OWS

So apparently OWS doesn't stand for the little noises I have started making when I walk down the slipway over the last week. It stands for open-water swimming and it is a huge phenomenon here since Lockdown. I like swimming, with my feeble breast stroke, and I do prefer swimming in the sea, though I have only ever done that in summer and have usually had a wetsuit on in Irish waters.
 

Swimming was the only thing I started to miss a lot in Lockdown, so as soon as we were allowed to travel beyond our locality I would always take my swimming stuff. I had a few swims in the sea up on our north coast and one in the spectacular Blue Lough in our Mourne Mountains, but in August as lady from church invited me along to her swimming group, and I have been swimming with them as much as work allows ever since.

The main group is actually huge, and they swim in all sorts of places in our county, but I just swim with the local ladies who swim from an old slipway just beyond the park at the bottom of our hill. I park there and walk along with my little rucksack, my insulated mug of tea, and my very reassuring float. 

Everyone has asked from the start if it's cold. Honestly, the water has only started to feel cold this last week. Up until now, even if it wasn't a beautifully sunny day like this one at the start of the month, the water was very comfortable. This is Belfast Lough, on the east coast of Northern Ireland, at the end of a gloriously sunny Spring and Summer. I had swim shoes already, because I hate the feel of silt and plant life, but the recommended gloves help too. I suppose you're protecting the extremities. Since October folk are swimming with their hats on as well, but not wetsuits. This group swims in skins! So yes, now it's cold!

If it's not too rough, and if I know the tide is coming in, I'm confident to swim out to the big metal pole. When the tide is high the water gets deep quite quickly, but on low days we can mostly walk out to here. I'm a very careful swimmer, always needing to know I have the strength to get back!

And that's it. There is only one hard part - the getting out of bed for the early swims to catch the tide. After that, when you're all booked in to check that the number is below social distancing requirements for space available on the slipway to get changed, it becomes automatic. When people visit and we go to the beach I've always said that once you start walking towards the water you don't stop. So that's what I do, I just walk in until the water comes to my waist and then I swim. No hesitation, no thinking, just swimming. If the Lough is very calm, and again if I know the tide is coming in, I will swim back along the wall with the stronger swimmers. I've only braved it to the end and back once!

I have lived along this shoreline my whole life. I bussed along it to school. I walked this park with an aunt who lived in the area long before I moved here from the city. I ambled through it with two boyfriends, and with the one I married. I have beach-combed here with small sons, cycled here with bigger sons, and sat here often when I was getting over the very little very successful cancer procedure I had last year. It is a wonderful thing to me that at a time when the world seems so constrained and constricted I can do something new, meet people new and get a wholly new physical perspective on a landscape I thought I knew intimately. I know that these are difficult times with unprecedented challenges for our lifetimes, but I do firmly believe that we can make the most of them for ourselves and our families. This may well have the potential to be a terrible winter of our discontent, but I am thankful that God can still come in to our houses and our lives, and stay with us with no distance, no sanitising, no mask. Thus far has the Lord helped us x

(Thanks to PC for coming with me one afternoon when the sun was shining and there were no organised after-school swims! He took the photos and kept an eye on me - cold water swimming is not one of his many, many, many interests!)