Day 63.
Ti Point, Friday intro swim w / Pod.
Robyn overcame her fear and got in the water.
What a miracle. After she’d wiped away her tears, we stood together on the boat ramp and started by putting our faces under the water for a few seconds. Once that was comfortable, we experimented with moving a few inches away from the boat ramp and back. I dived down to show her how deep it was, the water was murky but calm. Then we floated over to the wharf to look at the juvenile fish schooling under it, and slowly, little by little, Robyn found her rhythm and her face relaxed. We moved out into the channel, I explained that though we couldn't see the bottom it wasn't that deep, its just the sediment from the estuary that clouds the water, but nothing lurks below. She started to swim and in the end, she was doing laps up and down and only coming back to tell me she was going for another round.
My heart was so happy. I was in my element. It’s not that Robyn can’t swim; that wasn't the problem. In fact she told me she had done an Ironman when she younger. It was her fear of Orca that overwhelmed her at the waters edge, and made her feel like she couldn't get in.
I shared my stories around how I built my own confidence in the water as a young girl, exploring the underwater coastline of Yorkshire in the cold (and often wild) North Sea. I was inspired by Valerie Taylor and was in awe of GWS’s, but was also afraid to pee after watching Jaws, incase my butt got bitten whilst sitting on the toilet. I talked about how I have to find balance in the water still, between the fears my subconscious feeds me vs the logic my intellect can rationale with. And how, after thirty plus years of submerging myself, I still have to work to manage the thoughts in my head when ever I get in the ocean.
Just like Bonnie Tsui explains in her book ‘The Uncertain Sea’ where she writes about Ron Elliott (a diver who has been in the sharky waters around the Farallon islands for the last thirty years), it’s about risk assessment and becoming comfortable to sit with the fear of what could happen, but you know will... most likely, not. Valerie Taylor is right when she says “everything in life is a calculated risk, even a cup of tea could burn you”.
Don’t let it stop you. Ever.