Lion Island swim picture special: Peninsula Ocean Swimmers tackle 8.5km marathon
Ten members of the Peninsula Ocean Swimmers group have risked sharks, seals, jellyfish and open water currents to tackle an epic 8.5km swim around Lion Island. Read their story here.
Central Coast
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Lion Island is to ocean swimmers what a summit is to mountaineers.
A silent sentinel, ever present in the mouth of The Hawkesbury River, it taunts and beckons in equal measure those brave or fool hardy enough to consider what it would be like to circumnavigate its rocky shores with nothing but a swimming cap and goggles.
Until early Saturday morning there had only been two documented swims around Lion Island.
One man did it in the 1980s and the other was event organiser Chris Young who tackled the epic 8.5km round trip from Umina Beach in 2018 with just a kayaker in support.
But the number who can lay claim to having swum around the sleeping beast grew exponentially on Saturday when 10 members — including Mr Young — of the Peninsula Ocean Swimmers group set off in near perfect conditions.
The swim was scheduled for last weekend but the huge seas saw it pushed back to this Saturday.
“It was just there haunting me,” Mr Young said of the island.
The group formed in 2016 when a number of people started to meet up for an informal swim at Umina Beach.
Its numbers swelled in the past 12 months to more than 100 in the wake of COVID-19.
When the pools shut, swimmers took to the sea and nonswimmers also took up ocean swimming for exercise, stress relief and for something to do in isolation.
One of those was 39-year-old festival and events technician Nathaniel Holmes who found himself working from home, with not much on, during coronavirus.
“Personally I only started in April,” he said.
“What attracted me was the sense of adventure.”
Mr Holmes said he was inspired watching these people swim right out into Broken Bay and so he started slowly.
“After a while I would swim out half a kilometre and come back and think `wow, I just did that’,” he said.
Like so many people who discovered ocean swimming, Mr Holmes immediately felt the “mental health” benefits as much as the fitness.
Before tackling Lion Island he conceded there were a few nerves but was looking forward to throwing himself at the challenge and opening himself up to being “vulnerable” in the open ocean.
With brackish water flowing from the Hawkesbury River, intersecting currents, rips and swells Lion Island is home to seals, little penguins, jellyfish and a resident hammerhead shark colony.
It was declared a reserve in 1956 and public access is by permit only.
Unless people pass it on the Palm Beach ferry or other boat, very few get to see the island’s eastern side let alone swim 100m from its shore.
Event organiser Mr Young said he first did it “pretty much off my own bat” but this group attempt had a flotilla of support vessels including one kayaker per swimmer and three boats in constant contact via two-way radio.
Everyone had their own reason for tackling the swim.
For some, like Mr Holmes it was the adventure, but for one of the three women taking part it was to honour the memory of former ocean swimmer David Isaacs.
The 45-year-old, who was also heavily involved in water polo on the coast, suffered a cardiac arrest while on a morning swim with the group at Ocean Beach in October 2017.
The next year they organised a 7.5km swim across Broken Bay from Ocean Beach to Station Beach, near Palm Beach, to raise money for his wife and three children.
Mr Young said “it gets a little rough water on the eastern side” of the island and admits it was a little haunting when swimmers turn around the southern tip and realise they were “about 4km from a jetty, wharf or any other man made structure”.
“It’s really just a bunch of mates doing something fun,” he said.
The 10 swimmers, who all made the journey around Lion Island, can now forever look out every time they come to the beach and say “I’ve swum around that”.
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