My friend Melody (Mel) from North Sydney Masters is part of the Freshwater Surf Lifesavers Club. As a member of a "surf life saving club" Mel volunteers to patrol the beach in a group or under a patrol captain for a set period of time on the weekends and public holidays. While these surf living club members wear red/yellow "cossies" (swim suits in Australian), are trained in life saving and do save people on the beach, they are different than life guards who also wear red cossies because they are paid to patrol the beach and save people.



On the larger beaches - say Manly or Bondi - you might have both lifesavers and life guards patrolling the beach and keeping people safe.

On Sunday, March 7 Mel's Freshwater Surf Lifesaving club hosted the Barney Mullins 1.5 K ocean swim and a number of us from North Sydney Masters went out to support Mel's club.



Freshwater beach is about a 35 minute drive north of Surry Hills (across the bridge) and a really sweet, cozy beach. Because it's a bit small the swim course required us to swim a bit zig-zag to accrue the 1.5K. You can't tell this from the below course map, but believe me they weren't straight swim lines, it was more like a "W" at the end.



Unlike the North Bondi Classic from a few weeks ago, there were a LOT more waves. To the point where I was still diving into waves as I approached the first buoy.

Helen from North Sydney Masters and I started the swim together and she was a wonderful guide as I very quickly learned how to dive into the wave, count to 3 and then surface. And do this again and again always surfacing and looking for the next big wave. It was exhausting and my heart was racing! On top of this new-ish experience, they let us all go in one big wave of 250 swimmers so there were many arms and kicking legs to avoid at the start.

I finally did get my groove along the back stretch of the swim, but the rolling waves continued throughout the swim and it was hard not to feel like vegetables tossed around in boiling soup. And at the end, there was a 50 meter run to the finish line and after swimming vertical standing up and running through the ankle deep water was like a running, drunken sailor!

I finally crossed the finish line at 29:56. Overall I placed 195/250 and in my 30+ age category I placed 27/44.



Helen won in her age category (60+) with a time of 28:37 and here she is receiving her award.



Congratulations Helen!