Open water swimming in Britain and Ireland means a lake, a reservoir or a sheltered lough, and the limiting factor is cold. In Australia it means the ocean, and the limiting factors are surf, rips and sun. It is a genuinely different sport, and the transition catches people out in both directions.
The ocean swim series
Every summer, the populated coastline runs a calendar of ocean swims — mass-participation beach races, typically between 1km and 5km, starting and finishing on the sand. They are the backbone of the sport here and are as much a part of the Australian summer as parkrun is of a British Saturday.
The pattern is consistent: a beach start through the surf, a rectangular or triangular course marked with buoys, and a run up the sand to the finish. Surf lifesaving clubs run many of them, which means unusually heavy in-water supervision.
The crossings
- The Rottnest Channel Swim, February, Western Australia. 19.7km from Cottesloe Beach to Rottnest Island, as a solo, duo or team. It is one of the largest open-water swims in the world and the biggest event in Australian swimming.
- The Sri Chinmoy National Capital Swim in Canberra, a 10km on Lake Burley Griffin in November — a rare inland long swim.
- Numerous point-to-point and island swims around the coast, from Palm Beach to Whale Beach in Sydney to the Great Keppel and Magnetic Island crossings in Queensland.
Ocean pools
The Australian coast, and the New South Wales coast especially, is lined with ocean pools — tidal rock pools cut into the shore platform, flushed by the sea and free to use. Sydney alone has dozens, from Bondi Icebergs south to Cronulla and north to Palm Beach.
For a swimmer training for a triathlon or an ocean swim, they solve the main problem: real seawater at real temperature with none of the risk. They are also the reason a great many Australians can swim properly.
Surf, rips and what to respect
The surf entry is the skill an ocean swim demands that a lake swim does not: timing the sets, dolphin-diving under breaking waves, and getting past the break without exhausting yourself. It is learnable and worth practising before a race rather than during one.
Rip currents are the genuine hazard on an Australian beach, and the advice is well established and worth repeating: a rip pulls you out, not under, and the response is to swim parallel to the beach rather than against the current, or to float and signal. Swimming between the red and yellow flags, where they exist, means being watched by people whose job is exactly that.
Marine life is a smaller factor than reputation suggests, with two practical exceptions. Bluebottles arrive on onshore winds along the east coast and are unpleasant rather than dangerous. In tropical Queensland and the Northern Territory, box jellyfish season — roughly November to May — is a genuine reason to stay out of unprotected water, and stinger nets and full stinger suits exist for that reason.
Water temperature, and the wetsuit question
This is the reverse of the British problem. Australian summer sea temperatures on much of the east coast sit high enough that a wetsuit is uncomfortable rather than necessary, and often above the legal threshold for wetsuit use in a race. Tasmania, Victoria and the south coast of Western Australia are the exceptions and are genuinely cold.