Raves & Rants . . from Penzance

So here's the rub:  Imagine it's  the weekend and you go for a game of football at your local park with a few mates. Other people are spread around the park playing in similar games with varying skill and intensity. A usual Saturday or Sunday morning, the vibe is good whatever the weather. Now imagine that every time it rained, the whole park, including the football pitch you normally play on, got covered with a mix of rainwater and raw sewage.  How long would the water company responsible be allowed to pollute a public space in this way?  And how big the fines for allowing it to happen even once ? And yet every time it rains fairly heavily, this is what is happening at some surf breaks.  After heavy or prolonged rain, raw sewage is discharged into the river at Gwithian, immediately finding its way into the sea and spreading along the near shore surf zone - the surfer's football pitch if you will - where hundreds of surfers, swimmers and other water users ar...

A relative emails to remind me of a promise made in a previous blog , and asks me how the training has gone. Well the training has been and gone, as indeed has the Yacht Inn Swim itself, delayed two weeks by yet another summer storm. Start Line I started training for the swim back in March or April where I was unpleasantly surprised to find myself breathless and tired after only 10 lengths (250 metres) of the local pool. This despite having built up over 20 years of surfing muscles. With some trepidation I contemplated the 1300 metres of the Yacht Swim,  from Newlyn to Penzance alongside the Promenade. A pool membership plus five months of stroke correction, style correction, searching for non-leaking goggles that actually fit my odd shaped face, bilateral breathing correction, sea swims across Perranuthnoe beach, from Gwynver beac h to Aire point, random beaches up in Wales, even inside Penzance Harbour during storms, and my vastly improved and confident swimming ...