Nightswimming
An outdoor swimming adventure in one of Canada’s great lakes.
What’s it like to swim at night?
The man on the beach says his favourite thing about swimming at night is how he feels the water breathe. His name is Josh, and he’s an organizer of open water swim events. The beach is Turkey Point on Lake Erie, and I’m here to learn how to swim in the dark.
There are fifteen of us taking part in the event, hosted by South West Ontario Open Water Swim (SWOOWS for short). The group is friendly and welcoming, a mix of happy amateurs like me and taught-looking triathletes types in training. On arrival, we’re each issued a neon bathing cap, tow float, and handfuls of glow sticks. We help each other crack sticks and connect them around our necks and ankles. We stuff more into the bags of our tow floats. One swimmer adds a waterproof headlamp to her float bag. She’s the brightest beacon of all. I’m grumpy about having to wear a cap, but I suck it up. For safety’s sake. Dusting it with talc helps it slide onto my head.
It’s a sticky evening. Twenty-six degrees celcius on the thermometer, but it feels hotter. Thunderstorms have been threatening all day, and Josh tells us we’re to head straight back to shore if the sky opens. Lightning and open water is a dangerous combination. A bolt hitting the lake does so with enough force to vapourize sand and spreads horizontally across the surface of the water. A swimmer in open water is exposed, just like a person standing in the middle of an open field. A shock can be lethal. If you escape with your life, you could still lose your hearing - when a bolt strikes water it creates up to 260 decibels of noise. An ambulance siren blaring at thirty meters is about 100.
After our kit assignment and safety briefing, our group of swimmers is divvied up into pairs and assigned a kayaker. Emily, my swimmate, is a cold water swimmer from Scotland. She’s enthusiastic about the sense of community she has found through events like this one. “I’ve made some wonderful friends,” she says. Our kayaker, Patricia, has decked out her boat with lights and glow sticks to guide us as the light wanes. We’ll need her beacons - as the sun goes down, a swimmer’s ability to judge distance is hugely compromised. Our instructions are to stay close to her as we swim, and she promises to prod us if we veer off course. The course is a 2km back-and-forth along the shore of the lake, marked by lighted buoys at either end.
In the UK, swimming outside is enjoying a surge in popularity. The Outdoor Swimming Society Facebook group is more than 45,000 members strong and adding new dippers daily. There are book festivals dedicated to swim-lit; award-winning documentaries like 2008’s Chasing The Sublime (dir. Amanda Blugrass); and new dipping spots opening up in city centers. The health benefits - both physical and mental - of swimming outdoors are substantial. But as interest in open water grows, so too do the number of accidents. This summer just gone, three swimmers lost their lives in the Thames in separate incidents, and a man drowned in a Cotswold water park lake. There is tension between the need to equip swimmers new to the world of wild and outdoor swimming with the right tools to stay safe, and the need to protect our right to swim in the wild without overzealous safety restrictions . To be able to enjoy the closeness with nature an outdoor swim brings, the purity and peace of it all, is truly a magical thing. Events like this one, and groups like SWOOWS, help us navigate that tension by offering opportunities to learn more about safely swimming in open water, and helping us connect with swim buddies to adventure with.
I am a bold swimmer. Swimming in the wild, even at night, does not frighten me. Instead, it feels like a special treat, a wonderful gift I can spoil myself with. But busy, crowded waters trouble me. I mostly fear getting kicked in the mouth, or inadvertently piling on top of somebody and hurting them. I’ve never attempted an organized group swim before, and I’ve never tried swimming with a tow float. I’m grateful for this opportunity to hone my skills and improve my safety knowledge here tonight.
The water, listed at 17.2 degrees, feels colder than I’d anticipated. I have a particular, peculiar passion for cold water swimming, which helped me stay mostly sane during a particularly brutal Canadian winter. An icy dip is exhilarating, and a frigid Christmas day dip at the local lido is now my new favourite tradition when I’m home for the holidays. What I’m learning is that a distance swim in cooler waters requires a different kind of preparation to taking a quick plunge. I’m not mad about my lack of a wetsuit - I prefer as much skin-to-water contact as possible - but as my calves start cramping I find myself wishing I’d packed a sports drink.
My swimmate, Emily, worries that she’s slow, but I’m slower. I’m the only person haphazarding through a mix of backstroke and breaststroke. Everyone else doggedly front-crawls their way around the circuit. I make a mental note to tackle front crawl improvements next, although I do love backstroke. Looking up at the darkening sky, the strange sensation of the light suddenly changing when I flip back over to breaststroke, then soaking up the experience with my head up and observing the pockets of light from the swimmers and kayakers around me. It is surreal, and it is wonderful. I lend Emily my goggles, and enjoy the feeling of freedom.
This was my first organized swim, but I’m confident it won’t be my last. I can feel the itch to improve my stroke, to tackle longer distances in ever-weirder waters. It might not replace the thrill of a truly wild ocean swim, but I’m drawn to the sense of community found amongst the swimmers here. It’s only by the time I swing back towards the beach that it is really, truly dark. The biting bugs descend attack immediately, and I scamper back to my car feeling zonked but elated. It’s misty on the return drive, and I catch mice and frogs scampering across the road in my headlights. I’m thirteen minutes from home when the lightning hits.