Aquabatics

My eight-year-old daughter had her first SCUBA-diving lesson in Greece last summer. The instructor said: ‘She is a fish!’ This year she will go swimming with dolphins in the Red Sea. They are, I believe, mammals, as is, I believe, my daughter.

We were all fish 500 million years ago. Most people seem to like the sea. It has been suggested that we retain an atavistic yearning to return to our marine roots. It has also been said that early human populations lived on shellfish and developed an affinity for the seashore which is still with us 10,000 generations later. I think perhaps we are just drawn to the beach for food and fun.

We look down into an Istrian lagoon and see the sand 10 metres below. The water is translucent. What could be more pure? Yet every cubic centimetre of seawater contains 5 million bacteria and 50 million viruses. Fortunately, they are normally interested in each other but not in us.

I love the sea, but I would sooner be on top of it than underneath. Likewise my son, who was a better wind-surfer after five days than I was after five years. Not so my daughter. She wants to be in it. With a metre of water she practises cartwheels, handstands and somersaults for hours on end. She uses bath-time to test her underwater endurance.

One of her great-grandfathers was a tall Scotsman who remained in France after the First World War. He regularly won swimming races against the local Frenchmen, who were smaller and perhaps less buoyant. They called him ‘the whale’. He bought them drinks.

One of her grandfathers was also a good swimmer. This was useful when, during the Second World War, his aircraft lost its engines and crashed into the Mediterranean in the middle of the night. With one other survivor he swam for ten hours until – by pure luck – they were spotted and picked up by a rescue-launch.

I was taught to swim in the traditional English way: thrown into deep water. It worked, as I suppose it must usually have done. It was not thought to be cruel. I was enthralled by the sea from that moment, and I was lucky: my grandmother lived 50 metres from the Kent seashore. In bad weather the wind would throw pebbles against my bedroom window. But I seem to remember that every day was sunny and we lived on the beach from dawn to dusk.

When I was fourteen I started working on a beach in Cornwall. It was privately-owned, five kilometres long and, like most Cornish beaches, dangerous. Locals took care, but our summer visitors thought the Atlantic was just a cold, salty swimming-pool. People of all ages drowned every year. My boss stopped this by hiring teams of lifeguards and giving them two-way radios. There were plenty of rescues but no more fatalities.

The main attraction of Watergate Bay was the presence of Australians. They were natural athletes, swimming for miles without effort, and they introduced surfing to Europe. To watch them on the waves was to be seized by an overwhelming desire to learn how to do it. The Cornish surf was nothing like the 20-metre giants in Hawaii but in September and October you could expect three metres most week-ends, and sometimes five.

Later on, a friend in London who owned a small yacht needed a deck-hand. We cruised up and down the Channel and made two-day voyages over to France. Sailing is truly addictive: the physical sensation is exciting, especially in rough weather, but there is also a great deal to learn and always something to do – ropes to be coiled away, apparatus to be mended, decks to be cleaned, a watch to be kept day and night, equipment to be overhauled and oiled. Then there is the constant element of danger: if you get it wrong you can be in big trouble, very quickly.

One day my phone rang. ‘Can you take two weeks’ leave to cross the Atlantic?’ My boss gave me the time off work, but if not I would have resigned. We flew to Newfoundland and joined a crew of six on board a 15-metre ketch owned by an American who sailed 52 weeks a year. In the middle of the Atlantic we ran into a gale which lasted six days. Two weeks became three weeks. The entire boat was soaked and we ran out of food and water. Our last meal before reaching Ireland was breakfast cereal contaminated with diesel fuel.

When the gale abated the skies cleared and we nipped along with a brisk following breeze. I was at the helm one night when I spotted a glowing shape in the water just off the beam. My jaw dropped... a torpedo? Captain Nemo? What on earth could it be, 1,000 kilometres from land? When I leant over the side I saw one of the most extraordinary spectacles of my life: eight dolphins, glowing brilliantly from phosphorescence, diving under our boat, from side to side and back again, in perfect formation..... aquabatics.