The world of water with ice swimmer Nuala Moore

Outside Dingle in Co Kerry, the waves of Beenbawn Beach cascade gently on the shore and spray lightly off the rocks.

When we go swimming, the temperature is noticeably cooler than the summer months, but manageable for this writer (just about) and not a bother for the interviewee.

We settle down on rocks up the beach for a chat and travel far away from the Kerry coast. The adventures of renowned ice and open water swimmer, Nuala Moore, take us all over the world.

Even to the point where the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans meet off Cape Horn, 56° south of the equator. On this line of latitude there’s no land, just ocean.

The waters off Cape Horn, the Drake Passage, are notoriously deadly. Although we discuss the dangers associated with all water (keep reading, you’ll see), there’s no doubt these freezing ocean waves are a different world to the comparable sanctuary of Dingle Bay.

Nuala became the first Irish person and first ever woman to swim off Cape Horn in 2018. She was in her swimming togs, as she is for all her ice swims.

In preparation, she swam all through the winter for two hours off this beach and others nearby. She developed frostbite in her finger and open sores on her hands from the cold, which she covered in Manuka honey and wrapped in clingfilm.

She had to hire a team comprised of; two dive-medics, a nurse, a defibrillator and a boat, of course. Their primary job was to get her out of the water and keep her alive. All-in-all, the whole thing cost her a five figure sum. Her survival time was two hours, and if they lost her, she would die.

On the boat travelling south of Cape Horn, the enormity of the situation hit her.

“You realise, there isn’t anybody coming, there’s no helicopter, there’s no RNLI,” Nuala recalls. “Then you realise where you are, you’re north of the Antarctic, you’re in the Drake Passage and I’ve to be home for work on Monday.

“Suddenly you’re exposed to your weaknesses. You’re sitting there in the boat and you’re starting to cry. I remember thinking to myself, ‘This is ridiculous’. This is one risk too far, it’s like K2. You become insanely emotional as to, how am I going to do this?

“Then you say to yourself, this is who I am. I’ve enough of a skillset built up to take this on. I don’t know if that’s self-belief, because I doubted myself horrendously. It’s courage, I think.

“I was separated from my boat for a period of time and started singing St Brendan’s Voyage:

Around Terra del Fuego and up the warm Gulf Stream

He crossed the last horizon, Mt Brandon was in sight

And when he cleared the customs into Dingle for the night

“It’s one of my favourite songs and I kept thinking about the lyrics. It just brought me home.

“It was very traumatic. There was no elation when I finished, because I kept thinking of my father saying, ‘It could have taken you, but you just got passage’. So I sit back and just come home with a little bit of swagger. I’ve another Guinness World Record. This is where I come, to the beach. I always bring my records here and I put them on the beach. I sit here and this is my space.”

Beach days

Obviously, Cape Horn wasn’t Nuala’s first rodeo.

Having competed in a lot of 3km and 5km open water swims, in 2006 she was chosen to be part of a 1,300-mile relay swim around the Irish coast. It took 56 days. She then went on to take part in a relay swim from England to France and back. Individually she swam 26km across Lake Zurich in Switzerland.

In 2012, Nuala got into ice swimming, travelling to Siberia to swim at zero degrees. In 2013 she became the first Irish person and fifth person in the world to swim 1,000m at 0°C inside the Arctic Circle.

She was also part of a relay that swam the Bering Strait between Russia and the US and she has competed at four Ice Swimming World Championships, winning a silver medal at the first.

Previously, Nuala has been nominated among the top 50 women in the world for open-water swimming and also was chosen as one of the People of the Year by adventure magazine Outsider.

Quite a list of achievements by any standards, but where did it all start?

Here on Beenbawn Beach, of course. Beenbawn is a little bit off the beaten track and very much a locals’ swimming spot, as opposed to a tourist one.

Nuala’s father was a fisherman and instilled a great respect for the sea in her and her siblings. She was born in Donegal, but moved to Dingle when she was very young.

“This is where I grew up as a child. You avoided jobs by being on the beach all day. This is where we first saw Fungi, we just saw the fin and thought it was Jaws,” Nuala laughs. “My father was fishing, so when we were very young he would take us out to the mouth of the harbour there and we would swim into the beaches.

“Coming from a fishing family, my father, I would ring him every night and daddy would say things like, ‘The sea can take you tomorrow, you’ve just gotten passage’. I think when you’ve those mantras, you’re very grateful for your personal strength to get out there.

“I think anybody who works with Mother Nature develops patience. You don’t get what you want from it, you just take what you get.”

After school Nuala did a degree in hotel management. For the past 20 years she has run her own bedlinen shop, Strawberry Beds, in Dingle town. Her brother Eddie is a fisherman and also farms with his wife Kathleen de Mordha in Ballyferriter.

Nuala swims all year around off these beaches. When we visit, she’s helping a friend gain confidence in the water in the mornings and in the evenings is working with a lady who has MS.

Safe swimming

For Nuala, swimming has always been primarily an outdoor activity. They didn’t have a swimming pool growing up, so this beach was the pool and it’s here she feels at home. Over the years training for various swims she had to go to the pool, but there was no great love in it.

Alongside the sea, Nuala also has a great love of the mountains. Interestingly, they also feature in her training regime. When preparing for ice swimming, Nuala’s logic is to do what takes your breath away, and so she climbs Mt Brandon.

She’s quite interested in combining ice swimming with altitude. Earlier this year she was supposed to climb to Everest Base Camp and swim 1,000m there in a lake, which would have made her the first woman to swim at an altitude of 5,000m. Naturally, with the pandemic this venture is postponed.

There’s no doubt Nuala has taken on some pretty momentous challenges, but safety is still very much top of her agenda. She founded Ocean Triple R – Remote, Recovery, Rescue. It holds workshops to empower and educate ocean users on staying safe and how to safely act in a rescue situation.

With regard to water safety, Nuala believes people should know their limits and swim within them.

“What frightens me is that people now use this term ‘wild swimming’. There are people who are able to swim in a confined space, which is close to shore and there are people who are able to swim in open water. When you move into the next phase of the operation, you need to have safety teams, you need to have situational awareness; you should understand the waves, the currents, the conditions.

“What I fear is that extreme has now become mainstream. We have to respect the impact of anxiety, the impact of stress. You’ve to expect that in a minute that can change.”

Even with her skillset, Nuala knows the unexpected can always happen.

“I was airlifted back in 2013. It was because I didn’t understand post-rescue collapse after my ice mile, I swam 1,800 metres at three degrees in the Connor Pass. Everything was perfect, but I got out and couldn’t walk, so I was in trouble.”

Nuala’s advice for swimmers in general? Always have a plan before you go swimming, know the conditions and know they can change.

Although she has swam in some of the most dangerous waters in the world, for Nuala, safety is always a priority.

“Sometimes when I’m training I would go between the rocks out there, over and back, over and back, depending on the conditions. You don’t have to test your limits, life does that. I’m a real baby, people laugh at me, I’m a risk taker, but everything is measured.”

Whether it’s the Drake Passage, the Bering Strait or Lake Zurich, Nuala Moore accomplishes amazing feats wherever she goes. And it all started on Beenbawn Beach in Dingle Bay.

Remember

Water poses a risk in all its forms, from the barrel out the back, to lakes, rivers and the sea. Swimming in open water is dangerous. Don’t take chances, don’t swim in areas you don’t know and never swim alone. For more information see www.watersafety.ie

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Conquering life’s mountains