The Swim That Surely Changes Everything

Yesterday was a perfect winter’s morning – what passes for winter in Sydney – clear blue skies and sunshine - and the bay was flat and clear, and impossibly alluring.

Every day I make a judgement about where to swim, depending on the conditions and the weather. I’m lucky I have options. Any waves, wind or drama, and I head for an ocean bath.

Now see that? Those are perfect conditions.

I used to be afraid of everything, especially cold water, big waves and sharks. Some years ago, I didn’t like the shape I was taking and I knew I had to rewire my brain. After a back injury in 2018, I made a conscious decision to push myself beyond my anxiety by swimming out beyond the breakers. That’s what I have been doing consistently for eight years. Edging beyond a terror so pervasive, that if I simply give it any footing, it could consume me.

I always swim on patrolled beaches, never at dawn or dusk. I stay 50 – 80 metres close to shore in case of cramps or distress. I know what a rip is and I know how to swim across one. I can breathe myself quiet, despite how my heart sometimes clatters.

Swimming this way has expanded me beyond the frightened little girl of my childhood to become someone a little free-er and more frolicsome.’ I’ll never make reckless or footloose or fearless. I respect fear. But I had to mute it from the major to a minor chord in my temperament. I’m still not up for bungee jumping, sky or scuba diving – I know my limits; but swimming out into the open water across a bay I know intimately; has felt do-able. And I have done it, again and again, a few thousand times in eight years.

On these swims I have encountered cuttlefish, manta ray, Port Jackson sharks, skate, stingray, manta ray, octopus, groper… never a turtle, but I keep looking.

Yesterday, I was making my way across the bay, and damn, the water was so delicious, I couldn’t stop. I was in my 52^nd minute, working my way to an hour, when I heard screaming. I turned to see a swimmer some 80 metres away, flailing in the water. What was she doing? I watched a man on a paddleboard make his way towards her. Lifeguard training?

Then the shark alarm sounded. I swam as fast as I could back to shore, realizing a shark had been sighted.

But then I watched as a young woman was dragged to shore. Half her upper thigh was missing. (I pray you never see such disfigurement of a human body). Lifeguards and rescuers rescusciated and attended to her before the ambulance arrived while I stood on helplessly.

(She is critical, and I don’t know if she will be okay. I am praying for her, and if you pray, please think of her).

Like me, she was just out for a Saturday morning swim, likely with plans for Saturday night and her life that included many more swims.

My father used to ask me, ‘Aren’t you afraid of sharks?’

I am - but no more than snakes, poisonous spiders, blue-ringed octopus and box jellyfish. I know I am ‘out of my depths’ when I head out into the open water. Friends have called me both ‘mad,’ and ‘brave,’ but trust me, I am neither.

I hold the idea of sharks loosely because statistically, it is more likely I will be in a car accident or win the lottery than I will be attacked by one.

I am always measured about swimming out. I assess conditions and often decide against the bay on days when I don’t feel 100% right. I take a calculated risk, the same anyone takes when they drive in the dark or in the rain. I have swum across that bay thousands of times, and every time, it has been magical.

But the horror I have convinced myself was unlikely to ever happen, has now transpired. And only by the grace of timing did the shark get her, not me.

Have I been delusional? Arrogant? Foolhardy?

Will this stop me from swimming across the bay again?

Right now, all I want is to curl up with a hot water bottle and the cat. the thought of getting back into the water seems impossible.

But, I also cannot accept that my journey beyond fear, has only been a lesson in ‘I told you so’ by shark-wary friends. If I contract back into someone who refuses an adventure just in case something terrible happens, what has it all been for?

I have just published a memoir about losing my mother and how ocean swimming helped me navigate my grief. In Bring Us Home from Sorrow I write:

“My life has become a story of water; I no longer think of myself as separate from it. I have sunk into the ocean’s dreaming. When I am far from the sea, I am homesick for it. I have never belonged to any place more than I do in these waters. Over the past year, my life-force has flowed back into me like a new tide.”

How can that no longer be true?

In the open water I have experienced my insignificance and also my connection to all existence. It has expanded, not diminished me. I have been enlivened by this realisation, not dulled.

But, as The Dude says in The Big Lebowski, ‘New shit has come to light.’

Serious terrible ghastly gory shit. I can’t be unchanged by what I’ve witnessed.

I am shaken by the knowledge that it was by the grace of sheer timing and placement that it was someone other than me who was critically mauled.

But instinctively, I feel that my love and respect for the ocean and its creatures must enlarge, not diminish me.

If I alter backwards into the constrictions of refusal and abstention, I will not allow what I witnessed to grow me beyond this moment.

In the words of Rainer Maria Rilke,

There are so many other things I deeply fear: hatred. Antisemitism. Cruelty. Unkindness. Violence. Indifference to suffering. Isn’t all of life the business of swimming through shark-infested waters?

Right now, I feel the sag of grief - for the loss of the ‘safety’ I have always felt in this bay, my refuge and for the person I was yesterday before I saw a woman pulled from the water with her life hanging by a thread.

But in the days I have been given to be alive, I still have the chance to swim again and be grateful for safe passage each time I step back on shore.

• Ada Limon

Here 7 News interviewed me about my experience.