Complete · Zarasai
Swim log
Everything written up since 24 March 2024, newest first. The bead beside each entry is the water reading that morning, filled dark for anything under five degrees, which is the line where a swim becomes a dip.
- 18.3 °CSwim
Kit and habits
Six things in the bag, and the habits that matter more
The short list of kit that earns its place through a Lithuanian winter, the gear that does not, and the counting habits that matter more than any of it.
- 5.1 °CShort swim
Water temperature
Below ten degrees: the thermometer, the clock, the afterdrop
The one reading that sets the whole winter plan, why a minute per degree is only a ceiling, and the twenty minutes on the bank that decide the morning.
- 1.4 °CDip only
Winter
Cutting an ice hole that is still open on Sunday morning
Where to cut and where not to, how to push the slab under instead of lifting it out, keeping a hole open at minus fifteen, and planning the exit first.
- 21.4 °CSwim
Summer
Dawn swims in July, and why we are in before six
The flat hour before the wind gets up, a lake that layers warm over cold, boats on the crossing line, and the carelessness that warm water brings.
- 2.6 °CDip only
Spring
The thaw fortnight: swimming a lake that is coming apart
Two or three weeks when the ice is neither safe nor gone, the water runs colder than it did in January, and the entry has to be chosen twice.
Readings are ours, taken at knee depth with a cheap glass thermometer, and they are not accurate enough to be anybody else's evidence. Entries stay as they were written; where a later one contradicts an earlier one, both remain and the later says so — seehow the log is kept.