‘NOT AS BAD AS YOU THINK’
Warmish winter water greets brave polar bear swimmers
For some fearless folk, screaming, shouting, gasping and shivering is the best way to mark the start of the new year.
Hundreds of them could be spotted frolicking in frigid waters Tuesday at English Bay in downtown Vancouver for the city ’s 99th annual polar bear swim.
Among those who marked the first day of 2019 with a quick swim was Dave (Davey) Decarlo, a 66-year-old Vancouver man who took his first polar bear plunge in 1957, when he was four.
“I like the gathering together,” Decarlo said when asked what could possibly drive him to join a pack of people in an icy paddle. “Communities are very, very important and holding events like this is (too),” said Decarlo, who wore white stockings under a red and gold outfit that was inspired by 17th-century French court dresses and crafted from recycled Tim Hortons coffee bags. Last year he wore Starbucks, he said. The costume was completed with a matching wig and a staff topped with a white polar bear.
Decarlo said his family happened to know the Pantages family, a member of which had sparked Vancouver’s first polar bear swim back in 1920. The swim that year drew fewer than a dozen people, but it now regularly attracts crowds of more than 2,000 swimmers, by the City of Vancouver’s count.
While Decarlo’s was perhaps the most spectacular of the many outfits on the beach Tuesday, Fiona Scott’s was likely the warmest. So hot was it inside her seven- or eightfoot-tall polar bear costume that she had turned on the costume’s built-in battery-powered fans in a failing bid to keep herself cool.
“I’m roasting,” Scott said, laughing. This year was Scott’s 10th polar bear swim, but the first time she wore the outfit.
The coldest costume must have gone to Arthur Gee from Burnaby, who wore, for what was his eighth polar bear swim, a Dr. Seuss hat and bow tie, a formal cloth dickey, suspenders and a Speedo.
“As soon as I get in the water up to my neck, I’m out,” Gee said, already fretting the wind chill he would experience on the way back out.
Among the many polar bear firsttimers on the beach was Daniele Aoyama, from Brazil, who kept warm in a koala costume before her inaugural dip.
The lowest water temperature on record for Polar Bear swims in Vancouver since 1976 was just 3 C. The highest temperature was registered at 9 C. Tuesday’s reading was just shy of a relatively balmy 8 C. That may explain why Aoyama decided to go in twice. “It was less bad than I thought,” she said.
Twice was a good showing, but a pair of boys had her beat with four dips on Tuesday and the intention to take a fifth — and maybe even sixth — swim before they could call it quits. Five would be a personal record for Nikko Craig, for whom polar bear swims are old hat, having gone for several years already. You could tell he was experienced because he had a towel waiting atop the cold sand for him to stand on after he came out of the water.
This year was his friend Nikhil Miller’s first time.
“When you go in, you go into, like, shock. But when you get out it’s not as bad as you think,” Miller said as he towelled off in preparation for shock No. 5.