The wild BLUE
Ask any New Zealander to share a childhood memory of swimming and they’ll oblige. My father-in-law recollects swimming with Opo, the legendary dolphin of Opononi, Hokianga, as a boy and how he would bang two rocks together under the water so Opo would swim over to the local kids and away from the hordes of tourists. My mother has such happy memories of childhood beach holidays at Matapouri Bay, on the Tutukaka Coast, that a painting of the same beach hangs on her lounge wall. Further down our coastal country, my own childhood swimming memories are dominated by the days and days of swimming we did in the school holidays at the Napier Intermediate pool, trudging down the hot main road, plastic bag of togs in hand. One summer afternoon I swam a mile – 64 lengths of the pool – for no particular reason other than knowing I’d done it. This summer, jealous of the Opo story, my kids and I dived offa boat in Kaikoura and swam with dolphins. “When I shut my eyes I still see dolphins,” my 11-year-old said that night.
With around 15,000km of coastline and a beach never more than 130km away, it’s understandable we are a nation that loves to get wet. And that doesn’t even factor in lakes, rivers and swimming pools. There are swims to be had everywhere.
‘Only swimming allows you to enter another medium … it’s the liquid, the cool of it, the colour of it and the wildlife, which makes you feel slightly perilous. It’s enchanting.’
Annette Lees, environmentalist and author of , is a dedicated outdoor swimmer. Motivated by a childhood resolution not to become a “dusty adult” who sat beside the water watching the kids swim, in 2015 she set herself a quest to go for an outdoor swim every day, regardless of the weather. She swam in rivers, lakes, ponds, the sea, estuaries, wetlands, springs and open-air pools – covered pools were out – and documented each swim in a diary. She agrees that our memories of swimming are vivid: “Even the adults that swim just a few times in summer, when asked, they really describe those swims with some relish – they’re searing memories, not confused memories.”
