Brave New Waters

Author and Wild Swimming Brother, Jack Hudson traded his freshwater dips in the UK for a salty life in Australia last year. He shares how he felt like a ‘fish out of water’ in the southern hemisphere while adapting to sea swimming culture. 

“Different strokes for different folks” – so the saying goes. I guess it applies to different species of swimmers you meet around the world. I’ve tailed bubbling South Africans, who get peppered with questions, like how do they brave their salty training grounds? Why haven’t they gone the way of those Planet Earth seals, clenched like blubbery biltong in a white shark’s jaws? I’ve also swum with proud Turks, who lunge into their backyard Hellespont and rampage across the strait, like they’re off on an invasion of the opposite shore.

I’ve found that we all fear different things. We’ve grown accustomed to our own watery habitats. And we all take some pride in where we started out. For me, it was Cumbrian rivers and lakes around the English Lake District. We grew up thinking we were Wilderpeople, perplexed by tales of giant pike and bloodsucking lamprey eels. It was mostly freshwater for us in those early years. Lakes, waterfalls, rivers and tarns were the places we swam. Our best discoveries were underwater arches, caves behind sheets of water and rock stacks to jump from.

I didn’t swim properly in the sea until I crossed the Scottish Corryvreckan with my brothers back in 2014. Since then, I’ve stomached the unease you feel, threading through the chop, over a chasm of deep water. I thought I was getting pretty comfortable with it. Then I moved with my partner, Anna, out to Sydney in September last year. A Brisbane native, she’s been through those semi-aquatic school years Down Under and has an affinity with the Pacific. She took off her shoes the second we arrived at Bondi Beach, insisting we had to “get our feet in the sand” – she’s a bit like a sommelier for sand and how it feels underfoot. Apparently, the Sunshine Coast has the best stuff.

A new breed of water folk

Anyway, it was our first day in Sydney. We were jetlagged and marooned on the underside of the world. Empty apartment. No bank accounts. No healthcare. And a long list of life admin to sink into. Yet there we were at this iconic beach – famous for its sea-savvy lifeguards (remember Bondi Rescue?) and a fair amount of drama on a weekly basis. I’d been there a decade earlier and was awed by the waves on a windy day. Surfers slunk like apparitions from the foamy guts of these monsters. You could blink and miss them, cutting back over crests, or even spinning finless onto white water.

To me, this was a new breed of water folk. In those early weeks, we went down to the beach most days. We watched as they hurled themselves into varying swells. Then the swimmers started to appear beyond the waves as well. There was only so long I could sit on sandhills, or dunk in the shallows, before I decided I had to be more like them.

Eventually, I joined a group of sea swimmers called the Bondi Salties. There are all kinds of clubs along that stretch of sand, but The Salties are surely the biggest. They head out on Friday mornings at sunrise and often catch the interest of passing dolphins as they carve across the bay.

The first Friday I joined them it was early in the season. There was some chop and it was a fight to get out through the surf. Most of the swimmers were clad in full wetsuits. It all seemed to be going pretty well at first. It felt good to lunge out to where the swell settled. I kept up with the swimmers at the front and started to breathe more easily. We swam across to the other side of the bay. At which point I began to peel inshore, finding space to reach out and move more freely. Then suddenly I looked up and I was alone in the troughs and peaks. I couldn’t see any of the other swimmers.

For a second, I was panicked by the lack of tow floats, escort boats or kayakers – all things we relied on back home. The wall of Bondi Icebergs pool was up ahead. Frenzied coils of water whipped up mist against the rocks. My only escape route (as far as I could tell) was what I later learnt is the worst area to swim in from. Backpacker’s Rip. It’s not that there’s an undercurrent, close to the rocks, but the breakers are at their biggest and only skilled surfers go in there on a rough day.

I decided to make a break for the beach. It wasn’t long before the waves made me their plaything. I’d glance back in time to see one curling over. With each impact they’d swallow me and force me down. I’d come up dribbling salt and gasping for air. The thought crossed my mind of sidling up to a surfer and clinging to their board. In my head, I was about to become that airlifted Brit, wrenched from his first bewildering swim. The parable of the foreign swimmer. Then my arms kept spinning. Another wave barrelled into my shoulders. My head went down and I did my best impression of a torpedo, trying to gain some distance towards dry land.

There’s nothing like that feeling of finally kicking down and rooting both feet in the sand. Adrenaline coursed through me. I was reminded how much wiser, stronger and more puzzling the sea is than ourselves. It could chew you up and spit you out on the watermark, like the entrails of a belched-out bluebottle.

“How do Aussie swimmers get over these natural fears?”

For a while, I was like a fish out of water. Then there I was again at Bondi a few weeks later – I took my camera down and caught the charges of nine-year-old Nippers, diving into the frothy maw and wheeling their arms into the deep. Again, those same waters had beaten me up and left me concussed a few days earlier, when I mounted my surfboard under the crest of a wave I had no business being under. I was all the more impressed by these fearless Nippers, taking part in the Bondi To Bronte event – a chance to enjoy a treasured Aussie pastime of sprinting into breakers and bodysurfing back again. All age groups took it in turns to swim varying distances, some arcing all the way round the headland to Bronte.

Since those early scares, I’ve learnt to watch and admire these swimmers. I’ll get back in the sea and swim out beyond the breakers from time to time. I take it easy though. I’m happier in the Bondi Icebergs pool most days. I still get some open water kicks in the saline wash, when the waves crash in, before the big pool closes. I’ve also set myself the challenge of swimming 24 rock pools down Sydney’s coastline, from Palm Beach (where they shoot Home and Away) to Oak Park. I’m sure I’ll unpack these fears as I go.

The Sydney swimmers are a brave bunch – seafarers, less acclimatised to cold water. Sub-15 degrees is thought of as a winter swim here. Back home, we were inured to sub-5C swims on a muggy day, without a wetsuit. Still, I can’t help feeling humbled by this new discovery of another aquatic species. It’s a reminder not to swim with an ego. No one really cares. And the ones that do – the ones who flex at the pool edge and make scathing remarks about folk in wetsuits, or anyone wielding paddles and fins – there’s likely some other aspect of swimming they suck at.

A swimmer’s bravado is often a prelude to them clinging to a lifeguard, like a half- drowned sea damsel. I almost proved that point myself. There’s no pressure out here, once you get past the initial shock of folk who’ve been raised in the sea. Every swim club teaches us to go at our own pace. Only swim as far as you feel comfortable.

Always do it with others. There are things to be afraid of, but as every shark scare teaches us on these coasts, it doesn’t take long for locals to all be out again and tasting open water. We’ve had a few hammerheads recently crossing over the shark net, but they don’t stray far inwards and shark sightings are rarer than you think when you arrive.

How do Aussie swimmers get over these natural fears? After you wake up for enough sunrises and plunge into the surf, the pleasure of getting salted starts to clear this up a little. Offing views and cool depths slowly overpower your nerves. Some days you get that itch and Spielberg theme tunes and finned critters be damned, you can’t pass it up!

Jack Hudson is the youngest of the Wild Swimming Brothers and author of Swim Wild. His second book, Cold Water, launched on Unbound on 14 February and is available for pledges. This article is from the March 2023 issue of Outdoor Swimmer. Click here to subscribe to the magazine.