The deep blue sea
Mumbles Regatta, about 1982

I was in a rowing club when I was at school - my dad had done it when he was a kid, and it was one of the few sports that didn't punish short-sightedness on account of being able to wear glasses. (Soft contact lenses were available then, but only just and at punitive cost.)

I was racing Under 16s in a coxed four and it was my first time rowing on the sea, rather than a lake or river, so the waves took a bit of getting used to. To avoid snapping the boat in half on a particularly big swell, we raced parallel to the shore, but bigger waves still slopped over the gunwales and into the boat, and you had to wade out from the beach to put the boat on the water. (Lake and river boathouses usually have concrete steps so you don't have to get your feet wet.) I was wearing a pair of cheapo blue trainers which tended to release their dye when they got wet, and for the first couple of heats I wore them to walk the boat out, then took them off because racing boats usually have shoes attached to the 'stretcher' (bit of wood you put you kick off from; the seat is moveable along metal slides on each side, allowing the rower to use the power of their legs as well as arms and back).

Aaanyway, I was embarrassed to see the seawater slopping over the edge of the boat was bright blue - my trainers must have got wet enough to start leaking their dye. We won the first heat, and the second. Blue swilling water sloshed around the bottom of the boat each time.

For the last race for some reason I left my trainers behind, only to noticed that the water was still blue - really blue-green, like copper sulphate solution or WKD. We won that heat too, and went on to win the final, but that's not the problem, it was the water.

It wasn't my trainers. Maybe it was our socks or someone else's shoes? Nope, we were all wearing our school strip which used brown socks, and no one else had shoes in the boat either. As an experiment, someone picked up an empty pint glass from the clubhouse bar, and filled it with seawater. Lo and behold, the seawater was as blue as the default Windows colour scheme. Looking across the bay, you could see a fucking great big steelworks at Port Talbot. We didn't bother with the tradition of throwing our winning cox into the water after the final. He might have melted.

I've since seen stuff on tv about Swansea being a huge world centre of copper production from the early years of the Industrial Revolution until it finally died out in the mid to late 80s, so it probably was copper salts in the water that turned it blue. And while it was near death in 1982, environmental cleanup was still years away, so two centuries of toxic heavy industry was still leaching its filth into the waters around Swansea. Including Mumbles. And they let us row on it. I've still got the engraved pewter tankard I won for taking part somewhere.

Of course, it never did any of us any harm, apart from Porky Morgans who died of leukaemia in his 30s and had been for a swim between heats back in 1982.
( shinyshinyscalp less a man, more a way of life, Thu 19 Apr 2012, 14:33, 2 replies)

none of the locals swim in Swansea Bay
It's feckin' rank.

When you round the headland onto Gower proper it's a lot cleaner though.
(magic the cat will someone please think of the kittens, Thu 19 Apr 2012, 15:04, closed)

i row on the tideway
its brown

because its literally full of shit that thames water pump into it.

trenton oldfields performance in the boat race gives me a samll warm glow, knowing hes still probably suffering from the shits.
(magictorch, Thu 19 Apr 2012, 16:08, closed)