SWIMMING WITH THE POD

Jon Stagg has completed the Dark Mofo Nude Solstice Swim every year since its inception. What makes someone swim nude in the middle of the Tasmanian winter? Jon has some fabulous stories - he even did it himself when the event was cancelled during covid!

Songs in this episode - all licensed under a Creative Commons License:

• Nude Beach - Le Blanche

Image from ABC

I'm hoping to do the Canberra version - let's see where we're at come the solstice! You'll see it on strava or twitter if I do.

If you live on the east coast of Australia, your ocean swimming season has been rudely interrupted by the weather, with swims cancelled up and down the coast because of high swells and flooding. Australia has just experienced its wettest summer for five years because of a climate cycle known as La Nina.  Associate Professor Andréa Taschetto is an oceanographer and ARC Future Fellow at the Climate Change Research Centre, UNSW.

Songs in this episode - all licensed under a Creative Commons License:

• La Niña Y El Lobo - Jesus Adrián Romero

Image from hippo px

Some links from the show: Andrea on twitter, Marc on twitter, Marc on strava

Associate Professor Anna Clark is an ocean lover, fisher and historian at the University of Technology, Sydney. She has extensively researched the history of beach culture in Australia, an important place for thousands of generations of Indigenous culture,  a place of last resort during the Great Depression, and a place of upheaval during the more recent Cronulla riots. And throughout all that time, it has been vital for food and industry.

Songs in this episode - all licensed under a Creative Commons License:

• Beach - Lichu

Image from exploroz

John Sheely is head gardener at the Warrnambool Botanical Gardens, an acclaimed ocean swimmer who, with pools closed due to covid, has now swum 300 consecutive ocean swims, and is aiming at 365 - a fair achievement when you consider he's swimming without a wetsuit off the coast of Victoria! It will end up being over 1000 km swum. He's also got quite the take on beer and steak as sports nutrition!

You can find John on Strava and Twitter. Image from The Standard.

Songs in this episode - all licensed under a Creative Commons License:

• Beer - The fishermen and the priestess

Chloe McCardel is probably the world's best ocean swimmer. She holds the record for the world's longest unassisted ocean swim (124.4 km), has crossed the English Channel 37 times, was inducted into the International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame in 2016 and was International Marathon Swimmer of the Year, 2014 & 2015. Her achievements are too long to fully describe! She is also an acclaimed coach, and in November is giving free online English Channel solo swim advice talks for which you can register here.

Image from Chloe's Facebook page.

Songs in this episode - all licensed under a Creative Commons License:

• Chloe - Fear the priest

Craig Clarke is a champion Australian surf life-saver who has had a dream of swimming the English Channel since watching Des Renford in the 1970s. He had a slot booked in for this year, and then Covid-19 hit. Undeterred, not wanting to waste the training, and to raise money for Beyond Blue, Craig developed the 36 km “Coals to Newcastle” ocean swim on the Australian East Coast, a swim leg that has never been attempted before.  The course dates back over 100 years to when coal ships loaded at Catherine Hill Bay jetty (where the swim started) and transported coal into Newcastle Harbour past Nobbys Lighthouse (finishing point for the swim). It also has a great deal of personal significance to Craig as a coal-miner, with Newcastle being Craig’s home town and Swansea Belmont SLSC his club.

Craig also raised as astonishing $32000 for Beyond Blue. The swim took 12 hours and you can read more about the swim at the Coals to Newcastle Facebook page.

Image from Newcastle Herald.

Songs in this episode - all licensed under a Creative Commons License:

• Walking on hot coals - Joe Bongiovanni / Jamie Rhind

Heather Massey is a senior lecturer in the Extreme Environments Research Group at the University of Portsmouth. Heather has done extensive work into the human response to cold water, both the physical and mental effects, and her areas of research interest include thermal, altitude and survival physiology.

She's also an amazing ocean swimmer, having swum the English Channel and around Jersey, among other things. And has a podcast called Humans in Extremes, interviewing extraordinary guests who have done extraordinary activities in extreme environmental conditions.

Image from Heather on Twitter.

Songs in this episode - all licensed under a Creative Commons License:

• Ice Cold - Spurb Music

Bold and Beautiful are an informal Sydney swim group for all ages and abilities who meet out the front of Manly Life Saving Club every day and swim at 7am, 7 days a week from Manly to Shelly Beach and back.

Dorset Sutton is a philanthropist and along with Bold and Beautiful has been a key part of Operation Crayweed, an effort to bring crayweed back to Sydney beaches - you may remember this from the last episode. Dorset, along with wife Jenny, runs the Lim-Sutton Initiative which is focused on marine philanthropy.

Image from Bold and Beautiful

Songs in this episode - all licensed under a Creative Commons License:

• Bold - Human Condition

Crayweed, a type of seaweed, forms dense forests on shallow reefs all the way from Port Macquarie to Tasmania. However, there is a 70 km gap in crayweed off the coast of Sydney. Sometime during the 1980s, crayweed disappeared completely between Palm Beach and Cronulla, likely due to the poorly treated sewage that used to be pumped directly onto Sydney’s beaches. However, despite Sydney's water quality improving dramatically since the establishment of the deep ocean sewage outfalls, the crayweed forests have not returned.

Ziggy Marzinelli leads the crayweed restoration research at the University of Sydney and the Sydney Institute of Marine Science, and is part of Operation Crayweed, a concerted effort to restore Sydney's underwater crayweed forests. One of the places they are working is Cabbage Tree Bay near Manly, and have enlisted the help of ocean swimming group with Bold and the Beautiful (stay tuned for a podcast with them very soon).

Image from Patagonia AUS & NZ, who are also working with Operation Crayweed.

Songs in this episode - all licensed under a Creative Commons License:

• Seaweed Smoothie - oever

Dr. Shane Gould is the only swimmer to hold every world freestyle record from 100 to 1500 metres and the 200-metre individual medley simultaneously. She is the first female swimmer to win three Olympic gold medals in world record time, and the first swimmer to win Olympic medals in five individual events in a single Olympics. She is also the only Australian to win three individual gold medals at one Games.

And now she's a card-carrying member of the Ocean Swimmers' Union!

But not only that, Shane has completed two Masters theses and a Doctorate on the role of swimming in Australian culture, runs swim courses, is involved with surf life-saving and swims as often as she can in the ocean in Bicheno, Tasmania. So she knows a bit about swimming. And she also won Survivor!

Songs in this episode - all licensed under a Creative Commons License:

• Swim Good - Weathrman

Image from Numismatic Bibliomania Society.