Polar bear swim 2011

It was a balmy 12 C with intermittent rain in Hamilton today-- perfect swimming weather--and so your intrepid correspondent sallies forth!

(That is not fat. What looks to the casual observer like a beer gut is actually layer upon layer of thermal padding and floatation modules - safety first! That's my story and I'm sticking to it)

Going,

going,

gone!

In the immortal words of George Castanza: "There was shrinkage"

In all honesty, while it was chilly and the water bracing, it was not, as Tom Waits describes it "colder than a gut-shot bitch wolf dog with nine sucking pups pulling a number-four trap up a hill in the dead of winter in the middle of a snowstorm with a mouth full of porcupine quills" but it was definitely in banker's smile/witch's tit/welldigger's ass territory once you got wet, though not as cold as the year in the early 90s I did it in Picton harbour through a hole in the ice in a January snowstorm.


Apologies to my wife, son and daughter who, when I said "let's go to the polar bear swim this morning," we honestly-to-god expecting this:



My daughter, who is seven, was quite concerned when I said I was going to take part in the polar bear swim on New Year's Day because she thought I might get eaten by bears.
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