists and making money.
Molly slumped down on her towel, drowsy following her wetsuit-free swim, closing her eyes to the still-high sun. It was late afternoon and there was still plenty of warmth in its glow, but I struggled back into the neoprene, caked in sand from Stinking Porth, desperate to ensure this second swim of the day lasted more than a few delicious moments. The beach here slipped into the ocean quicker than around the coast, the entry to the bay feeling the full force of the Atlantic from the west. Waves tore over high boulders and smashed into cliffs, but in our sheltered spot deep in the cove all was calm, a slight lap on the shore as I snapped on my goggles and nestled the snorkel’s mouthpiece around my gums.
My earlier swim had been a resounding success, so I set off in the same fashion, head down and swimming hard for deep water. The seaweed here was thicker and rose higher, skirting the surface and wrapping itself around my arms and legs the further I pushed on into the bay. The dark closed in as more seaweed covered the sandy surface, and all I could see was a deep brown wave of underwater plant life, as if beckoning me to swim further. I surfaced in a thick soup of tendrils and realised I had swum 300 metres out to the nearest rocks, weeds skirting its edges.
Swimming without getting into a tangle was becoming impossible, so I turned and made for clearer waters, where things were rougher. The salty slap of the sea on my face told me that the glassy stillness I’d enjoyed earlier was over, so I turned and powered back to shore, beaching myself and clawing at the wetsuit, desperate to dry off in the sun before it slipped too low for sunbathing.
That evening we ate bread and cheese bought from the surprisingly well-stocked Town Shop, from where we also procured a more than decent bottle of Argentinian Malbec. The ‘Whole Earth Catalogue’ vibe my predecessor found on the island did still exist, but now it had a top-notch wine supplier to go alongside the honesty boxes dotted outside people’s homes offering up local honey, fudge and lobster, sellers unconcerned about anyone making off without paying.
We had planned to eat at the Hell Bay Hotel, but found the modest establishment of Roger’s time far fancier than we had first thought. The restaurant was fully booked, but our lo-fi meal, eaten while sitting in a pair of broken deckchairs left opposite our tents, was less expensive and far more enjoyable. To be honest, the hotel was anathema to the atmosphere on Bryher, an overly luxurious spot not in keeping with the rough-and-ready vibe I had fallen for earlier in the day. Its heated pool and spa treatments would never be able to top the icy cold of the sea just a few metres from its imposing front entrance.
We polished off the bottle, tipsy now, and decided to run to the top of Shipman Head Down, which rose north of where we were camping. I was fully aware of Roger having raved about the sunset as seen from the top of this high point, and we reached the mossy summit just as it began to touch the horizon, far off out into the Atlantic. We took lunar-like steps over the sea pinks which carpeted the top of the hill, the wine now working its magic and sending us off in different directions, hollering to no one, the Atlantic’s gusts catching and carrying our shouts. I stood stock still as the sun made its final drop into the sea and turned to see the moon rising in the opposite direction. At that moment I felt as if Bryher was the centre of the universe, the axis on which the whole thing turned. I revelled in this drunken thought as we crashed back through bracken and gorse into our tents, where I passed a fitful night, dreaming of swims and being woken by the crack of canvas in the wind.
Early the next morning, after dropping £3 in the honesty box at Veronica’s Farm for some large chunks of fudge, we walked the sandy paths down to Green Bay on the island’s east coast, looking over to Tresco. The tide was racing out and soon walkers would begin to carefully pick their way across the flats, crossing from island to island without having to jump aboard a boat. The wetsuit was damp with dew where I had left it out overnight, sand drying in the crotch and armpits. I pulled it on, cringing, and jogged out towards the water, in the hope I might see the submerged ancient farm walls and boundaries which Roger had seen on his visit.
As soon as I hit the water I knew my luck was out. I waded out a hundred metres, but was still only knee deep, so settled into a crawling motion, sticking my head under and pulling myself along using my hands on the seabed. My amateur archaeology skills yielded no results, and after half an hour all I coul
d see was my frozen fingers pawing at mud.
My disappointment at failing to find the old ruins which Roger had written about so excitedly was soon tempered as we walked south, Rushy Bay opening up before us, the uninhabited island of Samson a seemingly tropical paradise across the water. My swims the day before had perhaps been my favourites of the entire Waterlog journey, in the most beautiful of places, but this beach was perfect, a level up from those marvellous bays. I knew as soon as I saw Rushy Bay that I would have to swim in it without the wetsuit for protection. It was now mid-September, and there was little chance that the weather would be this warm again.
To my surprise, Molly said she wanted to get done up in the wetsuit, so while she yanked it on and made faces as its damp confines wrapped themselves around her skin, I stripped down to my shorts and made for the water. I knew what to expect, so the killer cold didn’t knock me sideways like it had done the day before. I stayed focused on my breath and looked all around me, at the Northern Rocks, the gulls wheeling in the sky, the wisp of stratus clouds high and untroubling. In this place I felt a profound sense of calm.
It was the physical distance from the everyday, yes, but also the strong, cold touch of the water, setting my skin alight and directing my focus onto nothing but the present. This was the best anti-anxiety drug I could ever find, but I knew that it was one which was not readily available, and that scared me like it hadn’t done for a long time. As I continued to swim, I realised that it was now a year since I had broken my wrist. A year since I had first sought Mark’s help and begun to tackle my problems with anxiety and self-hatred. And, by and large, I knew that I had started to make things better. For the most part, I had managed to stop swimming being the sole panacea for my endless worrying. I was talking more openly about it, recognising that ultimately worry couldn’t fix anything, and in the previous twelve months had felt lighter, less stressed, as a result. I was finding ways to heal myself by seeing the joy in spending time with people I loved and sharing what I loved with them. I was worrying less about work than I had ever done. In that respect, I was much better.