Laura Hall spent a year swimming across Nordic seas after a wintry dip

Laura Hall wrote that a wintry dip in Bergen harbour set her on a year-long project of swimming across the Nordic countries after she left her job on the verge of burnout.

She decided to swim once a week wherever she was, plotting a route from Copenhagen to places such as Helsinki and Arctic Norway. Hall says she travelled light — a swimsuit, two towels and an S hook — and reached out to other Scandinavian swimmers via Instagram to join local dips and find saunas, harbour pools and simple beaches.

Her account includes swims at Allas Pool in Helsinki, a solitary harbour pool in Oslo and a sea dip from the Arctic Hideaway where she saw sea urchins on the seafloor and learned about nearby orca sightings from a freediver she met. She describes meeting many kinds of swimmers — whirlpool swimmers, lighthouse and naked swimmers, people training for big challenges, and those who make submerging a daily practice.

On a tiny island in southern Greenland, Uunartoq, Hall writes she ran into cold waves beside house-sized icebergs before warming in a 38C natural hot pool. After the year she says she learned more about her ability to do hard things, found community and felt part of nature. Her book, The Year I Lay My Head in Water: Swimming Scandinavia in Search of a Better Life, is published by Icon at £18.99.

Key Topics

Culture, Laura Hall, Bergen, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Uunartoq