Hard Rock

My only swimming lesson took place when I was eight years old at a beach in southern Tasmania. I was part of a cacophonous mob of similarly-aged kids and one of the parents told us to swim out ‘past our depth’, dive under water, open our eyes and, whoever saw the first fish, swim back to shore  to collect a bottle of Coke as a reward. So out into the sea we stampeded to thrash around in search of a fish.

In the end, none of us saw a fish, so the Coke went unclaimed but, by thrashing around in the open sea looking for a fish, we had unwittingly proved one theory about swimming: overcoming one’s fear of water is more important than the technique of swimming itself.

And I still like to test the theory. On 25^th September 2018, I will be swimming from the Alcatraz prison site (infamously called ‘The Rock’) to Aquatic Park, San Francisco City.