Why socks are more important than seals

Friday 17th January 2025

It’s grey again. Morning light as if filtered through a grimy net curtain. Little wind to speak of. Land temperatures in double figures for a change. If not double at least north of zero.

Positive. Temperatures to celebrate. A brief winter respite. It’s still January, a month that to me is dragging its heels along the perma-damp pavements and feels as if it’s lasted three months so far at least. Back to a stuck time, tardy mardy.

Here’s a dull fact, according to a sea fishing website, one of my tide and temperature imperatives, the UV index is one. At least I don’t have to feel guilty about sun cream.

The North Sea clearly hasn’t heard the news about milder temperatures. This morning, the seawater temperature is a little over five degrees, as if ‘a little over’ mattered. I also swam on Wednesday this week, a positively tepid six and a half.

Mad? Probably. The thing is, the grey stillness brings still seas. The water is very cold but it is hardly moving around at all.

Walking down to the shingle, I couldn’t get to the shore line quickly enough to take a photo of the sequence of three skeins of Brent geese that flew one after the other directly in front of us. Small and dark, they were in formation then out of formation, flying high then low, skimming the water so closely it looked as if a tiny mis-calculation could catch one out.

Perfect formation after perfect formation after perfect formation and they were gone, along the shoreline and away to the south.

This morning, Friday, at eight, the sea is a uniform dark grey from its shorepoint to the horizon. The beach temperature is around four (nothing frozen) with a ‘feels-like-one’ thanks to a breeze from the south west. Not a strong wind, 10 mph mostly, the flag is blowing loosely straight out from land to sea.

10mph is enough when it’s just four degrees. Because the wind is cold and the air is cold, you feel every breath of it, like someone’s opened the front door on a winter’s night and you’re in direct line of the draft. It feels as if the cold is being circulated around and above and below.

Still seas are comparatively easy to get in and comparatively easy to get out of. Comparatively because there is little wave movement and consequently an extremely low chance of getting knocked over. Even if you’re mad enough to want to go in, you don’t wants to get knocked over in winter.

Getting into the sea becomes a purely mental issue. You know how cold the water will be (we share a forecast), what the tide will be like and whether or not there will be much wind.

On Wednesday, there was almost no wind. The sea looked like a beautiful grey pond with sparkly corners and secretly sitting birds. The birds love the lack of wind, herring gulls fly around the shoreline catching their breakfast.

People lingered when changing to dry, chatted. The minutes in the water didn’t feel so bad because when your top half came out of the sea, it wasn’t immediately blasted by the draft. Makes all the difference in the world.

This morning there isn’t a linger in sight.

Pebbles were strewn across the sand with srips of shingle in between. It’s as if the shingle beach is slowly on its way back. I take a couple of pictures, willing more geese to fly by. No luck. Standing in the breeze, close to the cold water, my head began to search for an excuse not to swim at all, the idea of it seemed completely ridiculous.

I get changed. We get changed. The strewn pebbles are uncomfortable to walk over but the water doesn’t feel quite as bad as I’d feared. It squeezes your chest at this temperature and requires a big lung-filling intake to ward it off, but once you’re in, for a minute or two at least, the sea feels like a cold plunge pool in a spa and you know that you’re in and no longer have the thought of getting in, which is a little bit worse.

We’re an hour or so after the first low tide and the sand bank is high and close to shore. There’s a narrow-ish gully of water in which we can full-height swim but stray further out and you quickly bang your knees on the long sloped, sandy run-up .

For a brief moment, it’s tempting to climb up the sand to ankle-height water that’s on the top of the bank, have a look, perhaps explore the far side. Assume when this thought appears that the temperature has got to your brain and you’ve forgotten it’s January with a water temperature of under six degrees.

The sandbank provides a smooth path to wind chill and it only takes a couple of steps and a tiny bit of additional exposure to bring that fact to your frozen brain.

Then comes the prickling and spikey cold and it’s time to get out. Wobble over the pebbles and join the tight-knit handful getting changed. The wind has stolen the chat today. It feels cold, colder with a damp body, and the imperative is only to get wet stuff off and dry stuff on as quickly as humanly possible.

Awkward, stiff and cold, sticky from the salt water. Clumsy and numb-handed.

I turn to sit and source socks and spot a seal, an arm’s length from the shoreline, playing, peeping at us, turning and floating on its back with its flippers in the air. At first glance I’d thought it was a swimmer that had somehow been left behind. I glanced again, counted the bodies on the land and pointed to the seal who is looking in our direction and moves as if he’s waving back.

Had it been the summer, or even autumn or spring, I’d have charged over attempting to take a close-up seal photo. In this weather, socks take precedence and by the time I was dressed sufficiently to stand and move about, the seal had lolloped south, away from our patch, out of mind if not yet out of sight.

I wait for the late-swimming lawyer to get out of the water. The herring gulls are noisily catching their breakfasts. A cormorant is fishing.

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