Do I Have to Take Off my Pants?

Open water swimming in Bermuda

When we reach the shipwreck, the captain cuts the engine and drops anchor. The boat bobs to a halt in the choppy turquoise ocean.

It’s a sunny Sunday morning in mid-May and Jess and I are vacationing in Bermuda, celebrating our tenth wedding anniversary. I’m excited to snorkel for the first time, and also anxious. Before I swim across the Hudson River in July I want to feel more comfortable in open water. Basically, today’s snorkel trip is low-key exposure therapy.

The captain distributes masks and fins to us and the other seven passengers: a young couple; two twenty-something brothers, their sister, and their aunt; and two women with baseball caps: one hat says Bermuda Harbor Swim Club, the other says The Kayak  Foundation. The former is local. The second is visiting from Brooklyn.

The mask squeezes my skull and the fins scrape my sunburned feet, so I loosen the rubber straps.

“Now listen up.” The captain glowers. “I need to ask you some mandatory questions.”

“Question 1: Can you swim?”

“Question 2: Can you float?”

“Question 3: Are you comfortable in water where you can’t stand?”

After each question, we murmur yes, a dutiful chorus. Regardless, we’ve already signed waivers releasing the company from liability.

“Question 5: Do you know your own limits?”

“Question 6: Will you stay within those limits?”

Yes. Also yes.

“Does anyone want a vest?” The captain holds up a fluorescent yellow life jacket. “It’s really uncomfortable because you have to secure this strap tight around your crotch.”

The young couple raise their hands.

“No,” the captain says, dismissively. “You don’t need the vest.”

Sheepishly they lower their hands.

“Last question,” the captain says. “Do I need to take off my pants?”

Silence. I’m confused. Then I understand: He means will he need to dive into the water to rescue anyone?

“No,” we murmur.

“One more time,” he says. “Do I need to take off my pants?

“No,” we say, louder.

“Good.” The captain smiles. “Now get in the water.”

Harbor Swim Club woman goes first. She dives off the back of the boat with the snorkel in her mouth, disappears in the dark water, then emerges. I jump feet first, slapping the water with long floppy fins. I gasp from the cold, then adjust my mask and snorkel, sputtering salt, heart hammering, treading to get my bearings. Minutes later, Jess joins me and together we swim toward the shipwreck, swarmed by schools of silvery fish.

For the next two hours, we snorkel, first at the shipwreck site, one of countless boats run aground over the centuries, and then at a coral reef, where the fish are scarcer, but larger and livelier, bright bursts of red and green. Apparently, snorkeling is less like swimming laps in a pool and more like underwater sightseeing. I’m surprised by my body’s buoyancy in saltwater and how easy it is to float.

The next day on the beach, I swim to a buoy that separates the designated swimming area from the harbor where boats are moored. There’s nobody else here, so I ask Jess to lifeguard. For a while, the water is warm, clear, and shallow—maybe five feet deep. I swim and swim, but the buoy doesn’t seem to get any closer.. Maybe I don’t know how to gauge distance in open water. Maybe it’s because I’m swimming straight into the current.

Suddenly, the bottom drops to twenty or thirty feet. The water darkens and chills. I pause, shivering, treading, and wave at Jess, ostensibly to reassure her, but more to reassure myself.  Then I swim straight to the buoy, stopping short so I don’t get tangled in the rope.

The swim to shore, boosted by the current, is faster and easier. But while I swam a straight line from beach to buoy, perpendicular to shore, the return trip is a drifting diagonal that lands me 100 feet down the beach.

Now I grasp why the Hudson River Swim web site says the one-mile swim may feel like 1.5 miles, depending on how straight you can swim, which depends on how well you can “sight” where you’re going and how well you can navigate the currents.

Clearly I still have a lot to learn.