My wife, Carol, is a master of the infuriatingly thoughtful gift. For a birthday of mine a few years back, she got my friends to record an album’s worth of tribute songs and roasts and had them pressed into a one-off vinyl record. When I entered a bird-fancying stage, she had a taxidermied drake wood duck (it had died a natural death, on a farm, she was promised) shipped all the way from France.
But her coup de grâce, to this day, is the needlepoint she commissioned for an anniversary of ours. “You never regret swimming,” it announced, in its pointillist stitching. We’d been saying those words, mostly as a dare, pretty much ever since we met. That square of needlepoint has become our de-facto family crest. I think I got her flowers that year. We swim a lot, Carol, me, and Cormac, our teen. And when we aren’t swimming, we’re often obsessing over our favourite swimming rocks. There’s the one on B.C.’s far west coast where a cold mountain river coalesces into deep, clear, pebble-bottomed pools, hyphenated by mini waterfalls. We’ve swum from that rock in sun and cold and near-blinding rain, through chattering teeth and pie-eating smiles. And nope, regret has never once entered our minds.
And there’s the paddle-in cove, just south of Parry Sound, Ont., where a weather-smoothed whalesback of sun-kissed gneiss gives way to a pocket of lake water with the texture of slept-in silk. We’ve found outstanding swimming rocks in Asia and in England (“wild swimming,” as it’s often called there, is a national obsession), in Alberta alpine meadows, and on cottage lakes in Haliburton, Ont. One of our all-time favourites as of now is among an archipelago of tiny, kayak-access islands near a friend-of-a-friend’s cottage on Georgian Bay. There’s a broad tongue of ancient rock there that rolls off fast into bottle-blue water. When the bay is even the slightest bit heaving, the waves roll hungrily over your feet.
The last time we went, we were with some friends. It was late afternoon in hot, high summer. We’d brought a little cooler with drinks and snacks. We’d swim a bit, then snack a bit, sprawling out with dripping limbs onto the warmth of the rock. It felt like there was nobody else for miles. We’d earned it too, boating there just after lunchtime. That’s a thing about swimming rocks: getting to the best of them usually takes a bit of effort. And unlike a dock (love them, but dock swimming is dock swimming, more-or-less generic), or yet another sand-strewn beach, this little spot was one-of-a-kind. The action of the waves had formed a sort of subsurface lounger. You could sit there for hours. You could probably read a book while doing it too. And like most of the greatest swimming rocks I’ve found, this one was very much on public land. It was there for the taking (for a time) for free.
As the sun dipped lower, we timed our dives so we’d slice through the swells. We let the lift from the waves push us back up onto the rock. “That’s the best swim I’ve ever had,” one of my friends said.
The very best swimming rocks share a few key attributes. The feeling of remoteness is important. Which is not to say that a great swimming rock has to actually be far away; it can even be tucked just off the road. An associated feature: the best of the best almost always feel like a secret. Or as Carol and I have taken to putting it, a truly great swimming rock will always pass the naked test. (Another time-tested motto the two of us share: “Bathing suits are a sign you’ve given up.”) Exposure is important—with west being best, for late-afternoon sun. And so is texture: of the rock and of the water around it. And great swimming rocks are just plain beautiful. They’re the sort of spots that burn into your brain, that you replay through winter to get through the cold, that you pine for the entire spring.
After a lifetime of camping, we bought a property last year. It’s far enough north that the locals don’t call them “cottages,” but “camps.” It’s a good-sized lot, with shoreline on two different lakes. One of the last things we did before finalizing the deal was paddle as much of those lakes as we could. We found swimming rocks everywhere: deep-water jumping rocks, clear, secluded, rock-ringed coves, and cocktail hour-worthy island shores. They felt remote and reasonably private (no bathing suits were dampened in the touring of those rocks) and undeniably gorgeous—each one, in a way, its own kind of gift. Pleasures don’t get much simpler than that.
Chris Nuttall-Smith writes about food, restaurants, and travel. He’s the author of Cook It Wild: Sensational Prep-Ahead Meals for Camping, Cabins, and the Great Outdoors.
This story originally appeared in our June/July ’24 issue.
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