Entry 01 · Spring

The thaw fortnight: swimming a lake that is coming apart

There is a fortnight most springs when the lake is neither frozen nor open, and it is the stretch of the year I trust least. The ice is still lying there, the water under it is colder than anything January produced, and the shore changes shape between one morning and the next.

2.6°C at knee depth

Dip only

At the water: 24 March 2024
Typed up: 12 May 2024
Reading: 7 minutes
Where: Zarasai, Utena County

When ice stops being ice

Ice does not thaw politely from the top down. It rots. The crystals that held together all winter separate into vertical columns, the sheet turns grey and then oddly pale, and a slab still measuring fifteen centimetres will take a boot straight through it. The sound changes before the look does, which is the part nobody mentions. Solid ice rings when you tap it with a pole. Rotten ice gives a dull, wet knock, and the pole comes back with a rim of water standing around the hole it made.

We stop walking out somewhere around the middle of March, and the date has never been the thing that decided it. What decides it is a morning when the surface holds a pole for three taps and then stops holding it, or when the black patches over the reed beds have doubled since Thursday, or when meltwater has run out from the bank and left a metre of open water along the whole bay. After that the ice is scenery. We swim from the shore and we look at it from the shore.

Said out loud on the bank

Grey, pale ice with a vertical grain is rotten, whatever it measures
A dull wet knock from the pole instead of a ring
An open rim along the bank where meltwater runs in
Black patches over the reeds growing from one day to the next

March water is colder than February water

The coldest swim of our year is almost never in January. Under a lid of ice and snow the lake sits close to four degrees at the bottom and a little under one at the surface, and it is remarkably stable about it. Thaw breaks that stability. Meltwater comes off the fields and out of the ditches at nearly zero, snow goes in off the banks by the shovel-load, and wind reaches the surface for the first time in three months. Our lowest reading in four years of notes is dated the twenty-ninth of March.

That matters because people arrive in spring feeling like veterans of the winter. They have swum in an ice hole in January, the sun is out, the first insects are up, and they get in expecting the water to have turned some sort of corner. Hands stop working at the same speed they did in midwinter and the first gasp is every bit as violent. We cut our times harder in the thaw fortnight than at any other point in the year, and the number gets said out loud on the bank before anybody undresses.

Choosing the entry twice

Every spring the shore we used all February becomes unusable, and it generally happens between a Wednesday and a Saturday. The shelf of ice welded to the bank undercuts from underneath, so it looks continuous from above while holding nothing at all. Somebody steps onto it and it hinges. That happened to us in 2023 at a spot we had used for nine weeks, and the person who went through was fine because she was roped and standing between two others, which is exactly why we rope in the thaw.

The habit now is to choose the entry, and then choose it again on the morning itself. One of us walks the bank with a two-metre pole and pushes down every half-metre along the line we mean to use. If anything hinges, sounds hollow or drops away, we move twenty metres along and start over. It costs ten minutes. A gravel beach with a gentle slope is worth walking to even barefoot over frozen mud, because it lets you get out without asking an ice lip to carry your weight.

Said out loud on the bank

Test the bank with a pole before anyone undresses
Treat every welded ice shelf as undercut until proven otherwise
Rope whoever stands at the edge through the thaw fortnight
Walk further for a gravel slope rather than trust an ice lip

What the thaw does to people

Spring is our most disorganised season and I have given up pretending otherwise. Winter swimming runs tightly because it has to: the hole is cut, the ladder is in, the times are short, and everybody is frightened enough to listen. In March the sun does most of the damage. It feels warm on the bank, the ice is visibly going, the lake looks as though it is opening for the year, and the group spreads out along the shore instead of staying in one place where somebody can count heads.

What works is a smaller swim with more structure around it. Two at a time in the water, one person counting on the bank, nobody further out than a shout, everybody dressed again before the next pair gets in. It looks fussy for a dip that lasts ninety seconds. It also means the fortnight when the water is at its coldest and the ground underfoot is at its least trustworthy is the fortnight when we watch each other most closely, which is the way round it ought to be.