The car park, being a winter mid-day, was empty. I was later to arrive than the “two-minute-dip polar bears”, who’d been and gone. I’ve often thought and written about these days, the empty days of open water swimming, no souls but mine and the ocean’s, grey days when getting in the water takes all my willpower, days when I could scream with the joy of the emptiness and the big sea out in front of me under a huge sky, and my ego vanishing away into the jade silence and endless sound of bubbles and movement through water. The days I do not dream of and will never dream of, but which are also the days that make me what I am, whatever I am.

The sky was overcast, the light low with the diffuse dullness of Irish winter and dirty cloud like an ash fall thrown over the country for weeks on end. South south east according to the Guillamene’s painted compass rose and my absolute sense of direction in this place, in a refulgent spotlight of sunlight, a laden leviathan of a container ship lay speared and stationary just below the horizon line, aimed away from Belleville Port, facing west, too far from the estuary to be waiting for a tide turn. My subconscious trigonometry took the twenty metre height of the cliff into account, so the curved hypotenuse of the ocean surface must arc in a gentle parabola across six or eight kilometres to where she lay moored, out in the ocean, open until the Galician coast a thousand kilometers away.

Even in the summer, even given my nature, inclination, tendency, death-wish, whatever you call it, for swimming offshore by myself, even considering that Newtown Head between us reduced that offshore distance by twelve hundred metres, well even then I never swum that far directly offshore without support. And of course it was winter. The time of short swims. Cold swims.

January. Six weeks to go to what we open water swimmers know; better than any of the drylanders, the warm ones, the landlubbers we pretend to be; as the bottom of the year, the arse of winter. The end of February, the coldest month, coldest week, coldest day, coldest water of the year, still out in front of us, then the long haul back from maybe six degrees, maybe five, maybe under five degree water through May’s false promise of warm water, to the promised land, the promised ocean of mid July and temperatures of thirteen and fourteen degrees.