By day four of any leg, the member who was not a morning swimmer before boarding has usually become one. Not through the pressure of the group or the programme or the expectation that the offshore morning requires a specific activity: through the specific quality of the offshore morning itself, which presents the option of the water at a time of day when the water is at its most specific and when the land life provides no equivalent option in the same form.
The six-o’clock anchorage is the anchorage before the day has begun its demands: the water at its calmest, the temperature at its most comfortable, the surface at the specific stillness that the overnight calm produces before the first breath of the morning breeze disturbs it. The member who goes in at six does not go in because the programme requires it.
They go in because the water is there and the morning is this morning and the specific quality of the offshore anchorage at six is the quality that the land life has been preventing them from accessing without quite identifying what it was preventing.
What the Routine Becomes
The morning swim is twenty to forty minutes depending on the person and the day and the water temperature and the specific marine life that the anchorage produces at six in the morning when the reef’s nocturnal inhabitants are transitioning back to the diurnal ones and both are briefly visible simultaneously. The swim is not lap swimming: the anchorage does not provide a lane and the offshore water does not require one.
It is the exploratory swimming of the person who is in the water with the reef rather than over it, who follows the coral head rather than the pool’s black line, who turns when the visibility or the depth or the current suggests the turn rather than when the wall is reached. It is the swimming that the pool was preparing the body for without the pool’s specific version of what the body was being prepared for.
The protocol is the protocol: the dinghy in the water or the crew member with eyes on the swimmer from the deck, the VHF accessible, the swim zone defined and briefed before the entry, the swim flag at the stern while members are in the water. The safety is consistent across every anchorage on the route: Mediterranean or Pacific or Indian Ocean or Red Sea, the protocol is the same and the platform is the same and the water is whatever the anchorage provides and the morning is whatever the morning is.
The member who goes in on day four and comes out twenty minutes later having shared the anchorage with the turtle that uses the cleaning station below the boat’s keel and the parrotfish school that moves through at six-fifteen on its daily circuit of the reef: that member does not need to be told to go back in tomorrow. The water tells them.
