Spectacular holidays for people who love the sea

Ah, the romance of the ocean: the rapturous splash of waves on sand, the whisper of a coquettish breeze, the sensual invigoration of a swim. All of us at some time in our lives, have discovered the sea is our ultimate playground. The personal recollections shared by The Telegraph writers over these pages only confirm its boundless seductions. In it, on it, under it, beside it, what would holidays be without the sea? 

But then what would the sea be without holidays? Our perception of the sea is almost entirely a construct of the holiday industry. 

Until tourism came along no one ­really knew what the sea was for. Historically it was treated as a disobliging extension of land. Wet and unwieldy, it required endless compromises for ­humans to exercise their basic survival instincts for hunting, farming, transport and war. All were made infinitely more complicated. It invalidated the ­invention of the wheel and the use of horses. The sea, frankly, was a menace.

In the Mediterranean it was the second and third sons who were bequeathed land on the coast; the firstborn got the valuable arable acres inland. The folk on the shore eked a ­living from fishing. Boats were tools of the trade, not vessels of pleasure; few coast-dwellers could swim. When they weren’t being thrown about by the swell, they spent their days interminably mending their nets, cursing the weather and resenting their siblings’ olive trees.

Even in the 19th century, when city dwellers began taking trips to the sea by the trainload, they had little idea of what to do when they got there. Some thought they should drink it. Otherwise they would just look at it. Piers took them out to sea without their having to leave land. I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside, went the song: not in it. 

The idea of immersing oneself was preposterous. For a start, that entailed disrobing. As late as 1907, a woman wearing a sleeveless swimming costume in America was charged with indecent exposure. “Bathing” meant spas, and had done for centuries, but spas were therapeutic. That same healthy notion was what first attracted the upper classes to the seaside in Britain and Germany in the 18th century.

As a species we may have emerged from the ocean but it took almost 400?million years before we were prepared to return. In Europe the metamorphosis was at its most flamboyant in the South of France. The combination of sea and sunshine – something else that had never been fashionable – was an intoxicant.  

Phobias, inhibitions and clothes were discarded; rundown fishing ­villages became priceless real estate; water sports were invented, theatres built, the kind of grand hotel that had previously been built up mountains came down to the coast, and in 1894 Blackpool opened a 518ft iron tower. The sea had become one of the great liberating influences of life.

Like so many people, my earliest memories come from the sea: carefree childhood days with my cousins at St Davids in Pembrokeshire. We were like characters from an Arthur Ransome novel, our exploits bathed in seemingly endless sunshine, summer and escapades. Endless childhood. It was a time of Aertex shirts, calamine lotion (for sunburn), shrimp nets, picnics, Thermos flasks, sandals and innocence. 

We swam from huge sand beaches, which we considered crowded if there were two other families in sight. We scrambled over rocks and paddled and dabbled in pools. In my uncle’s motorboat, we puttered out to the craggy little islands of Skomer, where thousands of puffins nested – and still do – and Ramsey, where we were sure to spot seals. On the way we laid lobster pots. We raced to the lifeboat station at St Justinians when the maroons went off like sonic booms to summon the crew. Worming our way to the front of a small crowd, we would watch the lifeboat hurtle down its slipway and crash into the Atlantic through a great white ruff of spume. 

I went to school by sea – to America on the old Queen Elizabeth – and in my working life the sea has taken me to the ends of the earth – through the Northwest Passage in the Arctic and to Captain Scott’s hut in the Antarctic. In the tropics, I have sailed by supply vessel through the South Pacific to the Marquesas Islands, an archipelago of iridescent beauty as distant from a continental land mass as it is possible to go. I have been to sea in square riggers and dugout canoes, in ice breakers, freighters and racing yachts. From inflatable Zodiac expedition boats I have watched whales breaching in Canada and tracked brown bears foraging along the shore in the American Aleutian Islands; I have dived off the Great Barrier Reef, landed amid a colony of half a million king penguins on South Georgia, and witnessed a “haul-out” of 200 walruses in Siberia. 

In a converted Japanese fishing boat, I sailed among the blue footed boobies and swimming lizards of the Galápagos Islands. This dusky clump of spent volcanoes, strung along the equator, 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador, and teeming with wildlife, has become a paradigm for man’s relationship with the natural world. The challenge now, set so graphically by Sir David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II documentary, is to ensure the oceans’ future. Holidays gave us the sea; as holidaymakers we know better than anyone exactly how precious it is. 

It all began in a chine on the Isle of Wight. The beach that my parents took us to had no direct access. Reaching it involved a cliff-top walk that skirted a hairy bit of precipice and which ended with a final scramble down a short slope to a stretch of sun-spangled shingle.

Shelving steeply into clear water this was like no beach I’d ever seen. Slipping in to cool off I experienced, for the first time, the pure and visceral joy of open water. For the rest of that holiday I abandoned myself to the sea.

I’ve since frolicked in seas far and wide but memories of those formative swims have stuck. Now, I enjoy it for the pure pleasure of pounding the water ? free of lanes, chlorine and other people ? and for the buzz that freedom affords. I enjoy the dizzy sensation of floating under an open sky and of seeing the shore from a different perspective. I relish the companionable solitude of bobbing in my private place. Occasionally I recall my 14-year-old self, escaping not just my parents and younger siblings, but the naturists with whom we shared that piece of paradise each summer.

It can be hard work, holidaying with a sea swimmer. Daily schedules must account for at least one swim. A beach is not a prerequisite (though decent goggles are). Some of the best swims are those that fling you straight into the briny ? from boats; rocks; even a concrete platform. If it’s a beach it must be a “swimming” beach and not knee high, clobbered by waves or inhibited by dangerous currents and pleasure craft. A bay would be nice but isn’t essential; a rocky promontory for underwater observation is a boon. Ideal temperature? Between 62.6F and 69.8F (17 and 21C). Any warmer and you lose the delicious separation between water and skin; any cooler and you might be out sharpish. 

Recently, in North Devon, I spied a cove with two sheltered beaches tucked below the wooded cliffs of the South West Coast path. Blue and becalmed, this water had no business being in Britain. Our group of four (three toe-dippers and me) had been walking for much of the day. We’d run out of water and it was hot. At the head of some steep steps an out-of-puff dog walker reliably informed us it was 230 steps down… and up again. Like a puppy begging favours I looked at my friends. We were going down. In the UK, where the sea has moods, every swim is different. Evening is my favourite, when the waning sun paints a line of liquid light across the water. Drawn by the reflection, nose level with the water, it’s the liquid equivalent of chasing rainbows.