About half way through the 1.8km Captain Christie Classic at Gerringong, off the rock shelf that forms the inner boundary of the course, Mrs Sparkle had a close encounter of a very pelagic kind. She was accosted by a prawn. Just one prawn, but, she said, a very large prawn. “I was swimming along, minding my own business, struggling to get a breath, and I saw this prawn going the wrong way,” she said. “It came right at me. I thought it was aiming for my head. But it passed about a foot below me right down the middle … (she described a near as straight line down from her forehead, along her nose and right down between her heaving breasts (she was still puffing from the exertion) and it was (holding her thumb and forefinger about six inches apart) this big!”

We’ve seen her striking a pose like that before, but not on a beach. Looking at her standing there, her curly red hair and freckles still dripping from the swim, in her striking orange and yellow patterned cossie, only lately received in the mail from the Way Funky people, we suddenly understood why a prawn might think Mrs Sparkle was friendly life. A cooked prawn, anyway.

Indeed, this was a remarkable swim. It was about the 27th running of the Capt. Christie Classic, which commemorates, so the organisers would have us believe, a bet between a sea captain by the name of Ernest Bartholomew Christie who, in 1892, was moored in Gerringong’s Boat Harbour. He bet a crew member that he could swim from the mooring along the rock shelf to Werri Beach, which is Gerringong’s main beach. The prize was a bottle of whisky. Christie did it and won. Although whether the feat was genuine or apocryphal is something about which the Gerringong surf club laddies would prefer to keep us guessing.

“It’s a good story,” said club identity Greg Moore.

“… and there’s no-one around to say it’s wrong,” chimed in fellow scallywag Mal Dunwoodie, who is a boatie, so, as far as credibility goes, there you go.

To mark the legend, in the literal sense of the word, the Gerringong club distributes miniature bottles of whisky to swimmers, although how we ended up with a miniature of rum is beyond us.

We can’t help but feel that someone’s coming the raw prawn with us here.

Trek to the start ...

... which allows one to show ...

... how beautiful Gerringong is. Indeed, the week before the swim, one of those trashy shows on commercial tv that masquerades as "current affairs" but really is just a series of promo puffs for commercial interests listed Gerringong as one of the most desirable places in Stray'a for sea changes.

It makes the swim a bit different, however. Not that it needs help. This is a different swim in that it’s one of those genuine, small-club country swims that remain in your mind for its idiosyncracies. As swell as the swim, the Gerringong club bungs on a fashion parade, a fish-off – after which the catch is auctioned off – and a body surfing competition, which it titles, grandly, “The East Coast Body Surfing Championships”, which involves a host of willing mugs going for a body surf at 7am and half a dozen judges on the shore make value judgements about who is the biggest mug lair in the surf.

It’s all a lot of fun, and we all have a good time, and it’s all done in a terrific spirit. It makes you glad to be an ocean swimmer.

The entire town turned out to watch the start of the Capt. Christie Classic at Boat Harbour ...

... others were coming to terms with the arm action required for this swim.

Milling throng at the start.

You really had to do this swim in 2009. In recent years, the Christie has been cursed with poor, difficult conditions and very cold water. Two years ago, we were standing on the deck of Lorne surf club in Victoria, waiting for the start of our first Pier to Pub, when we took a frazzled phone call from then Christie organiser, Pommy Andy. “The water’s 13 degrees up here,” said Andy. “What’s the rule?” Thirteen degrees in Sydney, whilst we down here in Lorne, abutting the Great Southern Ocean, were preparing to deal with 17 degrees. It was cold last year, too, and with difficult surf, so the club moved the swim around the corner to Gerroa, which offers some protection from bad conditions in some weather.

This year looked ok at the outset, but there was a freshening northerly breeze which, around swim start time, moved slightly to come from the nor’-east, on a nor’east swell. It wasn’t so difficult as to be alarming enough to change the course earlier in the morning. And, indeed, it never did get bad enough to be regarded as bad. But it was freshening, so the swim took place, from Boat Harbour to Werri Beach – a south to north course – into the breeze, the swell, and the chop.

“This is real ocean swimming,” we thought, as we rounded the first point out of Boat Harbour. A few people said much the same thing when we got back to Werri Beach.

Into the breeze, the chop and the swell, we got a real taste of what swimming in the ocean should be all about: buffeted by wind, rocked by the swell, and disrupted by the chop, which crashed into our faces, our heads, on every stroke throughout the swim. So Mrs Sparkle’s comment above about how she’d been “struggling to get a breath” was genuine. “At one stage (in the swim),” she said later, “I rolled to breathe right, and a I got a mouthful of ocean. Then I rolled to breathe left, and I got a mouthful of ocean. I began to think, I hope I get a breath soon, or I might be in trouble.” She went at times, she said, for seven strokes without getting a breath, such was the disruptive combination of the chop, swell and wind.

The sea in Boat Harbour is filled with all kinds of maritime memorabilia and sea life ...

The boat ramp feeding into Boat Harbour forms the start of the Capt. Christie Classic.

It was like Coogee, undoubtedly the bumpiest beach in Sydney, where no two strokes are the same. Not just consecutive strokes, but any two strokes – pick any two! – throughout the swim. As well as the difficulty with breathing, there were difficulties with entry, with pull through, and with recovery. With entry, you’d suddenly find the water you were about to enter is no longer there. With the pull through, you would find your body, properly aligned at first, suddenly rotating dramatically as the water disappeared beneath you. With the recovery, you found your recovering arm, after a long finish to your stroke and poised to leave the water, suddenly under another foot of water and impossible to retrieve from the sea.

In conditions like this, you need patience. Back in the olden days, when oceanswims.com was an eager surfboat rower with the Bronte SLSC – we were the Bashful Bs – we changed our technique for conditions like this involving long reaches directly into heavy chop. Instead of a faster stroke rating, we would slow it down, lengthen it out, lean back farther, and finish each stroke with a muscular flourish, which would give the boat extra shove to run through the chop until the stroke recovered and we grabbed again. Despite the chop and the swell, the boat ran relatively flat. It worked well.

Culcha.

Here they come.

Up close and personal.

Ditto in ocean swimming: into a chop and swell, especially into a breeze on top of the other two, you need your body flat, a longer stroke, a slower, stronger pull through, and you need to finish your strokes well to give provide that extra bit of run to keep the body moving forward, through the chop, until the next stroke. A stroke like that requires patience. In chop, in head on swell, when you’re rising and falling and being hit in the forehead stroke after stroke, patience will be your greatest virtue. Don’t let the continuous disruptions throw your stroke plan. You constantly have to change the stage of your stroke, the direction of the entry, the line of the pull and the timing of the recovery to deal with the quickly and perpetually changing conditions, but you have to accept that perpetual change as the norm, and perhaps delay or alter lines, but continue to keep your stroke long and slow with greater power, and a more robust finish. The sea is trying to throw you off, to disrupt your technique, to knock your confidence, to destroy your rhythm. But you have to understand this and adapt a technique to suit the conditions. You have to show that you’re greater than the sea by working out an approach to deal with it. The sea can’t rationalise this; you can.

You’re constantly responding to the changing conditions, of course, but you’re doing that within the context of a constant technique.

It was a fascinating swim for all this. The constant disruptions provided equally constant demands on your mind. It was a mind swim. A game of patience.

And it was conducted in pristine water, ocean clear and clean, so energising and so purifying. And the fish-off was still to come! Goodness gracious, it was good to be an ocean swimmer at Gerringong.

Stunning. And around the point, the sea flattened as the peloton headed across the swell, not into it.

Some people were born to be fashion models. Some weren't.

The cast of the fashion parade.