Sea Swimming Blog #45
Day 84 Sea Swimming.
#45 of the blog.
Today was pretty chilly wasn’t it?!
I normally like to do my swim after I’ve dropped my daughter at school but with low tide at 9:54am, the thought of having to walk hundreds of feet down the beach at St Aubin before hitting the water didn’t fill me with too much excitement.
So, with a few bits to do it town, I thought I may as well head there first and get a dip in at Havre des Pas… as I was driving sleet began to fall and that did fill me with excitement :)
Considering I had about an hours worth of stuff to do in town, I decided to get that done first as walking round afterwards in the sleet having been in the cold water also didn’t appeal, but by the time I’d done my bits the weather had subsided and I arrived at HDP to a cloudy, chilly yet sleet free environment.
Never mind… it was still bloody cold… with an air temp of 4 degrees according to the car and HDP pool itself being notoriously fresh, I bought my camera and tripod with me and had a quick think as to what I would capture.
Taking photos on a daily basis in what has been one of the greyest of winters hasn’t been an easy task… especially when I’m by myself and don’t even have someone to point the camera at.
So, I decided I’d stick the camera on a timer and point it in my own direction.
There is a certain egotistical feeling when doing this but I was reminded by someone the other day that this (this whole blog thing) is my story so I shouldn’t be worried about that.
With that in mind (and with no one there to judge!) I took a quick ‘here’s me about to swim shot’… not entirely sure what the tongue was about… then had an idea to try and capture myself diving in.
After setting the camera up I got changed, and, taking safety into account went into the water, dunked myself and checked out that there were no rocks or other obstacles under the surface of where I was planning on diving into.
Diving straight into super cold water without acclimatising to it first can cause a heart attack… and I wasn’t really up for that… and no one wants to dive into rocks either.
Job done, I got back out and set up the intervalometer on my camera (this allows me to take a series of photos up to 1 every second for a specified number of shots). In an ideal world i.e. if I was photographing someone else doing it, I would have stuck the camera in the equivalent of burst mode with a fast shutter speed and fired of 10 or 20 shots in the space of a couple of seconds to make sure I got the best one.
But this isn’t possible with the intervalometer and so I had to try to listen out for the camera as it took shot after shot, then time my dive and hope that I got it right.
I tried a few times and this one is the best I could get - I’m not sure my diving form is exactly perfect but there you go… legs should definitely be closer together however the wind must have dropped a touch as I did manage to capture a cool reflection which was a nice touch.
Whilst doing all this I’d set my phone up to capture another time-lapse, so having been in the water for a little while and tried a few times to get the image, I decided enough was enough and I’d see what the time-lapse was saying.
Half way through I noticed what appeared to be someone coming up to the phone and touching the camera…
“who the hell was that?”
I played it back and watched frame by frame to see that it was none other than a friendly, curious magpie, who had no doubt heard about my blog in the recent Bailiwick Express feature and wanted a bit of air time.
… as if they don’t get enough.
“Swimming is like flying underwater”
- David Walliams