SWIMMING WITH THE POD

Caroline Clements and Dillon Seitchik-Reardon run the beautiful website Places we swim and have just released a book, also called Places we swim, a travel guide for water-loving people, exploring Australia through swimming. The book takes us to beaches, pools, waterfalls, lakes, hot springs and gorges all over the country. Caroline and Dillon visited hundreds, if not thousands, of swimming holes to explore Australia's wild beauty and to curate the absolute best of every place they visited. Make this your list of places to swim when we come out of isolation!

Image from @placesweswim

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

• Misty Gorge - sillythewilly

Hannah Sassi is a virologist from the University of Sydney who studies the persistence of viruses in the environment. She is also an ocean swimmer who trains with BondiFit, whose local beach is Maroubra. Right now during the Coronavirus pandemic, many swimmers are wondering whether it is OK to go for a swim. At the time of recording, a lot of world is in lockdown or headed towards it, so some of this is a moot point. If the local laws say don't swim, then obviously, don't swim!

In summary, should you swim right now?

• In public pools: NO

While a properly cleaned pool will kill the virus, the virus can live for a long time in the surrounding environment and everywhere you go on your way to the pool. And in such places where people exercise, people tend to be breathing heavily. Viruses can persist for a longer period of time in fresh/salt water, and so there are further risks with ocean pools, especially those that don't get flushed or cleaned regularly. If you want to swim, swimming at some distance from others in the ocean is the way to go.

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

• Virus - Danik3

The Cole Classic is one of Sydney's oldest and largest ocean swims. It has a storied history and in 2020, ownership of the swim moved from Fairfax to Manly Surf Life Saving Club, meaning essentially a whole new swim had to be organised. 

Simone Hill is a member of Manly SLSC and runs her own company My Crew Travel. Simone coordinated the volunteers and logistics for the day, and helped create a new community vibe around the event.

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

• Harris Cole - Rain (Extended) - Slayer_Op

Therese Spruhan must be one of Australia's experts on the cultural impact of the swimming pool. Her recent book, The Memory Pool, is a fabulous nostalgic anthology bringing together reflections on the childhood swimming pools of 28 Australians including Trent Dalton, Leah Purcell, Shane Gould, Bryan Brown and Merrick Watts. You can taste the hot chips, smell the chlorine and feel the burning concrete. For many kids, the local pool is a place of imagination, freedom, friendship and romance. 

Therese is also the author of Swimming pool stories, a blog to which every Australian swimmer should subscribe!

We had a lovely chat at Therese's new local pool, the Fanny Durack Aquatic Centre in Petersham, about all things swimming pools. You can hear kids splashing in the background, but also the occasional flight overhead and a little bit of wind - it's very real! I've left it long, so put the kettle on, go for a drive or a long run, and dive into the memory pool!

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

• Memories - Sevnth

Dean Summers has conquered the triple Crown of open water swimming and as I type this, is waiting for his chance to swim the Cook Strait between the North and South Islands of New Zealand, part of his attack on the Oceans seven. Only 18 people have completed this astonishing series of seven incredible channel and strait swims around the world, and Dean is five in. He has swum The English Channel, Catalina Strait, The North Channel, Moloka’i Channel The Strait of Gibraltar. He plans to conquer the remaining two, Cook Strait and the Tsugaru Strait in Japan, by 2020.

You can sponsor Hunterlink here.

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

• Oceans - Petit Biscuit

Image from SWIMDEAN

Tim Garrett is an extraordinary athlete. Not content with swimming some of the world's most famous and gruelling waterways, Tim tags on runs and rides of hundreds of kilometers to his swims. For instance, Tim has completed the Arc2Arch:

• Run - 87 miles from Marble Arch in London to Dover,

He is one of only two people to have completed the Arc2Arch and Uberman, an event in which you swim from 21 miles from Catalina Island to Los Angeles (a major event in itself!), cycle 400 miles to Badwater basin, the lowest point in North America, and then run 135 miles through Death Valley before ascending 13,000 feet to Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the Continental United States.

He plans his own ultra-endurance events through his company Another Level Performance. Apart from Australia's longest open water swim, he has also organised Hard Bastard, where you:

• Swim - 35 km from Palm Beach to North Bondi,

He fundraises for The Heart Research Institute and unsurprisingly doesn't sleep much! His major aim is to tackle the North Pole.

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

• The Endurance - Scott Buckley

Image from TimmyGarrett888 on Instagram

Wild swimming is something of a cousin to ocean swimming. Or is ocean swimming a subset of wild swimming? Either way, wild swimming is huge across the world, and particularly in the UK and Europe. It's also often stunningly beautiful - search #wildswimming on instagram and you'll see what I mean.

Calum Hudson is the middle brother of The Wild Swimming Brothers, triathlete,Ice swimmer, author, nature love, swimming advocate and wild swimmer. He has swum the world's most powerful maelstroms, escaped Alcatraz and swum between continents. The Wild Swimming Brothers started with a 140 km swim down the River Eden, as you do! We had a wonderful chat about the whole gamut of things that make up the world of wild swimming. 

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

• Wild - Bank$ the producer

Image from The Wild Swimming Brothers on Instagram

Dr. Mark Hemer is a Principal Research Scientist leading the Sea-Level, Waves and Coastal Extremes team within CSIRO's Ocean and Atmosphere Climate Science Centre. Mark has researched offshore renewable energy for the past 10 years, exploring the potential of Australia's renewable offshore resources. We chatted about offshore energy, and among many things, whether you can swim around wave farms.

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

• Ocean Wave, Power of Ocean - Shyinka

Image from David Dixon

What is the likelihood of a tsunami hitting your favourite beach? Dr. Hannah Power, from University of Newcastle's School of Environmental and Life Sciences, conducts research on ocean waves, and recently published on the likelihood and consequences of a tsunami hitting Sydney Harbour. She has also developed the risk forecast for the Figure Eight Pool in Sydney's Royal National Park. This forecast examines the likelihood of being struck by large waves on your journey across the rock shelf.

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

• Tsunami - Cyclotone

 Image from Canterbury Maps

Have you ever had the visibility in a swim drop to a few centimeters? Has it ever gone a bit brown? Perhaps you've ended up swimming through sewage!

This happened to Dr. Ian Wright in the 90s, and is likely to have happened to any ocean swimmer who was swimming off the coast of Sydney in that period. Ian is a keen ocean swimmer and a senior lecturer in the School of Science and Health at Western Sydney University, whose research interests include freshwater ecology, water chemistry and water pollution. We chatted about the poo problem at Sydney's beaches.

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

• Plume - Kubbi

Image from eutrophication&hypoxia

There's also a quick Kath and Kim clip in there at the end #lookatmeme