The overwater villa at the Maldivian resort has a ladder from the deck to the water. The Eighty2 at anchor in the Maldivian lagoon has the dive platform, three steps from the companionway, at the waterline. These are not the same experience. The resort villa is in the resort: the housekeeping schedule, the restaurant opening times, the other guests, the specific managed quality of the five-star experience that arrives with everything it provides and everything it prevents.
The Eighty2 is at anchor in the lagoon because Sven put it there the evening before and because the lagoon was where the route was and where the anchor held in the coral sand, and the six o’clock water is the lagoon’s water before the resort’s morning programme has begun and before any other human is in it.
I swim every morning that the anchorage allows it. Maldivian lagoon mornings allow it consistently: the water is twenty-nine degrees at six, the surface is flat before the trade wind builds at nine, and the visibility is thirty metres in the specific clearness of the atoll water that the absence of terrestrial runoff and the carbonate sand of the lagoon floor produces.
The swim is forty minutes in water that I share with the reef fish and the occasional sea turtle and the bioluminescent plankton that the morning’s first light makes invisible but that the platform’s edge at midnight showed in the wake of the hand moving through the water. The forty minutes of the morning swim is the forty minutes that no resort programme provides and that the offshore anchor makes available by simply being where it is.
The Safety of the Anchorage Swim
The anchorage swim has a specific safety protocol that the offshore sailing community has developed and that the Naora dive programme formalises. The dinghy is in the water at the swim time, not on the davits: the surface support that the dinghy provides is the surface support that a person swimming forty metres from the boat needs and that the dive platform alone does not provide when the swimmer is beyond visual contact. The swim zone is the zone that the anchor position and the current determine and that the briefing before the swim defines: this side of the boat, within this distance, no further. The VHF is always in the dinghy or on the deck with the crew member who has eyes on the swimmer. The swim flag flies from the stern when members are in the water.
The Maldivian lagoon is one of the safest swimming environments on the Naora route: the tidal range is minimal, the current inside the atoll lagoon is gentle, the water temperature is warm enough to prevent the cold water shock that the Mediterranean morning swim sometimes produces in members arriving from northern Europe. The reef sharks in the lagoon are the blacktip reef sharks that the Maldivian lagoon produces in abundance and that the marine biologist has spent twenty years telling the dive industry are not a threat to the swimmer who is not wearing silver jewellery or trailing blood. The briefing covers this. The swim is safe. The water is extraordinary.
