The weather decides whether we swim

Channel swimmers know: if you don’t like the weather, wait a minute. Elaine K Howley delves into a swimmer’s history of weather watching

I write to you, dear reader, from the comfort of a lovely AirBnB home in Whitfield, UK, where my friend Charlotte awaits a passable window of weather through which to swim to France.

As I pondered this month’s topic of seasonal swimming, Indian summer and the extended swimming season, it occurred to me that humans being beholden to the whims of the weather is not unusual, and in fact has a lengthy history. After all, wasn’t it inclement weather that led our earliest ancestors to first construct shelter?

Over millennia, the British have developed a real talent for describing and discussing the changeable nature of the island nation’s cornucopia of climactic conditions.

For would-be English Channel swimmers like Charlotte, however, weather takes up a unique, outsized space in our hearts and minds as perhaps the most important of the myriad factors we can’t control that dictates the outcome of any cross-channel effort.

Since Captain Matthew Webb’s first swim across the Dover Strait, weather has been a main character in the play of each crosschannel drama. Will the wind and sea settle long enough to allow a physical triumph? Or will the white horses neigh and kick up a nasty current that thwarts a landing on that far shore?

While Channel swimmers hope to have ‘the Queen’s Weather,’ – many must settle for flenching weather – conditions that are expected to improve but never fully materialise. This is perhaps the most painful of all weather conditions for channel swimmers, living in hope and waiting for the word “go” from their pilot. Keep calm and carry on has an additional meaning for swimmers launched into less-than ideal circumstances.

Many antiquated terms for weather and climate have passed into oblivion, but their low pressure lingers like a far off rumble of thunder. For example, the term the Queen’s Weather refers to Queen Victoria’s reputation for seeming to bring the best weather with her on official visits. The term was popularised by Charles Dickens in an 1851 dispatch, ‘Ten Minutes with Her Majesty.’

In it, he wrote, “The memorable morning was a bright one in February – the fourth of the month. The sky was cloudless; a brilliant sun gave to it that cheering character which from the good fortune Her Majesty experiences whenever she travels, or appears publicly – has passed into a proverb as ‘The Queen’s Weather.’”

Another old term, ‘Indian summer,’ has its origins in the European conquest of North America, and can be traced to a 1778 work by the French-American soldier turned farmer J H St John de Crèvecoeur (aka Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crèvecoeur). He used it in ‘Letters from an American’ to describe a period of unseasonable warmth in autumn after a cold spell or frost – typically in October or November. The calm, hazy, hot conditions recall the fleeting summer, striking back one more time as winter looms, hulking and inevitable.

The term made its way back to Britain in the 19th century – during the era of the British Raj in India, leading some to assume it referred to the Asian subcontinent. But instead, it connoted Native Americans – some of whom set prairie fires in their quest to repel European invaders. Those fires contributed haze to the horizon, and that could be part of the phrase’s birth.

The American Metrological Society attributes the name to “the way that the American Indians avail themselves of this extra opportunity to increase their winter [harvest] stores,” and notes that these conditions do not arise every year but can occur two or three times in some years.

Channel swimmers scheduled to launch their efforts in the autumn often hope for a spell of Indian summer, but the term itself has fallen out of favour in some circles as it’s been deemed potentially derogatory by some indigenous peoples.

In Europe, a warm snap in November was sometimes called Saint Martin’s summer, old wives’ summer, St Luke’s summer, Allhallown summer or even halcyon days. But while these periods earned these fanciful nicknames, spells of warmth in autumn aren’t uncommon.

As the BBC notes, “the origin of all these sayings has, perhaps, more to do with keeping people’s spirits up during the headlong rush into winter.”

Waiting for winter can be dreary work, just as swimmers waiting for a chance to swim must endure the hardship of uncertainty. A simple look out the window is never enough to know whether weather conditions are ripe for a successful swim.