Entry 05 · Kit and habits

Six things in the bag, and the habits that matter more

People ask what you need for winter swimming, and the honest answer is a towel and somebody sensible standing on the bank. The list below stays short because most of what gets sold for this is comfort rather than safety.

18.3°C at knee depth

Swim

At the water: 14 June 2026
Typed up: 25 August 2026
Reading: 6 minutes
Where: Zarasai, Utena County

What actually goes in the bag

Six items earn their place all winter and none of them is expensive. Neoprene gloves and neoprene socks, because hands and feet are where the pain lives and where function goes first. Two hats, one wool and one neoprene, worn together below about four degrees. A brightly coloured tow float, in winter as well, even for a dip. A wide-mouthed flask of something hot and sweet. A changing robe or an old quilted coat, and a rubber mat to stand on while dressing.

Everything else is optional and a fair amount of it is a liability. A wetsuit changes what you are doing enough that you are no longer practising the same thing, and it makes the exit harder rather than easier. Elaborate thermometers, heart-rate straps and apps that score your dip are entertaining and have never once altered a decision on our bank. The rubber mat sounds trivial until you have tried to pull dry socks onto wet feet while standing barefoot in frozen mud.

Said out loud on the bank

Neoprene gloves and socks: hands and feet give up first
Two hats below four degrees, wool over neoprene
A bright tow float, winter included
A wide-mouthed flask, a changing robe, a mat to stand on

Gloves, socks and the two-hat question

Nobody in this group started out with gloves and everybody wears them now. The argument against is that gloves reduce the exposure you came for, which sounds principled right up until your hands are useless and somebody else has to dress you. Three-millimetre neoprene roughly doubles the working time you get out of a pair of hands in two-degree water, and that time is spent on getting out, opening a bag and holding a flask rather than on staying in the lake any longer.

Hats are less clear-cut. We do not put our heads under below about six degrees, which makes the wool hat largely a comfort item, and the neoprene layer underneath is for the ears and the back of the neck in wind. The one thing worth being firm about is colour. A dark hat in grey water at half past eight on a December morning is genuinely hard to pick out from thirty metres away, and the person on the bank is counting heads.

Counting in and counting out

One person counts, that person does not swim, and everybody knows who it is before anyone touches the water. The job rotates weekly. The counter holds the times, keeps the phone in a dry bag, stands where the whole group is visible rather than where the shelter happens to be, and has no other task at all. We wrote that down after a morning when three people each assumed one of the others was watching the water and none of them actually was.

The count happens twice: heads in, heads out, spoken aloud with names attached. It takes ten seconds and it feels absurd among eight adults who have known each other for five years. It is also the only mechanism we have that works when something goes wrong quietly, and cold water almost always goes wrong quietly. Nobody thrashes and shouts. They get slower, they go silent, they stop answering when spoken to, and the counter is the person who notices.

Said out loud on the bank

A named counter every week, who does not get in
Count heads in and heads out, aloud, by name
Phone in a dry bag with the counter, not left in a car
Trouble is quiet: watch for silence, not for splashing

The rules we wrote down after a bad morning

In February 2023 one of us stayed in for four minutes at two degrees, double the agreed time, because he felt good and nobody on the bank was holding the clock. He climbed out unaided, walked twenty metres up the path, and then could not tell us where his own bag was. He was fine within the hour, and he was fine because five of us were standing there and the sauna was already lit. Neither skill nor fitness had anything to do with how that morning ended.

Four rules came out of it and they have not changed since. The stated time is a maximum and the counter calls it. Nobody swims alone, in any season, at any temperature. Anybody may end anybody else's swim without an argument and without having to justify it afterwards. Whatever happened goes into the log the same morning, including the parts that make us look careless, because a log that records only the good mornings is a scrapbook.