Last month Harry and I took on the Jersey Hospice Care & National Trust Jersey 30 Bays in 30 Days challenge. We made a donation to these charities in lieu of fundraising for Harry’s close friend Peter, who is undergoing treatment for relapsed Neuroblastoma, a childhood cancer that is incredibly difficult to treat.
This blog is about the 30 Bays challenge rather than the fundraising, which I wrote about in my latest Lettre Jèrriaise. I am shamelessly going to put the link in here again though, because Peter’s family have a big target to meet and every penny counts: https://www.solvingkidscancer.org.uk/fundraisers/30-bays-in-30-days
So we decided to take on the 30 Bays challenge in Juilet 2021, when rainfall was well above average for Jèrri en êté and the highest temperatures were crammed into just four days toward the back end of the month. Yet despite the grey skies and low temperatures I can honestly say that it was one of the loveliest things Harry and I have done together. Even on an island this small we visited beaches I had never heard of and swam in bays in which I had never dipped a toe.
Despite the opening swim being cancelled because of the ever-present Covid restrictions, we were spurred on by a video circulating social media of National Trust staff and volunteers running into the waters of Grève dé Lé and so decided this too should be our first bay. Late in the afternoon on 1st July we stepped onto the cool, damp sand, its usually golden sheen dulled under a heavy sky. This was a day for wetsuits. Our entrance into la mé - my first of the year - was less of a run and more of a painfully ginger tiptoe into the chilly 15℃ water.
The word wetsuit wasn’t even a part of my vocabulary growing up. As a teenager, I would spend my summers at Grève scrabbling over les rotchièrs and swimming the gullies in nothing but a swimming costume. We would pass whole afternoons jumping into the Octopus Pool, before climbing back around at the end of the day to catch the bus home. I had very little fear of the water and thought nothing of standing on the Rhino and tomb stoning into the deep, cool sea off la côte du nord.
Yet, as a mother, I am horrified at the thought of Harry doing the same. I recall the terror of being sucked down into the depths of a gulley and thrown back up, the repetitive cycle drawing the air from my lungs and preventing me from replacing it before I was dragged back down again. We’d been caught out by a change in the weather one time. A large swell had developed and though we had enjoyed the lazy river effect it had created around the Octopus Pool and had great fun riding the water down a slide of rock, we hadn’t anticipated how difficult it would be to cross the gullies on the way back around. I will be forever thankful to my friend Jason, who somehow managed to pull me out. He was so calm about the whole incident. We all were. I don’t remember a lingering sense of fear after the event. We were teenagers oblivious to the dangers, with no real sense of our own mortality. Jason probably saved my life. I wonder if he even remembers.
Harry and I chose L’Êta for our second bay. Not too far from home for a swim after work and school, and my favourite place on the island. The tide was fairly far out, not ideal for swimming, but we found a spot between the rocks and swam our thirty strokes in circles in the company of a heron (un héthon), which was quietly stalking the rock pools. Granny once told me how she used pick spider crabs (les pihangnes) off this beach. Amazing.
We covered the north coast the following day, ticking off Bouonne Niet, Rôzé and Lé Bouôlay. We reasoned that the low temperatures meant less chance of jellyfish, and as it turns out, it was a good idea. When we visited Bouley Bay again at the end of the month we spotted several blue jellies from up on the pier. Jellyfish in Jèrriais is leune, which also means ‘moon’. This makes perfect sense when you see their pale forms floating in an expanse of Prussian blue. We stood on the pier for ages that evening mesmerised by their hypnotic pulsating.
I spent many years living at the top of Bouley Bay hill when I was a child and my brother and I would walk down to the beach nearly every day. We would, of course, take the short cut, heading straight down Les Vielles Charrieres to Radio Corner. There, we would leave the road and climb down the embankment, grabbing onto the trees and sliding on our bums, popping out just short of Undercliff Guest House. We weren’t bothered by the dust and scratches; they would be washed off in the sea.
Pier jumping was a favourite pastime for my friends à la Trinneté and I. Again, without a wetsuit in sight, we would jump on hot days and in the rain. If it was high tide in the evening, we would jump in the dark. I don’t remember ever seeing a jellyfish, but we would freak each other out about the conger eels (l’s andgulles) that supposedly lurked in the depths. Each time I jumped I would draw my feet up as soon as I was under water just in case.
Back to the challenge, and the sun came out long enough for Harry and I to enjoy a sunny afternoon at Robin Bay and La Rocque, although a brisk south-westerly wind created a stark difference between the two. The following day Harry was on a school trip to L’s Êcréhos, where he had a paddle in the wind and the rain so I was inclined to give him that one. The weather wasn’t much better over the next couple of days. We took a grey, drizzly dip in la Baie d’Anne Port with a man and his rather large dog. Then we crossed Lé Port in St Ouën off the list while Harry was surfing with school. I jumped in at 8am and managed to grab a shower in the carpark before work. Nothing like a cold outdoor sprinkling to kick start the day. We took a break for a couple of days then finished the week with Ouaisné.
Now here’s the thing. Despite being born and brought up en Jèrri, I had never visited Lé Hâvre du Scez (Saie Habour). I have explored Le Couperon Dolmen but never actually walked down onto the beach. It was low tide when we ventured down the muddy track and my first thoughts were that the rocky seascape did not lend itself particularly well to the purpose of un hâvre. Apparently my misgivings are not all that unreasonable, seeing as this is the place where a 17-ton cutter named Iris wrecked in 1896.
Another place I have never visited is La Coupe, a small inlet just south of Saie. We arrived to the company of just one other family on the beach. La Coupe en Jèrriais, means ‘chalice’, bringing to mind a golden goblet of wine, perfect for this pretty little cove with pale sands and sparkling water. We swam two more bays that day, Flicquet (or Flyitchet en Jèrriais), Jersey’s closest point to the French coast, and finally La Mathe Ste Cat’linne.
With a trip to the La Rouoyaume Unni (UK) on the cards during the third week of Juilet, we were in a hurry to get through as many bays as possible and we ticked off five more the following day. This time with the sea temperature reading a balmy 16℃ we made our way down the east coast. We jumped in (I say jumped, but it was a much more gradual entry) at Rhona’s in Gouôrray then walked over to Longbeach, where we floated on our backs for some time in the brief and only interval of sunshine that made an appearance that morning.
After a shallow dip and a water fight at Lé Ho we moved onto La Motte. Motte in French and Jèrriais is a ‘lump of earth’. It is also an Anglo-Norman word for ‘mound’ or ‘hillock’ often topped with a structure or camp. Fragments of prehistoric pottery and stone tools have been found on Green Island, as well as 18 stone cist graves. There is even evidence of the previous existence of a small chapel. I promised Harry time to explore properly later in the summer and we headed over to Greve d’Azette, where a couple of tourists were bravely standing waste deep in the cold grey water throwing a ball at each other.
At this point we had covered 20 bays and with just 10 to go we received news from England that our friends had contracted Covid-19 and we would need to postpone our trip. This meant a much more relaxed approach to the remainder of the challenge so we took a break. A week later the four-day arsion (heatwave) hit and we managed to get out of our wetsuits and into the deceptively cool waters of Le Braye and Les Laveurs out west, where of course, we stopped for an ice-cream at the van that always adds sprinkles.
That week we tied in eune bangnole à la mé (an evening swim in the sea) with a barbecue at L’Archithondé. We also went for a beautiful clear dip at Pliémont, otherwise known as La Grève au Lanchon (the beach of the sand-eels), where the Victorian night-time fishing expeditions took place by lantern light. In blazing sunshine and a temperature of 30℃, we might as well have been on a tropical island…
Of course, we were fast brought crashing back down to the reality of British summer time and faced the next two bays in lé vent (wind) and la plyie (rain). This, with some poor planning on my part, meant for a miserable and quick wade through thick vrai (seaweed) at low tide at the usually delightful Belval Cove and, a neighbouring bay I’d never set foot in, La Grande Maison. Harry had the great idea of making sand angels at the edge of the water so we lay on our backs and just let the weedy water wash over us. Never mind, we were inching closer to our target and had just four bays left.
We spent the next few days searching out the sunshine, leaving lé hathîn (sea mist) à Ste Mathie and finding blue skies on the south-west coast. Descending the steps into Lé Bieauport, it felt like we had entered a portal into another world as the bright sand and sparkling water came into view. We spent a full afternoon swimming and rock pooling while yachts came and went and the water lapped. Then Lé Portélet, the bay with the islet l’Île au Guerdain, the final resting place of Philippe Janvrin, who I always believed had died of the plague. It turns out, however, he was unfortunate enough to die of an unrelated fever while quarantining on his ship off the coast of Jersey during the epidemic.
Technically by this point, Harry had already swam La Baie d’St Aubîn on a Youth Club trip at the start of les vacanches. But in the interests of fairness I made him do it again so I could tick it off too. This was our penultimate bay. It was first thing in the morning, the tide was racing in and I’m not sure if I was kidding myself, but the water felt really rather warm.
One bay left. The official final swim at St Brélade was cancelled due to Covid, but we chose it as our last bay anyway. This was the beach I’d spent most of my time as a young adult, drinking in the Beau Rivage and being towed in a rubber ring attached to the back of my friend Tim’s boat, while he crossed the wake to make it flip. He still has a boat and took us out a few years ago. That was an altogether different experience though that involved life jackets and everyone remaining inside the vessel.
St Brélade was quiet for the time of year, but the ribs were still going out with inflatable sofas full of excited children. A smattering of windbreaks covered the beach with the more hardened beachgoers hiding behind them, a few venturing into the water to body surf in the unusual swell. This being our last bay, we decided to run straight in. So I donned my wetsuit (of course) and, making a silent plea for warm seas, ran alongside Harry into the waves.
To date we have raised a fantastic £900 for Peter’s treatment and are so grateful to everyone who has donated. Thank you.