Sunshine makes February feel like a new year
5th February 2024
The early sky was blushing. A soft pink against a clear high cloud of perfect skin with a flirty little earring made of brightly polished crescent moon.
By the time I arrived at the beach, the sun was shining over a dark blue silver sea. It’s February, ladies and gentlemen, and at last we can celebrate the end of grizzly damp January, which seemed to go on forever.
It’s impossible to overstate the loveliness of the fresh morning sun on the beach, even when it’s cold. The tide was low which gave us a wide blond strip of sand at the water’s edge. The steep shingle bank has gone now, reconstructed by the most recent storms.
Our beach almost looks as if it has been re-modelled in time for spring fashions. There’s no struggling up a steep bank or sliding down the other side, filling your shoes with stones. It’s smooth now, a gentle path down to the water,
It’s just me and the boatbuilder swimming again. Puck and the electrician are whizzing up and down the heritage coast on their bikes having swum yesterday. They stop for hellos but it isn’t quite the same as having them in the water at eight o’clock on a Monday morning. Weekend swimming is a different game entirely.
The boatbuilder and I are building our hardcore winter swimming reputations, with an eye to cementing them before the return of the Canadian to the sea on Friday. She will doubtless knock us out of the water. Me anyway.
I badly miss swimming with her and can’t wait to have her back on the beach. However, despite cold showers in sub-zero Alberta, she hasn’t been in the North Sea for three or more weeks. She will find it surprising.
The Perus will be home too, yippee, and it feels like the swimming family is slowly coming back together.
This morning, the sea temperature is six point seven degrees, a whole degree warmer than last week. That degree makes a difference or perhaps it’s the sun that makes it seem slightly less bad? We can look at the sun while we swim, soak up the energy. The winter sea is still mighty cold, however, and neither of us is keen to linger.
We swim for a minute or so and get out unusually smoothly. I don’t fall over and neither do I reach for the boatbuilder’s hand to support me.
It’s five degrees on the beach with a noticeable breeze from the south west. Five never seems too bad in the winter when we are adjusted to temperatures that begin with a minus. South west, however lively, will never be as painful as a wind that begins with a north or an east.
The sun continues to shine on us as we get dressed and chat about a potential kittiwake expedition. We don’t hear each other properly because we are cold from swimming and in a hurry and also because the wind, albeit kind, is blowing in our ears.
I ask about looking at the kittiwakes new nesting place.
He says, we’ll have to go in August because if we come out, we won’t want to hang about in a sea like this.
I remind him that nesting is in March and April and mention that I wouldn’t really want to go in a craft with a high risk of coming out.
I begin to feel cold and chivvy him. He knows his boat stuff and we’ll manage the expedition one way or another.
The sunshine makes February feel like the beginning of a new year.
