Solstice sunrise swim

21st June 2025

It’s almost dark; pinky dull, a shaded gauzy hazy light that’s not quite sure where it belongs. Not a dark that lives in winter, that’s for sure.

The air feels a little chill rather than cold but with a whisper of warm, a remembrance of record-melting heats.

The factor that I try not to ponder is time. It’s four am, twenty before four in fact. Three forty in the morning.

This weird sunless daylight is solstice. The longest day of the year. It starts first and finishes last and we are determined to honour it.

This morning, the shingled shoreline is populated and we can see people like us (waiting to swim people) on the ribbon of sand between the shingle and the sea further south too.

We are all gathered together in our regular swimming place this morning. Those that regularly swim later than us. Known, more colourful, they have deckchairs and windbreaks and delicious wood-smelling fire bowls that waft gently over the heath spreading scented reminders of what it felt like to be young, waking up on the beach and balancing an old-fashioned kettle on embers.

On solstice we blend; one tribe, a summer mix.

We are here, we are Viking, we are here heathen. Merfolk, we come to greet the rising sun and pay homage to the water. We are East Angles, the south folk (that’s where Suffolk comes from). Our King Edmund’s flag flies, south-south-west, wind off the sea. Watch out for the arrows.

Here’s an aside. Someone recently rather sniffily said to me, when I told them that I was a year-round sea swimmer, that it was mostly menopausal women who swam in the sea. ‘They get as much from the socialising as they get from the water.’

I look around, our population is about half-and-half women and men. A vast array of ages and an even vaster array of backgrounds and opinions.

What we have in common is that we worship the sea. It’s an addiction. It makes us a blended modern family.

Sea swimming bonds you like family bonds you. You may not know the individual swimming with you but you are always aware of them. You are conscious that they’re way off your right or just behind you, quite a way in front. We quietly and continually look out for each other. Never let one float away.

Perhaps someone here is having a menopause? Seems rather rude to ask.

We wait and watch the horizon. The sea looks big and dark and beautiful. It’s almost a night-time sea, the deep, dark waves look slightly intimidating, it hasn’t quite put its daytime face on.

Above, in the pink haze of early morning sky is a bright crescent moon.

We’re halfway between low and high tide and the water is moving towards high tide. All being well, it should be at chest height by the time we reach the sand bank, with sand to walk on to get there. Hopefully, we’ll be able to stand comfortably to watch the sunrise.

Puck, the Electrician, The Professor Perus. We wait and watch.

Two people awkwardly launch a canoe and head off towards the horizon, perhaps for a closer view?

Rupert’s Mum arrives and is ready in a moment. Then Cousin, then our Lawyer. We chivvy them. We’ve waited long enough.

We wade into the dark water under the pink hazy crescent sky, noisy kittiwakes fishing for breakfast, circling the old rig, fishing, shrieking, landing, fishing, shrieking, circling the old rig again.

This morning, the water temperature is fifteen degrees. It feels colder. Probably because everything feels colder when it’s this early.

It’s twenty past four and we’re all in the water wading out to the sandbank. There is a small cheer behind us from someone on the dry shingle bank, with a higher viewpoint of the horizon. The first flicker of fire has been spotted.

We’re standing on the sandbank now, waist and chest deep in cool wavy water, and there it is, a blurry smudge of burning red on the horizon.

It rises and it grows and it rises, soon a blurry-edged burning semicircle and the warmth in the air increases as if someone the other side of the room is pointing a hairdryer at you.

Or a fusion of hydrogen is radiating from around 93 million miles away. The distance varies. The Earth’s orbit is elliptical.

Soon, the burning orb has lifted itself away from the water and begins to float into the hazy sky, transforming the colour of its surroundings as it goes.

When the sun has fully risen, we wade out of the water, across the long blonde ribbon of sand, back on to the shingle and shore-based friends to find our stuff and get dry dressed again.

We don’t have a firebowl but we do have a secret shed, smuggled between the fishermen, that Puck has made his own and from where he makes bacon baps. And there’s a chocolate cake that we pretend has not much to do with Mrs. Professor Peru’s birthday next week and Rupert’s Mum brings orange juice.

There is coffee and tea and a special place that, at this time of the morning, seems impossibly beautiful; warm and comfortable, rare views, clean air and, apart from us, mostly empty, so far unspoilt by tourist people and tourist dogs.

The rough grass that surrounds has grown tall and plump-seeded in the heat.

before

after