Waterlogged: Why We Write About Our Water Experiences

To swim in the North Sea is to tingle. You feel it in your skin as salt finds its way into every pore, in your throat as it gasps for air, in your scalp and eyebrows — every nerve ending is struck. Emerging from the water you feel, ironically, like there is a fire burning behind the eyes. To then write about your swimming experience, according to nature-writer Roger Deakin, is a way to revive these bodily electrifying moments. 

Deakin’s groundbreaking novel, Waterlog, records not just his own experiences of swimming, but also of those he encounters along the way. To Deakin, it is not only the time it takes them to swim a distance that matters, but what stroke they swam, who they were with, and what temperature the water was. These can be collections of pure numerical data, but they often reflect a more visceral reality: the shade of blue your fingertips turn, a seal sighting, the feeling of deep and assured calm that resides for hours after a plunge into Castle Sands Tidal Pool. 

And so, I set out in search of this water-writing phenomenon in Fife. 

The Step Rock Amateur Swimming Club (SRASC), an initially all-male club founded in 1928, had its original base at Step Rock: a palatial tidal pool which sprawled over sands where Saint Sizzle and the Aquarium now obscure the seascape. Rather than the possibly mythical seals the aquarium is building a new enclosure for, this high-walled sea-bath enclosed dozens of splashing young men. The SRASC still exists. Now, however, its members are aged 3-18 and swim indoors at East Sands Leisure Centre. This change in the Step Rock swimmers’ habits mirrors the decline in the number of people who record and write daily journals — and the niche margin of people who both swim in the sea and keep records of it. 

However, speaking to (and swimming with) the all-women Bob & Blether swimming group, who usually haunt Castle Sands in their vibrant yellow beanies and wetsuit booties, I found the sliver of my Venn diagram’s intersection. My wish to uncover old clothbound swimming journals was dashed when I asked how the group records their swims: Caroline, one of two original founders of the group, said, “Truthfully, we don’t.” However, the rest of our exchange showed me how important the verbal connection of these 140 swimmers is. 

As an antithesis to the all-men origins of swimming groups of the previous century, the Bob & Blether group “hark back to the fisherwife days” in their swimming practices. A community of women, based around the water not just for pleasure but as a way of life, certainly rebrands a culture of harsh coastal living into an invigorating and health-driven bathing ritual. 

Their group nonetheless does echo the talk-culture of these fisherwomen: anecdotes and stories about “sharing swims with dolphins and basking sharks” and much more are swapped between these women “over a hot drink at the end of each swim”, according to Caroline. Where women’s talk might have been considered babbling, or using the Scottish word “blethering,” they were forming meaningful connections and establishing roots in an otherwise lonely and mercurial setting. While their husbands and children were out, seafaring, these fisherwives battled the wind off the coast, emboldened by their togetherness. The simultaneous swimming and chatting in the sea that members of the Bob and Blether group prize is a renewed form of resistance against this dominant ideology, where men’s hunting was esteemed while the women’s communities that enabled it were belittled as mere ‘blether.’ 

The treasuring and importance of a spoken word swimming community was revealed to me through contact with Caroline; writing about seabathing can open a portal for personal reflection and enhance your experience of daily life, but it is also a community practice. Deakin’s philosophy of writing about his swims allowing him to reanimate his body and mind years after the event can be traced to this localised tradition of women by the sea; talking while swimming strengthens this mind-body connection, as well as a connection with the seaswimmers of the past. 

Illustration by Haalah Bint Hashim