Some times it’s nice just to take a break from life and escape to something different and yesterday that happened to be a Sauna and Dip session with a friend at Divers Cove. It’s the kind of experience you need the chilling waters of winter to be able to do properly – running from a hot sauna to lukewarm waters in the summer just misses some of the tingling fun of doing the same run into the ice cold waters of winter.
Divers Cove is one of those hidden treasures you read about and keep saying you are going to go to – a small, sandy bottomed swimming lake hidden just outside of Godstone in Surrey. When you first follow directions there you really wonder if you have gone the wrong way as there are various commercial barriers for a lorry run from a depot out to the motorway that you have to traverse. Once you find the entrance and pull into the tree topped driveway-come-car park you enter the magical world.
Being the hardy, mad, insane cold water swimmers we are and faced with an empty, blue lake it was hard to resist not taking the cold dip first. Slowly edging in, welcoming the pin pricks of cold across our skin and the associated sailor talk (my mother would not approve lol). For safety reasons, when doing a sauna session you are limited to just dipping – so with no expectation that we “had” to swim, we just enjoyed the cold waters embrace and allowed the world to slow down and stop.
Some times it’s nice just to take a break from life and escape to something different and yesterday that happened to be a Sauna and Dip session with a friend at Divers Cove. It’s the kind of experience you need the chilling waters of winter to be able to do properly – running from a hot sauna to lukewarm waters in the summer just misses some of the tingling fun of doing the same run into the ice cold waters of winter.
Divers Cove is one of those hidden treasures you read about and keep saying you are going to go to – a small, sandy bottomed swimming lake hidden just outside of Godstone in Surrey. When you first follow directions there you really wonder if you have gone the wrong way as there are various commercial barriers for a lorry run from a depot out to the motorway that you have to traverse. Once you find the entrance and pull into the tree topped driveway-come-car park you enter the magical world.
Being the hardy, mad, insane cold water swimmers we are and faced with an empty, blue lake it was hard to resist not taking the cold dip first. Slowly edging in, welcoming the pin pricks of cold across our skin and the associated sailor talk (my mother would not approve lol). For safety reasons, when doing a sauna session you are limited to just dipping – so with no expectation that we “had” to swim, we just enjoyed the cold waters embrace and allowed the world to slow down and stop.
