Crummock Water Swim

The nights are drawing in and the water is getting cold.  Actually, it was already cold, it's getting colder.  I have a sense of running out of time before it gets too cold.  I am really hoping to get at least one lake crossing done this year.  Crummock Water is a natural choice as it is near and there is a clear crossing point from Hause Point (where there is a wall along the side of the road) to Low Ling Crag (the peninsula sticking out from the other side below the rock face).  The distance across is about 500m.  Of course, once across you have to get back.  There may be other lakes with more of a 'one way' option using two cars.

Sunday 30th September was a pretty awful day weather wise.  The Wasdale Triathlon had been cancelled due to the weather but it cleared up later in the evening and we decided to have a drive through to Crummock Water to see what it was like.

We parked up at the usual point.  Water was pouring over the road and into the lake.  After a quick change, we were soon in and doing the, now familiar, floating around, saying how cold it is but then eventually feeling warmer.

The picture on the right is from the place we have been starting our swims from.  On our last Crummock Water swim, we went around the island visible on the left of the picture for a total swim of about 350m.

On this occasion, I wanted to go a bit further and continue to get used to swimming in deep water.  The full GPS details are below:

The total distance, out and back was about 650m.  You can see from the satellite image above that this is significantly longer than the swim around the island that we did the last time.

The same GPX data overlaid on the satellite image zoomed out.  This gives a bit more of a perspective of the distance.  The lake is approximately 1k wide at the point we set off from horizontally across.  There was quite a strong current from west to east.  It felt like we were in the middle of the lake but, as you can see from above, we got approximately a third of the way across.

On the way to The Kirkstile Inn for our traditional post swim pint, we stopped off at Hause Point where Jonathan Bolt pointed out Low Ling Crag, just above his left hand in the picture above.