Wild Waters
An invigorating plunge on a sticky summer’s day. A 90-mile traverse from river source to sea. A hard-won first across the world’s strongest whirlpools. Overflowing with immersive tales of expedition, camaraderie, art, and literature, the Wild Swimming Brothers entice our bodies back outdoors and into natural waters. Here, with disarming geniality — warming even the most tepid of swimmers to the cold water sport — they chat: lockdowns, childhoods in Cumbria and Scotland, sibling bond (and rivalry), and why an icy shock of discomfort may be exactly what we need.
Words below by Robbie, Calum, and Jack.
Calum: In May last year, I went from lockdown in Singapore to lockdown with my mum in very rural Scotland. No neighbours, no houses around. I work in the events industry which, along with the tourism industry, has been hit hardest by the pandemic. The company I work for had asked me to return to their UK office so I’m back in London now, in my third lockdown, feeling quite claustrophobic and nature-deprived!
I hadn’t lived with my mum for 13 years. It was lovely to spend two months with her, now as an adult. I really reconnected with her. Because we had the time, we kept exploring and finding new places on her land. We found this beautiful little pond (it was always hidden by trees) which is seven meters across and a meter and a half deep — perfect for having a dip. So every single day Mum and I went down together for a swim. It seems like this last year has strengthened a lot of social connections.
Robbie: I’m in Slovakia at the moment, working remotely out of Berlin, and I have just returned from another COVID test! You need to take a test if you want to go out into nature at all here, within the next week, so it was probably my tenth test. My background is in art and I work as editor-in-chief of a digital fitness magazine. People don’t often see the overlap between sport and art but, for me, the swims we do for example have been very informative for my artworks. Sport is a great way to engage with the natural landscape around you — to feel the physical presence of places.
Calum: The three of us grew up in Cumbria and — it might be the nostalgic tint of lockdown but — I absolutely loved growing there. The nice thing about having two brothers is: there are three of you, and three is enough for an adventure! We had so much freedom. Our mum was incredibly liberal with us. We would be out of the house on most weekends, cycling off to a stretch on the water or local pool. We had a river at the bottom of the garden as well, where we could jump right into our kayaks. We spent a lot of time outdoors, on our own, without someone telling us what to do or how to enjoy nature. It wasn’t forced upon us. We were lucky. I mean, there are negatives of rural: It wasn’t very diverse, there wasn’t much culture, art, nightlife. You are there for the quiet country life and beautiful landscapes. So as we grew up, we had that, “I have to leave, I have to spread my wings and go off to uni!” But as we got older we realised how lovely it really was.
Robbie: Calum came up with the idea for our first big swim together in the River Eden. Part of the inspiration was to swim through the river that had always run at the bottom of our garden. Also, at the time, we were selling the house so it was our way to say goodbye to that house, that place where we had spent happy teenage years. Travelling from source to sea appealed to us because no one had ever done it before, and we weren’t sure if it was doable. The brotherly thing kicked in, we egged each other on. We were like: “Is this even doable?” “Yeah. Let’s do it.” “We can do it.”
Calum: That always kicks in. It’s inevitable.
Robbie: We did 90 miles over nine days. The source is over the border in Yorkshire and we travelled along the length of the river, through the whole of Cumbria, and spat out by the sea at the other end. Our rough plan was to do 10 miles a day, although some days were longer, some days were shorter. You can read all the books in the world, speak to as many people as you can, and be as prepared as possible — but when you start, loads of things will be completely different from your expectations. It forces you to be adaptive. Sometimes you have to take the kayaks out to walk around an obstacle. Maybe you discover a massive waterfall. Other times you come across incredibly beautiful places that you didn’t know existed, or you meet new people along the way. On the day we swam through Carlisle, there were loads of people there. We swam different sections with different people, people we had never met before but who shared the same passion as us. Some would jump into the water and join us. Others would stop and give us food, help out and say, “We love what you guys are doing.” We have found that people either think that we are totally insane or are 100 percent behind us.
Calum: It's a collective experience. Shared challenges in nature allow you to really connect to one another because you are tired, hungry, cold, and all going through the same things. They kind of strip you bare. Maybe you are nervous, scared, thinking that you haven’t trained enough. Then you overcome it together. For the River Eden swim we chose to camp as well, waking up at 6:00 AM to put on a cold, wet wetsuit, to wolf down instant porridge, then to get in the cold water — it’s not an enjoyable dip — to swim eight hours, very slowly. As the years have gone by, as we stack up more of these adventures together, we now have this backlog of memories that connect us through each swim. It has redefined our relationships with each other in a powerful way. But then there’s also the sibling rivalry!
Calum: Extremities of nature appeal to me. I hadn’t heard about maelstroms before we discovered the Corryvreckan. There is so much history and literature surrounding maelstroms. The Corryvreckan, for example, is where George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. There are two remote islands off the west coast of Scotland, called Jura and Scarba, where Orwell holed out in a tiny house with his brother-in-law and three-year-old son in 1947, to write the story that would later become the novel. On their way back, the maelstrom shipwrecked and nearly killed them. Eventually they were rescued, and in 1984 his brother-in-law became the first recorded person to swim across — and he had only one leg. No one else attempted it for years afterwards, until more recently. So as soon as we heard “maelstrom” and “George Orwell was shipwrecked” (Jack is a writer), we were like, “Right. Let’s go.” And, “You mean this is in Scotland and I can get there in four hours?”
On all our maelstrom swims, we get into the water and go. That is it. You are swimming flat out, head down, trying to go in a straight line as much as possible. With that, we partner with a ship captain. For The Corryvreckan, it was a ship captain who had 18 years of experience. For our swim in the Lofoten Islands in the Arctic Circle, we used two ship captains who have guided whale-watching trips and excursions for years. We rely on local ship captains’ knowledge because we need to be precise with maelstroms. If we were to swim across at the wrong time, we would drown. So for the Saltstraumen the ship captain calculated that our most favourable window was at 6:28 PM on a Monday, and that we would have 12.5 minutes to swim across.
Robbie: Swimming in the Arctic Circle was amazing. We were there with the mountains, in these incredibly remote places — it felt like we were on the edge of the world. I remember when we swam the Moskstraumen, we had started early in the morning because of the currents. Once the initial adrenaline began to wear off, I relaxed into it. I remember with each stroke, looking up, I could see the sun rising, shining onto the mountains. The sea was out here, I could hear Calum and Jack nearby there, light splashes, and no other noise. I remember thinking, for a second, This is phenomenal. I was watching a sunrise in the middle of the world’s biggest whirlpool. It was a real moment of focus on where I was and what I was doing. It felt special and terrifying at the same time. A weird kind of serenity and fear and self-confidence.
Calum: I was nervous. It was more nerve-wracking doing it with other people because I felt responsible for them. Mum had specifically asked me not to do those Arctic swims; she said she had nightmares about us all disappearing down the plughole. It’s a difficult decision to make when your parent is begging you not to do something because it will be dangerous. In hindsight the added pressure was good. It made me double check and validate all the risks as much as possible.
“For the Saltstraumen, the ship captain calculated that our most favourable window was at 6:28 PM on a Monday and that we would have 12.5 minutes to swim across.”
Calum: Mum is a wilder swimmer than all of us now. She has her own swimming group, she breaks the ice with a hammer and swims all year round, and when I spoke with her yesterday she was heading off for a swim. On a weekly basis she will call and be like, “You know, erm, Rob. Rob. Yes, Rob Hutchings—”
Robbie: She does!
Calum: “—from New Zealand. He swam Clutha River? Well, he’ll probably get in touch with you.”
Robbie: She is like the mafia don of the wild swimming community.
Calum: Even Dad is an indoor swimmer. He doesn’t like the cold but, prior to lockdown, he was hitting the indoor pool twice a week. We get updates about the lengths he has done.
Robbie: When the pools are not shut he is doing a kilometre a day, sometimes pushing up to a mile. He’s nearly 70, isn’t he? It’s really nice to see that — to do these things and to see how your friends and family also take to it.
Calum: It does get under your skin. To now have friends and family who have also gotten into it — that really is our aim: To promote wild swimming as a way to reconnect with the natural world, each other, and yourself. We had left for school, then for jobs, then work got stressful and life got busy. We each had found ourselves feeling disconnected from life by not being immersed in nature. Wild Swimming Brothers is about taking time to focus on what is important to us (and hopefully to other people, too). Nature, exercise, and relationships with the people you love.
Calum: Cold water swimming has many positive effects on your mental health and immune system. Also, your weight becomes sort of irrelevant when you swim; the water holds you. You don’t need any equipment; all you need is: Where is the nearest body of water? The UK is an island so you are never too far away from somewhere to swim. The longer swims especially have a meditative quality because swimming is all about breathing. It’s very similar to yoga; you control your body and technique with your breath. When you focus on your breathing for six hours straight — concentrating on: “One. Two. Three. One. Two. Three.” — you zone out a little bit and, at the same time, you are totally into where you are. You can’t look at your phone or see a passerby like you might if you were cycling or running.
Robbie: The cold also flicks a switch and puts you straight into a kind of survival mode. You could be having the worst day at work, overthinking things, but as soon as you get into a really, really cold lake — it all goes. Suddenly none of that matters. Roger Deakin describes it beautifully — how there’s a film at the top of the water and, as you break that, you enter another world. Your body enters a completely different state. And, Calum touched on it then, but cold water swimming has profound physiological effects — endorphins, dopamine, everything — all backed by scientific data. Another ancillary benefit during the swim is cold water recovery, so in addition to cardiovascular benefits, the cold water flushes out lactate from the muscles and offers compression. I think all this has been the impetus for a resurgence in cold water swimming. The desire to try it, then to keep doing it.
Calum: Your body is made to move. It’s meant to lift things, to be doing things, to be out in nature. Over this last year especially, people have flocked to outdoor swimming. It’s good to get the body off the sofa and away from the central heating.
Robbie: James Joyce talks about the importance of regularly depriving yourself of the things you have, so that when you do come back to them you enjoy them even more. He would occasionally sleep on the floor so that he would really love his bed on the next night. When you go into a freezing lake on a Tuesday afternoon, then arrive home to the warmth of a radiator or hot cup of tea — it’s difficult to replicate that sort of appreciation.
Calum: We have a family motto from our Grandma Wild (no one believes it was her real name, but it’s true!). She lived in the middle of nowhere in Scotland, up on a lochside. She was hacking bracken all day, every day, up into her 80s. When we were younger, we built a house together right on the top of the lochside. It had a compost toilet and brass roof; no electricity, no running water. We carried all the stones and timbers up the hill, and carved into one of the timbers is the motto: “Rest and be thankful.” It’s a motto that only makes sense after a hard day’s work. It's a feeling you have to earn. That’s also why we choose to take on big challenges — it not only connects us to each other and to nature, it also feels good. This is all making me want to swim now! I haven’t swam in two months. All the pools are closed.
Robbie: I’ve been a bit luckier. There’s a lake near me that I can get to in 10 minutes or so. I’ve been able to get in almost every weekend.
Calum: Last August I was training hard for something that’s called an “ice mile.” I trained five days a week, reaching 1.4 miles at 5.3°C — you need at least 1.6 miles at 5°C. Then all the pools closed. It was quite hard to take! I lost six months of training. But outdoor lidos reopen on 29th March. I will have my next swim in just over three weeks.
Robbie: Within wild swimming communities, we have met so many inspirational people. Artists, writers, and others who are creative in their own ways. It’s a very free space. There is something about it. Swimming is a complete immersion; you cannot do it half-heartedly.
A lot of my work is abstract, they are my representation of a swimming journey. Whatever the project is, how ever long a swim may be, I will always draw throughout the whole project. In the beginning it tends to be lighter-hearted, more expansive. Then during the parts when training is more difficult I notice how the drawings also become more intense, darker, busy. After, with that sense of relief, it filters back towards works that are open and more reflective. I always enjoy hearing other people talk about their swimming experiences — or, in a broader way, their relationship to places. How they interpret them.
Collectively the three of us swim together, often times just for fun, other times to take on these really dangerous challenges. Then the three of us will have respective perceptions of what has happened, which become the resources for our drawings or writings or projects.
Calum: It’s true. We have similarities but, at heart, we are quite different. Jack finished swimming the Eden then went away and wrote a book. The thought of writing a book had never crossed my mind, but it was the one thing that Jack did: He just went away and spent months and months to write a book. Robbie went away and created artwork. I go away and create the next expedition. No one’s creativity is not going to be fuelled by something like that, and it’s important to see yourself as a creative person. We have met really interesting people, creative people, and by virtue of that our own creativity has been fuelled.
Also, your expectations of yourself are overcome and changed. Something you thought you could not do or were too afraid to do, you have now done it. It sets your neurons firing. Then you go and do the next one, then the next, and suddenly six years later… Wild Swimming Brothers has spiralled off into all these different areas.
Robbie: You learn to let go of the things that are holding you back — any rules that are not allowing you to fully express yourself as you want to. When Calum told us about his idea to swim 90 miles, it felt like such a massive, ambitious thing that I had to make a decision. “Yes. I can do it. I’m going for it.” Previously I could swim maybe a kilometre? Then we trained and, together with my brothers, I was able to swim 145 kilometres. It’s a frame of mind that can be applied to anything.
I remember as part of an art project, I wanted to swim the length of Lake Ullswater, which is about 7 miles across. For my first training swim in the middle of winter, I was in the water for a minute, max. I remember driving home, not overly pleased with myself, thinking, “Maybe I should have done a bit more…” But the next time I went in, I swam for a bit longer, and my endurance built up over time. Basically — you just start, then your fitness and confidence levels will build up quicker than you think.
Calum: You also learn to trust people. We often take school friends with us on our trips — one of Robbie’s friends, James, and one of my school friends, Luke, have joined us for nearly all expeditions. Luke’s job in Norway was to look out for killer whales, which is a pretty critical job from my perspective as the swimmer in the water. Meeting ship captains for the first time — there’s a real bond that forms because they know that we are placing ourselves into their hands, and we know that we are in theirs.
For the Moskstraumen, there was a lady called Therese whom I met when I first visited on my own. I met her, her husband, and kids, and we talked about what we were going to do. When she took me out to see the Moskstraumen, she said that a lot of people ask to do these kinds of things but never actually do it. She said she felt honoured that we trusted her, that we were willing to get in the water and to let her lead us.
Robbie: Calum is completely right. It’s an amazing feeling. Through my job, I’ve interviewed Olympic athletes, weightlifters, swimmers, runners. There is this common principle that you need to clearly identify what you can and cannot control. You use what you can control to help you focus on where to invest your time and energy to improve. That way, when you know you are as good as possible in those areas, you are able to let the other things you cannot control completely wash off your back. For example when we swam the Moskstraumen, it was a 2.5 hour swim in the Arctic, in some of the craziest currents in the world. We had no control over the currents that day but we did have control over how fit we were, how strong of swimmers we were. So we focused on the training and worried less about things like what the weather would be like. In your mind you just accept it 100 percent. Getting into the water at the beginning — we had to slide off the boat, swim to a rock, then begin swimming across from there — I remember during the first few strokes, I had to remind myself, “I trust James and Luke to look out in case there are killer whales, I trust them that if I start to sink or to get pulled down, that they will pull me out. It’s just my breathing and my swimming. Just keep going. I’m going to get to the other side, or they are pulling me out of the water. That is it.”
“You need to clearly identify what you can and cannot control. You use that to help you focus.”
Calum: Generally, though, fears of wild swimming have more to do with psychological fear than real physical danger. And the cold.
Robbie: No matter how acclimatised you get, you do still get that initial shock. You can train yourself to expect it, to know what to do, and you can build up your endurance over time, but it never gets not cold. If that makes sense.
Calum: And the thing with swimming is — I know this sounds strange — you can float. So any swimmer, as long as they don’t panic, will be okay. There is a very natural fear of deep water in open seas. It’s the same reason we all see shadows in the forest at night, or that lots of people are scared of spiders. There is a primal instinct within every human to fear deep water because, previously, deep water would not have been a good place to be. Swimming strokes were not as evolved and drowning would have been more common. So it may be helpful to remind yourself, “It is normal for me to feel this way, this is just my primal instincts.”
Robbie: If you go into the water and you feel yourself having that panicky feeling, stop where you are and tread water for a little bit. Take four really deep breaths. Breathe in for four seconds, then out for four seconds. Repeat this four times. This will really slow your body down and help you relax. (When swimmers panic it’s a sign that they are not getting enough breaths and are not confident enough with their breathing technique.) That’s a good one, because it also teaches you to say, “Okay, I feel this kind of fear and this is how I’m going to control it right now.” After that, you can continue on and if you feel it again, just stop, and do it again.
Calum: You can also start with a lake where there are no currents. You are able to walk in and out, you can swim along the bank, rather than out. Go with a friend. Maybe try swimming five meters along the bank on the first day then work up from there. It’s also about time: You need to stay in. If you run in and run back out, you haven’t had time to relax. Spend some time to take a leisurely swim. Maybe there is a swan or a duck. (We’re lucky in the UK, there’s nothing dangerous.)
Calum: One of my favourite swims to date happened last year off the coast of Scotland. I took my mum to go swimming with basking sharks for her 60th birthday. It’s one of the only places in the world where you can swim with basking sharks. We went out in a boat to the middle of the ocean. We saw pufflings floating on waves, sunfish, minke whales — all the time keeping an eye out for basking sharks. Then, when they find one — the way the sharks swim is with their nose slightly out of the water, so you can see its nose and its big fin behind it — what they do is drop you in the middle of its food. Basking sharks eat what is called “plankton soup,” it’s a huge patch in the water maybe the size of a tennis court. They drop you in the middle of this and the basking shark swims straight through, back and forth. So there we were, the four of us in the middle of this plankton soup, the guide saying to us, “The basking shark is approaching.” I couldn’t see it, I was underwater, and then out of nowhere this huge, open mouth comes looming out of the dark, straight past within a meter of us. The largest one we swam with was about 7 metres long. Being that close to an animal that big was pretty incredible. And Mum, bless her, she had never snorkelled before and I didn’t know! So there she was trying to get used to her snorkel, while I was like, “She’ll be fine.”
In the end she absolutely loved it. That was a moment when I realised, hang on a minute, I might have overlooked what we have here in the UK. I think lockdown has forced us all to look closer at the places we live in, to try to find some magic closer to home. It was special — sorry, I didn’t pick one with Jack and Robbie there!
Robbie: I’m trying to think of any swims that I’ve done without you now, Calum…
“The three of us will have respective perceptions of what has happened, which become the resources for our drawings or writings or projects.”
Robbie: One of the most meaningful swims we did together was at Loch Broom on the west coast of Scotland. That was where Calum described where our Grandma Wild had lived, where we still have the house there. We swam the Loch in her memory. Her house is halfway up the lochside. We swam from the town there, past the house, all the way up to the head of the Loch to the church where she is buried. It was quite a long swim — what was that one?
Calum: Four and a half hours. Yeah. One of our cousins was collecting bits of seaweed and flowers along the swim, so when we finished, we got out of the water and went up to the church to lay the wreath on Grandma’s grave. It was quite emotional.
Robbie: It showed us how this can be a way to honour people who are not here anymore — by doing something that is a bit different, that they would have enjoyed. Loch Broom is also a place that we have been returning to ever since we were born. Because we have moved around a bit — Calum in Singapore, me in Istanbul and Australia and Berlin, and Jack as well — that place in the highlands is somewhere we have consistently visited throughout our lives. We have a close connection to it. Then physically doing that journey, in that place, in memory of our Grandma — it was a powerful thing. Also, there was no way that I could not finish it, partly driven by, to be honest, the knowledge that if our Grandma had been there she would have been at the front swimming twice as fast as we were.
Calum: With a year spent apart and limited access to outdoor swimming, I would say the fires of our next expedition are being stoked. It’s often an organic unfolding depending on how our three lives intertwine, but we have a few ideas at the front of our minds. The Maelstrom Seven. We have swum three of the seven largest maelstroms in the world: Moskstraumen, Saltstraumen, and Corryvreckan. There are four others — Te Aumiti in New Zealand, Old Sow in the USA, Skookumchuck in Canada, Naruto in Japan — that we would like to be first to swim across. They are complex to organise, expensive, and with many dangers, but swimming across these has evolved into a family dream. Windermere/Red Tarn group swim. Robbie has a plan to swim across a body of water in the Lake District in memory of his school friend, Ben Osborne, who died by suicide. It will be an invitational swim, encouraging young men to join us (and anyone else who wants to) for the swim as we seek to share the experience of swimming in memory of a close friend, and using outdoor swimming as a way to overcome mental health challenges. And, Cold Water. Jack is working on Book Two and has plans to focus on the world of ice swimming and benefits of cold water immersion.
Best time for a swim: Winter season. 100%. You cannot beat seeing footsteps in the snow leading up to the water. Magic! And lunchtime. Nothing like a swim to fuel midday hunger and to set a positive intention for the rest of the day.
What have you been up to in lockdown? I just finished reading a book called Fortress Besieged by a Chinese writer called Qian Zhongshu. I’m learning Mandarin and very much enjoying discovering another culture’s wealth of literature. I’ve been listening to Sigur Ros’s album Odin's Raven Magic which is a concept album about a 14th century Icelandic Saga Poem and features folk singer Steindór Andersen. It’s haunting and has been the perfect soundtrack to winter. I’ve just finished watching It’s A Sin, an incredible miniseries on Channel 4 about the AIDS pandemic.
Greatest extravagance: In terms of swimming, it has to be infinity pools. I know they are not wild but they are really quite something for a swim.
Swim Wild
by Jack Hudson, with Calum and Robbie Hudson
Publisher: Yellow Kite (19 April 2018), imprint of Hodder & Stoughton, Hachette
Hardcover and Paperback: 336 pages
Photography by Erlend Bodo Nu, Beth Harrison, James Silson, Tina Wild
Illustrations by Robbie Hudson
“The bigger swims, the events around them, and what they meant for the close family — that was what made me want to preserve the story.”
Jack: The process of creating the book was decided in hindsight, after the Eden swim and Grandma’s funeral. The bigger swims, the events around them, and what they meant for the close family — that was what made me want to preserve the story. I didn’t keep diaries, so I pieced the narrative together from memories, videos, images we took during the swims. I had long conversations with friends and family to confirm small details. I mapped out the topography in my mind to establish exactly what happened on each day, what we saw — the river section was the hardest to write, especially when we were so tired that the days and the swimming seemed to blend together.
I wanted to ground the book in outdoor swimming and to communicate the fact that we are three, totally ordinary Cumbrian boys, who did things no one had ever done before, with lessons passed on by characters in our family. I wanted to contribute to a community that we all love being part of.
I made several attempts to publish books and shorter stories before, with no luck. The one before Swim Wild was a 650-page sci-fi novel. I’ve tried everything. All I’ve ever wanted to be is a writer, so I try to trust and nurture that instinct. I emailed the pitch for Swim Wild and its first three chapters to various agents, before it was passed to Richard Pike at Curtis Brown. Richard is a country-farm boy at heart as well and he liked the family aspect. Fortunately he agreed to take us on as clients! It was one of the happiest moments in my life — followed by getting published by Yellow Kite. The best advice I can give to aspiring writers is to write every day, and to remember that being published does not validate your writing any more than your enjoyment of it. Get up, put pen to paper, stick at it, and love the craft as much as you possibly can.
Published on: 2 April 2021. Edited by Fields in Fields. Cover image and short film by CLICKON Media in partnership with General Tire; all images courtesy of The Wild Swimming Brothers. ■ Follow Jack, Calum, and Robbie Wild Hudson’s adventures on YouTube and Instagram. For training tips, swimming guides and events, and more visit: thewildswimmingbrothers.com