Cold water immersion, one year on

A year ago, some bright spark decided we should dip in the sea for fun. I blogged about it here. A year on, what have we learned?

This is what we'd learned three weeks in - let's update!

1. We have learned that you need to boil the kettle before setting off to swim. Yes, that's a habit now. We have two cups of tea (she a lemon and honey tea, me a Dorset).
2. You need a hat afterwards, Ms Humdrum needs to remember! I haven't worn a hat for a few weeks, but yes it is important to keep warm. Even when you think the sun is out. We also have rugs, courtesy of my mum, to keep our legs warm. "Old lady slipper boots" are excellent too. Whatever the weather. 
3. You need gloves as it's FREEZING and your hands hurt like HELL. Luckily, my friend bought us gloves and we have worn them ever since, except in high season. No more pain.
4. You also need to remember, from yesterday's swim, not to gossip too much on the way and have to make a triangular reroute on the way back because you didn't realise you were drifting. Not really an issue at the moment as we are only in for minutes. But we still drift. We need a yardstick and a dipstick... our sons have played those parts for us, but they are more likely to swim in the summer.
5. And don't forget the tide comes in quickly so may wet your towels. Her dry robe won't help with this! I did have to nip back onto the beach recently as a rogue wave wafted up too close to our stuff for comfort.
6. We also learned that whilst we felt impressed with what we were doing, we saw the old ladies who were dipping in just swimsuits! Whilst we are not old ladies, we do now dip without wetsuits, because we've got used to it. I'm sure soon, when we want to swim for longer, we will get them out again.

New things we've learned:

1. Not to just go in blindly; watch the swell and those double/triple waves, plus the shelf. We nearly couldn't get out of the water only this year and it frightened us. 

I'm sure we'll be adding to this list as we go.