Marrying a woman blew my cover.

We bisexuals can hide in plain sight, camouflaged by our opposite sex relationships. You might spot us by our bi flag laces, or the pins on our jackets, but we can so easily be mistaken for straights. Now I’d shed my carapace, and I was out in the open. Vulnerable.

I thought it might be time for a fresh start for me, for us, a whole new life. And this ended up in North Yorkshire. By the sea.

My memories of the seaside are of childhood holidays swimming in the sea until I was blue. My mum warming me up in a towel scratchy with sand. Hot terracotta tea out of a tartan Thermos flask.

My first sea swim as an adult was Druridge Bay on our honeymoon. As I walked into the water a drift of swans flew along the beach, their wingbeats throbbing in the air. I wore a cheap wetsuit that left me bobbing on the surface like a discarded plastic bottle, and I giggled like a fool for the rest of the day.

As part of my new life I decided to go sea swimming with the Whitby Wild Swimmers.

I am so nervous when I turn up with my bag and my costume and a towelling robe. I hope that I have found the right place, brought the right kit. I walk down the steep concrete steps to the beach and there they are. My new tribe, resplendent in bright dryrobes and woolly hats.

One woman – we are mostly women of a certain age – explains about walking in steadily until you get acclimatised. Another warns me about the sand bank part way out that means you can unexpectedly step into nothing. A third offers me coffee because my flask, full of ginger tea, is still sitting at home in the kitchen, next to the kettle.

Sea swimmers are so welcoming. They don’t care if you are straight or queer, fat or thin, emblazoned with HRT patches or covered in tattoos, a long-distance swimmer or a splasher in the waves.

When we swim together, we lend each other swimming gloves, boots, hats and towels, talk about where we’ve got our gear from, laugh at each other's stories. Share hints and tips – clean dog poo bags on your feet help neoprene socks come off more easily, a folding Styrofoam mat protects you when you sit on the cold concrete to change and a hot water bottle on a belt around your middle is a gamechanger.

We tell each other about sea conditions, strong currents, jellyfish and weather changes. Joke that ocean warming is caused by all the menopausal women easing their hot flushes in the sea. Show each other pictures of our dogs and cats. Talk about anything, everything and nothing.

Sea swimming got me back in in touch with myself. How I feel about my body – if it's strong enough to swim in the North Sea in winter it's doing okay. That no-one cares what you look like when you are standing on one leg to put your knickers on. Trying so hard not to flash the beach dogwalkers on a breezy Wednesday morning.

How all the pieces of me – my age, my sexuality, my mental health issues, my spicy brain, all fit together to make me who I am.

I learned so much. To be aware of the afterdrop – the chill after I’ve started to warm up that usually hits a few minutes after I pull away from the beach. To read the sea. Recognise the oddly inviting flatness of a rip tide. See what the waves and the swell tell me. Know the turning of the tide. Be aware of the cleanliness or not of the water.

Though I do still make mistakes.

There was the day that the waves threw me under like a washing machine, three times in a row and someone kindly, tongue planted firmly in cheek, said – we knew you were okay as we counted and you came up the same number of times as you went down. The day that the wind changed and the stiff offshore breeze made the swim back to the beach twice as hard and even the experienced people got a little anxious.

And the day someone spotted tampons and toilet paper floating on the wave.

I was amazed how fast I got home that day, how hot I could bear the water, and how much soap one middle-aged woman could actually use in a single shower. And furious that the water companies could allow this to happen. All in the name of shareholders and profit. Could take away something as perfect as a Solstice sunrise swim where I floated in the water at half past goodness knows what in the morning, my fizzing brain suddenly and unexpectedly quieted, as a perfect pale-yellow sun edged above the horizon. Or a supermoon swim where the moon hung, silver-bright, between the twin lighthouses at Whitby Pier.

I feel like time is running out. As a woman in my 50s I have more life behind me than I have in front, and I worry that it's the same for the world if we can't fix it. Thinking too much about this makes me feel powerless, so I try to change the little things. Pick up litter when I walk on the beach. Walk and take the bus more and drive less. Generate less plastic. Plant for insects and birds. Write letters to my MP about water companies. Support local sustainable enterprises, like the Whitby Lobster Hatchery. Adopt a lobster and call it Leonard.

The hatchery aims to release 100,000 lobsters to combat the losses of larvae from predation and from ocean acidification, warming and pollution and to help to to maintain Whitby's fishing heritage.

When they first hatch, lobster larvae are tiny and cannot swim. Only one in 20,000 will reach the next stage. And only one in a million make it to old age. The hatchery grows the larvae until they are mobile, fingernail-sized versions of adult lobsters. Complete with tiny tails and miniscule claws. And then they release them at low tide to hide, camouflaged, on the seabed.

I think my favourite thing about lobsters is that they can only grow when they shed their carapaces and their new shells are paper-thin and soft. Then, they are completely vulnerable.

I step into the sea and for a moment I don't think I can do it. The water feels icy, and my skin freezes and burns all at the same time. My yellow tow float bobs behind me in the swell, with its little duck thermometer like a bright and cheery tugboat. But then the others join me as the sun sparkles in the waves. We wade in further and shriek and laugh as the sea hits our bits and tits, and then we are swimming. And there's nothing before us but the immensity of the sea, and the blueness of the sky and the common terns hovering and plummeting into the sea for fish. And on the seabed below the tiny lobsters hide, shedding their shells and growing new ones until their time has come. For their fresh start.

Yorkshire Post, 2 September 1936

There’s a lot of sea frets round here – days when you can’t see one end of the street from the other  – and those are the days when the ships run aground. Early this year – January I think– well, months ago, anyway, there was a sea fret and the Heatherfield cargo boat from Liverpool went ashore, and it’s been sitting there ever since. It's September now and its been there so long it feels like part of the coastline, and there's always a line of seagulls across its top using it as a look out, when the salvage crew isn't aboard.

Yesterday I was in my sitting room, waiting for the postman with a parcel from my sister – the one who married a fisherman and went to live in Hartlepool, not the one who went away to London – I must tell you about her one day – anyway, I saw the Harvest Queen salvage crew working on the Heatherfield, getting the scrap iron off.

Something didn’t look quite right, and I saw that the lifeboat, the one they'd been using to ferry them to and from the Heatherfield, had come adrift. Perhaps someone hadn't tied it on properly – they'll get an earful for that. The little lifeboat capsized and got washed towards the shore.

Well, that meant the men on the Heatherfield were stuck. All six of them.

I shouted to Mr George Crabtree, the plumber who was looking at the leak under my kitchen sink, and off he ran to get Mr Oliver Storm, who was on the shore seeing to his nets. The two of them took a motorboat out. They got to the boat, but the swell tossed them about so much that the crew couldn’t climb in.

I could see Mr Crabtree and Mr Storm waving their arms about at each other, and then one of them started tying knots in a piece of rope – there’s always plenty of rope in a fishing boat. They tied up some kind of lifeline – it looked more like a cat’s cradle to me – and four men jumped down into the motorboat. But there were still two left, who had to tie themselves up in rope and be pulled through the waves. They got back on shore bruised and battered, soaked through and shivering – it might only be September but there was a chill in the air.

That wasn’t the only thing yesterday. Some visitors – relatives of the Storm family someone said to me, though the Storms I know would be too embarrassed to admit it. Well, these visitors had walked out to Cowling Scar. That’s the flat rock that goes out to the right of the beach at low tide. The one over there. It’s a fine spot to sit if you have time to do that sort of thing. I hear the views are good, but the tide comes in fast.
Well, the three women had been reading and hadn’t see the waves coming. Someone on the beach ran to get help, and Mr Thomas Storm – that’s Mr Oliver Storm’s brother you know, and there’s many a Storm in this village – well, he and Mr Harrison went out in a boat to pick the women up. By the time the boat was heading back, the rock they were on had been covered up by the waves. That would have given them quite a wetting, and perhaps it will learn them for next time they want to read a book.
​
All in all, it was quite a day. I’ve never known anything like it. My neighbour said that the only thing that didn’t happen to us yesterday was a visit by this sea serpent which is supposed to be off the Yorkshire coast. I don’t know about that, but I do know there’s still a leak under my kitchen sink.