The swimming issue

A few odes to some swimming holes

Good morning.

Today’s post is going to be about places I swam this summer. If you don’t want to read that and would prefer to wait until I start writing about media stuff again, then I’ll see you later.

---

People that know me well know that I like to go swimming. I’m not a great swimmer by any means. I don’t do laps or triathlons or even go for very long recreational swims in an open body of water. I just love to be in the water.

It could be because I grew up on Long Island alongside so many salt water ponds, creeks, bays, harbors, coves, and necks and got used to having a body of water nearby as a fact of life.

Whatever the reason, I love to take a dip or a plunge. I like to take a quick splosh, splash, dunk, plonk, plunk, or a roll. I’ll definitely jump, but very rarely dive. I avoid flopping and can’t really flip. Wading is good and so are gliding, sliding, easing, and settling. I like to arch as well. Floating is nice too. I suppose I don’t float enough. I do hover a good amount. I also like to arm, press, and urge. I think I might do those the most.

I did my fair share of all of that this summer. Not as much as I would’ve liked, but it’s never really enough for me. Below are the places I swam over the past few months. I’ve created a ranking system of droplets to rate them. I have no idea what any amount of droplets means but I put it on a scale of 5 droplets. But really I have no idea what the droplets mean.

Jacob Riis Beach, Queens, New York

I lived in New York for 15 years but only ever made it to Jacob Riis Beach once.

When my fiancee and I visited New York this past June, we took a Friday off and subwayed and Ubered our way to Jacob Riis because, now that we live far away from an ocean, I wanted to make the most of my opportunity to get a salt water swim in.

Being driven through Belle Harbor and Neponsit was a revelation—there are tiny wonders of neighborhoods everywhere in New York.

The day started off sunny and hot and we ate fish tacos and drank pina coladas under an umbrella. But by the time we settled down on the sand, some clouds had blown in and rain was spitting off and on. Didn’t stop me from dunking in two times and rolling around in the waves. 

The first cold salt water swim of the summer is hard to beat.

Rating: 💧 💧 💧 💧

Deep Eddy, Austin, Texas

You all may have heard of a place in Austin called Barton Springs. It is the most famous swimming spot in town. And it is great! But it can sometimes be a pain in the ass to park there and is often crowded.

My fiancee and I like to go to Deep Eddy Pool. It’s a big concrete pool that they fill with the nice cold, fresh spring water from Barton Springs. Every other day they refresh the water in one end of the pool.

Deep Eddy is one of those places that could never exist in New York. It’s a great spot to chill and read a book and swim and it is incredibly useful during the many hot afternoons and evenings in Texas. But it is never crowded. You don’t have to make a plan—you can go and sit and swim and its no big deal. Plus you can walk to this place Pool Burger after and get some burgers and this drink called the Tradewinds that I get every time even though I say I’m going to try something different every time but I never do because the Tradewinds is so good and I get it every time.

Rating: 💧 💧 💧

Shipe Pool, Austin, Texas

One of the best things about Austin is the prevalence of free public pools. They are everywhere. It's sort of a public service in the summer. Again, this is the kind of thing I’d never see in my old life in New York: free, public pools that are rarely crowded.

The water isn’t very cold, but that doesn’t matter much when it's super easy to just head over and plop in on a whim while the air temperature hovers around 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

My fiancee and I live very close to Shipe Pool so we can walk or ride our bikes there. Even so, we only made it once there to swim this summer. I promise you one thing: we’ll do better next year.

I’m only giving Shipe Pool two droplets. On the one hand, it's free and not crowded. On the other hand, the water is warm and we all have a tendency to take good things for granted and, look, I’m no saint.

You think you know so much? Why don’t you go swim at Shipe Pool and you tell me if you think it should be four droplets!?

Rating: 💧 💧

Walnut Street Beach, Poquott, New York

Where I grew up in on Long Island, there were tons of little swimming nooks. It was probably one of my favorite things about the place where I was raised.

Walnut Street Beach in Poquott is one of those nooks. It isn’t the best one (that would be Crane Neck Beach right beside Flax Pond), but it has a lot of memories.

There is a bend at the far edge of Walnut Street Beach and around that bend my friends and I would hang out, have bonfires, and party. Technically that part of the beach was private. It seemed like every bit of beach we came across was private and that the homeowners thought it was a good idea to call the local village police officers to come and break up our fun. This was a hard concept to understand when you were a teenager looking for a place to drink and smoke and spend time with girls.

It was on this bit of beach that I fought with my friends countless times over the best way to make a fire, went skinny dipping, and did a bunch of other stuff I wasn’t supposed to do.

Now, it's a nice place to stop and look at the water when I go on long runs whenever I stay with my parents. This July, after a summer rain shower, I took a, perhaps ill-advised, swim there during the middle of a jog. I set my phone on the picnic table, blasted part 1 of the Pulp Fiction Rewatchables podcast, switched into my suit, and went for a short little swim—maybe a pool lap length—in the onset of evening.

Rating without childhood memories: 💧 💧

Rating with childhood memories: 💧 💧 💧 💧

Wade’s Beach, Shelter Island, New York

Near the end of July, I received an email from a childhood friend I hadn’t seen in maybe 10 years. It was a little graphic invitation to attend his wedding at the courthouse on Shelter Island. He said to bring no gifts and that food would be served at Wade’s Beach after the nuptials. The date for the wedding was in two weeks, which happened to coincide with when I would be home visiting my family. 

When coincidence strikes like that, you take off from work. So I took the day and set off out East on the North Fork with my friend Erik at 8:00 AM. We listened to IDLES basically all the way there, got on a 10:00 AM ferry from Greenport, floated across the Peconic River, and pulled up to the courthouse right before the ceremony.

It was a beautiful, sunny morning and, seeing my friend, it was like no time had passed between us. He was happy.  People from the Shelter Island community had shown up unexpectedly and made the crowd for his wedding bigger than he’d planned.

We moved to Wade’s Beach for a picnic under the pavilion. Then, the rain came. A torrential downpour blew across the Shelter Island Sound and held steady for about 30 minutes. Luckily I was wearing my freshly bought REI (new sponsor!!) rain poncho, so only my sneakers and most of my pants got soaked. Don’t worry, I had a backup pair of footwear.

When the storm passed, my friend wanted to swim. What? Was I going to say no? We swam and talked like it was a regular day. We stayed in the water for 15 or 20 minutes. Later we ended up at someone’s house beside the Shelter Island Country Club golf course and ate lobster.

Wade’s Beach isn’t the best beach on Shelter Island. That would be this spot

Or maybe even this spot, which is right across from Wade’s Beach.

But it was a good swim.

Rating: 💧 💧 💧 💧

Atlantic Beach Park, Misquamicut, Rhode Island

From 2014 through 2017, I rented a series of beach houses with my friends on the stretch of Montauk Highway between Amagansett and Montauk that is known by those who know as Napeague.

This makes it sound like I had money. I had no money. I made $40,000 a year up until July 2015, which was right before my 30th birthday. But I valued certain things in my life more than others and was able to save money so that I could rent a beach house with my childhood friends.

After 2017, when we were all about 32 or 33, it got harder to find a week to spend together. You know how that story goes.

But this summer, through lots of wrangling, we were able to find a weekend in early August to meet up on the ocean in Rhode Island.

I’ve swam in Newport, Jamestown, Barrington, and Bristol, but I’ve never been to the area you could variously call Westerly, Weekapaug, or Misquamicut.

The forecast was iffy. Scattered thunderstorms—the ultimate cop out of a summer prognostication. Our Friday afternoon and evening weather was sunny and hot. But an intense fog rolled in around sunset and held up through the night. I woke up on Saturday fearing rain, but it was bright and sunny and hot.

The group swims were many and long. The ocean water was almost at peak summer temperature. This was some good swimming.

But I do have to dock half a droplet for one reason. If you ever go to Atlantic Beach Park, just be aware that people that live on beach front lots have some right to the sand next to their property so they make these little “lawns” out of sand that you aren’t supposed to walk in or on and they are very protective about this. Very strange behavior.

Rating: 💧 💧 💧 💧 1/2

Moja, Stockholm, Sweden

Did you know that Stockholm has a famous archipelago with over 30,000 islands that scatter into the Baltic Sea? Yeah, neither did I.

My fiancee visited Stockholm in the winter of 2023 and was dead set on going back so that we could go to one of the islands in the archipelago. She thought I’d enjoy that. So we went to Stockholm this summer.

We took a three hour ferry, weaving through islands, under a bright Nordic August sun until we reached Moja where we stayed in a little red cabin for two nights. On the first evening I made sure we marched down to the closest swimming spot, which was just down the dirt road our cabin was on and across another dirt road and then through a mossy and rocky trail down to the Baltic.

The Baltic Sea, from where I stood at least, looks coppery and black. It has a very low salinity. And it is cold. About 60 degrees the day we went swimming there.

Once I found a good spot to slip in off a large, sloping boulder, the bliss of sliding into frigid water (that makes your limbs seize up at first before you realize it's not life-threateningly cold and you can swim in it just fine and soon you’ll be warm enough that you won’t even think about it as cold) came over me. I sloshed around in the Baltic on that first sunny evening we arrived and then again on the bright crisp morning we left.

It’s a swimming spot I’ll always remember.

Rating: 💧 💧 💧 💧 💧

Le Grand Plage, St. Jean-de-Luz, France

St. Jean-de-Luz is a small beach town in the French Basque country a little south of Biarritz. It’s a vacation town, but I thought it was cool. (Though my fiancee and I did experience one harrowing lunch sitting next to two incredibly rich Dartmouth undergraduates talking loudly about god knows what. The kicker? One of the kids spoke impeccable French whenever he wasn’t loudly talking about Ronald Regan.)

The food was great. We had two excellent meals at restaurants that I think were overall better than the food we ate in San Sebastian. But there was this one place in Bilbao that I’ll tell you about another time.

Anyway, St. Jean-de-Luz is built around a nice fan-shaped beach on the Bay of Biscay, which is right on the Atlantic Ocean. They have a trio of sea walls to protect the harbor from the powerful waves, so slow rolling little breakers come into shore in nice sets that are safe enough for kids. There is a big netted swimming area with three diving platforms. Once you get beyond the crowd, there’s nothing but nice green colored water and serious swimmers doing laps. It’s eerie how safe it feels.

The only knock on this place? The beach got very crowded because it was right in the center of town. It didn’t feel as private. But we knew what we were signing up for. I almost gave this four droplets. I don’t know what four droplets means, but I was really very close because I really liked this place.

Rating: 💧 💧 💧 ½ 

La Concha, San Sebastián, Spain 

San Sebastian is a great town. What everyone says about the food is true. The vibe was great and I was obsessed with watching the tide change in the channel that runs through the town and out into the ocean. There’s great and easily accessible hiking on the Camino de Santiago.

The heart of the town is the beach: La Concha. It is very busy in the late afternoon, but, again, you can get beyond the crowds close to shore for some excellent swimming. Plus, they have some surprisingly clean and nice bathrooms and changing facilities for a beach that is absolutely jammed every day when the weather is hot.

While I traveled in the Basque Country, I re-read The Sun Also Rises. I’d forgotten that basically the second half of the book takes place around Bayonne and Pamplona and San Sebastian and that there are plenty of mentions of Biarritz. It’s a good book, but is starting to show its age a bit. I wonder how long it’ll make it. It was really Hemingway’s best work.

Near the very end of the novel, Jake takes a trip to San Sebastian alone. And Hemingway writes beautifully about him going down to the beach to swim by himself. I read those passages on the beach in San Sebastian and then went for a swim myself. That may be trite or whatever but it felt good to do.

Even with all that, La Concha gets three droplets. Great place to swim, but just not unique enough. Plus, I feel like these kids found the real best swimming spot in the harbor channel on the opposite side of the bay.

Rating: 💧 💧 💧