Entry 02 · Summer

Dawn swims in July, and why we are in before six

In July the lake is warmer than the air until about seven in the morning, and for an hour before that the surface is completely flat. We get up early for the surface rather than for the temperature.

21.4°C at knee depth

Swim

At the water: 7 July 2024
Typed up: 2 September 2024
Reading: 6 minutes
Where: Zarasai, Utena County

The hour before six

A shallow lake loses its wind overnight and gets it back with the sun. From around four in the morning until the first thermals lift, usually a little after seven, our bay is glass: no chop, no sound off the road, mist standing over the water in a layer about a metre deep. At chest depth you can see the bottom. It is also the only stretch of a July day when nobody is fishing on the far side, and that matters considerably more than the view does.

By nine the same bay carries a fifteen-centimetre chop, three boats and a wind coming straight down the length of the lake, and a crossing that took twenty-five minutes at half past five takes forty. The difference in water temperature between those two swims is almost nothing. The difference in effort is enormous. Most of what we call a good swim in summer turns out to be a description of the surface, and the surface is a function of the hour rather than of the month.

Warm on top, cold below the knee

Through most of July our lakes layer. The top thirty or forty centimetres sit at twenty or twenty-one degrees after a week of sun, and underneath there is a boundary you can find with your feet: fourteen, sometimes twelve, occasionally colder than that over the deep hole in the middle. Standing up in chest-deep water halfway through a July swim is a real shock, and the people it catches are the ones who have only ever read the surface figure off a screen.

The layer is fragile as well. Two windy days will mix the whole bay and take three degrees off the top, and a thunderstorm can manage it overnight. Our notes for the same week in three different years read twenty-one, eighteen and fifteen. I measure at knee depth every single time and write it down, and I have stopped being surprised that the reading has far more to do with the last two days of weather than with the date at the top of the page.

Boats, reeds and the line across

The crossing we do most often runs about six hundred metres from our bay to a point on the far shore, straight across the line boats use to reach the northern end. A swimmer's head in flat water at five in the morning, with mist lying on the surface and a low sun behind, is close to invisible from a small boat. We assume we cannot be seen. Every one of us tows a float, we cross as a tight group rather than strung out over fifty metres, and one person swims at the back with their head up.

Sighting is the other half of it. Without something to aim at, people arc to the left; almost everybody I have ever swum with arcs to the left. We pick a mast, a gap in the trees or the corner of a roof on the far bank before getting in, and we say out loud which one we have picked. The reed beds at either end are a genuine hazard in August, less for the weed than because they are shallow, hot, thick with insects and impossible to see through.

Said out loud on the bank

One bright tow float each, including on a short crossing
Agree the sighting mark aloud, on the bank, before getting in
Cross as a group, with one swimmer at the back, head up
Keep out of the reeds and hold the line across open water

Summer is when the winter people get careless

Everybody in this group is more careful in January than in July, which is backwards from where our near misses have actually been. Warm water removes the fear without removing the distance. Nobody swims six hundred metres out in February, because two minutes is the entire event. In July somebody will be forty minutes from the bank with a cramp in one calf, no float, and a group that spread out twenty minutes earlier and quietly stopped counting anybody.

The summer rules are duller than the winter ones and they get broken far more often. Drink something before a long morning swim, because dehydration in a lake is not obvious and it is what turns a cramp into a problem. Keep the crossing inside the flat hour. Do not swim a distance you have not already swum in company that season, and do not extend it because the water feels friendly, since that feeling is the one part of the lake nobody can measure.