Guest post: Becoming a Mermaid, Annette Vaucanson Kelly.
I took the plunge and swam in the Irish Sea for the very first time on the 17th June 2017.
It was about 6 o’clock on a Saturday evening. The car temperature gauge showed 28°C - something of a rarity in Ireland!
I had wanted to go for a wild swim in the Irish Sea for a long time. Was this the day it would finally happen? I felt nervous.
Nothing prepares you for the shocking cold. Numbing, painful nearly, but also electrifying.
Taking two steps in and one back, I slowly waded in. As the waves reached higher and higher up my stomach and chest, I gasped repeatedly. ‘I always do that too!’ my daughter assured me with an excited laugh.
By then the skin on my legs had gone numb. Every so often I lifted my hands out of the water to wriggle my stiff fingers. As the swell and my breath slowed, I took a deep inhale and, with my eyes closed, I took the plunge.
It was only a few strokes, over a dozen metres alongside the shore. But I swam in the Irish Sea. I did it!
It was both the culmination of a long held dream of mine and the start of an unexpected journey of self-discovery.
Had it not been for the swimming lessons my husband bought me as a Christmas present, none of it would have happened.
I had always been a mediocre swimmer - poor technique and zero confidence. Born and bred in a landlocked area of France, I saw swimming outdoors anywhere north of Lyon as something akin to self-inflicted torture.
Yet I was fascinated by wild swimming.
It started several years before that momentous first swim, when I came across a piece on wild swimming in British magazine The Green Parent. I recently found a printout I made of an Irish Times article on outdoor swimming, dated August 2012 - a full 5 years before I actually took the plunge.
I was immediately hooked.
Each swim every bit as cold as expected, yet extraordinary. Numbingly cold, yet deeply enjoyable. Physically demanding, yet blissfully restorative.
This first swim was followed by a summer of wild swimming in France, exploring the rivers, lakes and pools of my homeland. But it also became a new exhilarating way to adventure around Ireland. We started planning our family adventures in the great outdoors around swimming opportunities.
I remained a fair weather swimmer, taking to the chilly Irish Sea from June until November at the latest. Then, in June 2019, I inadvertently opened my swimming season under the full moon with a bunch of self-styled mermaids. I haven’t stopped swimming since.
Little did I know back then that I had found my pod.
Following another epic summer of wild swimming in France, I started going for dips in the sea with the Greystones Seagirls once or twice a week after the school drop-off. As the Irish Sea gradually got colder still, we kept sharing the swim love, and tea and cakes, and kept connecting around this strange habit. Before we knew it, we had formed a gently supportive and warmly welcoming little community, celebrating the turning of the seasons with cold dips, chats and laughter.
When the pandemic and lockdown put paid to our shared swims last March, it was as if the rug had been pulled from under my feet. Solo swims became the norm and I sorely missed my newly found sea friends.
Still, I felt grateful that their warm friendship had carried me through my first winter of sea swimming. The sea became my lifeline.
At the end of a particularly hard day in late April, Brian and I escaped for a much needed reset. Quite naturally, our steps took us down the well-trodden road to the seafront. Then what started as a regular lockdown walk turned into a micro adventure. Together we explored the small coves and temporary beaches, the coarse sand and the grey rocks that give Greystones its name, between the cove and the South Beach.
In the glorious evening light, it felt like we were magically transported somewhere far away. On the Wild Atlantic Way maybe. But still 2km from home. Sometimes I still can’t quite believe this is where we live.
The sea was always a foreign country to me. Both beautiful and intimidating. Welcoming and unpredictable. Benevolent and brutally powerful.
Wild swimming has taught me about the sea. I now know what time and where on the horizon the sun rises over the Irish Sea. I now know that spring tides, which nearly swallow up the beach, are linked to the new moon. I now know that, in winter, sunlight first reaches the rocks at the far end of the cove, painting the cresting waves in soft pink tones, before slowly spreading across the beach. But not all the way to the steps. The near end of the cove remains in the shade all day.
Or is it that the sea has become my teacher?
Embracing the cold under the vast expanse of the open sky, I have learnt to brace myself and to let go, to challenge myself and accept my limits, to surf the waves of change and be at one with this beautiful living world.
I have become a fully fledged mermaid.
Annette Vaucanson Kelly is an outdoor family blogger at Four Acorns / Quatre graines de chêne. A nature and climate activist with a passion for trees and wild swimming, she lives in Greystones, Co Wickow, Ireland, with her husband and their four nature-loving children.
