SWIMMING WITH THE POD

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...

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...

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 t...

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 qua...

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 o...

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...

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 o...

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...

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 con...

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 C...

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, Swim - The English Channel, Bike - 181 miles from Calais to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He is one of only t...

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, n...

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....

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 fo...

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 S...

Scott Portelli is an acclaimed wildlife and underwater photographer, and has swum with whales and other magnificent creatures of the deep in some of the world's most exotic locations, like Antarctica, Tonga, the Falkland Islands and Norway. Among many other awards, Scott was awarded Wildlife Photographer of the Year in 2016, and he runs tours that you can join up with around the world to swim with...

During winter, you're probably familiar with human snot, but are you familiar with whale snot? Dr. Vanessa Pirotta is ! Vanessa is a marine biologist, naturalist and science communicator, and has been collecting snot from whale spouts using bespoke drones  in order to understand whale health. She's collected viruses, bacteria and DNA from the snot, in a much less invasive way than other methods. S...

Last time we talked about stingers , we learnt some valuable insights - don't wee on them! Turns out, there may be some better solutions on the horizon. Associate Professor Greg Neely , from the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney, has discovered an antidote to the sting of the most venomous creature on Earth -  the Australian box jellyfish. Greg's antidote, disco...

Whether you are an experienced or aspiring ocean swimmer, if you are in Australia or New Zealand, you will visit  oceanswims.com . Oceanswims.com handles the entries for the majority of organised swims in this part of the world, as well as being home to commentary, photos, witty banter, results and competitions. Paul Ellercamp and Suanne Hunt are the ocean swimming doyens who run  oceanswims.com a...

Dr Gary Greenberg is a scientist, author, teacher and photographer who combines his passion for art and science by exploring the hidden small-scale dimensions of nature. Gary has invented multiple high-definition, three-dimensional light microscopes (for which he has multiple US patents) and nowadays focuses his microscopes on common objects, such as grains of sand, flowers, and food. He's looked...

Ocean pools are a delight. I love swimming in them, and they are also quite often simply beautiful places to be. Dr. Marie-Louise McDermott has written a PhD on ocean pools ( Wet, wild and convivial: past, present and future contributions of Australia’s ocean pools to surf, beach, pool and body cultures and recreational coasts ) and runs a fantastic website dedicated to ocean pools,  All into ocea...

Swimming caps are a large source of ocean swimming waste. Often only once used, destined for land-fill or the ocean itself, events have not got a handle on to how to appropriately use them. And despite popular belief, they do not break down in the environment in any useful timeframe. They are important facets of ocean swimming safety so that swimmers can be seen in the water and in their racing wa...

Things that can sting you are part of every ocean swimming experience, not matter where you are in the world. Associate Professor Jamie Seymour , Director of the Tropical Australian Stinger Research Unit at James Cook University , studies venomous animals and has a particular interest in decreasing the envenomings of humans by jellyfish. He has some personal experience in this area too - he has be...

Rips claim an order of magnitude more lives than shark attacks in Australia, and are arguably the most dangerous facet of going to the beach. Associate Professor Rob Brander , also known as  Dr Rip , is a coastal geomorphologist who studies morphodynamics (hydrodynamics, sediment transport, morphology) of coastal systems, with a particular interest in rips and the safety of beachgoers. He runs a b...

Shark nets are fairly common across popular Australian tourist beaches, but beyond giving swimmers a perception that they are being protected from sharks, do they actually work? Jordan Sosnowski is the Advocacy Director for Action for Dolphins , a group that aims to stop cruelty to, and gain legal protection for, small cetaceans (dolphins and other small whales). We chatted about how shark nets pr...