The Glistening Dave pano ... Shelley Beach in near perfect conditions.

Meanwhile, at Lake Macquarie, by the Belmont 16' Skiffies a day earlier, we were about to set out on the second oldest ocean/open water swim in Stray'a ...

... early morning on Lake Macquarie ... the Across the Lake Swim gets going at 9:30, but you have to be there early to catch a ferry across the lake to the start.

Some people watched the Mosh Pit Classic "2km" from the comfort of a balcony overlooking Steyne beach. Some people such as Genevieve Hudson. Genevieve took her dad for a swim around the "1km" course first, then must have hightailed it back to luxury pretty damn quick in order to get this shot, framed by the iconic Norfolk pines.

The officials boat on Lake Macquarie.

Milling for the start at Coal Point.

The most terrifying thing about swimming across Lake Macquarie is the start, where event organisers warn us of "razor fish", which we long thought was a rev-up. But it's not. Razor fish exist, and they will cut your feet, right through them , if you step on them.

The longest march begins ...

From the sublime to the ridiculous, going from the second oldest swim in Stray'a, Across Lake Macquarie,which at 190 starters this season also is one of the smallest, to the Cole Classic at Manly with its "4,000" starters, is a little surreal. Here, we are briefed on the razorfish.

The man on the left is Cliff Marsh. He has one of the most poignant records in ocean/open water swimming in Stray'a. As tykes at Caves Beach, we were terrifed of Cliff, who was an examiner of surf life saving qualifications. If we didn't work hard for our Resuscitation Certificate, or our Qualifying Certificate, or our Bronze Medallion, our instructor would warn us, "Just wait until your exam and Cliff Marsh gets you ..." 40 years on, we've moved on, but Cliff still is playng a very active role in surf life saving, not just at his almer mater, Swansea Belmont SLSC, but in peak councils throughout the organisation. And Cliff was one of the founders of the Across the Lake Swim, back in 1960. He has been involved in it every year since then, and next year, the swim will celebrate its half-century. It is the second oldest ocean/open water swim in Stray'a, behind only the Magnetic Island Swim, which celebrated its half-century c. 5 years back. Now, almost 50 years on, Cliff still stands there, on the jetty, and briefs and starts this swim. We were ferried across to the start by Cliff's son, Ben, whom Cliff says, too, is "an outstanding surf life saver". Knowing Cliff, as we have now for 40-odd years, we expect nothing less. But hats off to Cliff. The Across the Lake Swim remains one of the best, albeit least known swims on the ocean swims calendar: from Coal Point to the Skiffies at Belmont, it's 3.8km in a straight line, and it oozes eccentricity and idiosyncracy. This year, oceanswims.com was rammed by a jet ski, whose driver simply wanted to attract our attention. Why didn't he simply wave to us? We felt like JFK. But you younger types wouldn't know what we mean by that...

Shelley before the storm.

The start of the Across the Lake Swim at Coal Point.

... with a last minute change of venue.

And the finish of the Across the Lake Swim at the Skiffies at Belmont. Watch out for those razorfish. Whilst we were rammed by a jet ski who wanted to push us back onto what they regarded as the course -- we knew better, of course -- Mollymook swim organiser Graeme Wolfenden, who was in Newcastle to visit his dad, overshot the finish by 100m because he was allowed to swim out wide without being brought back in. Graame headed off to see his dad straight after the swim. Keith Wolfenden, in Merewether, is in his early 90s now and is not feeling the best, so we'd like to send Keith a cheerio, and some advice to take comfort from the thought that he's raised a high-quality son.

They made us drink our own.

We can see this pic in Glistening Dave's ocean swims calendar 2010.

The night before the Mosh Pit Classic@Manly, we got to thinking. We added up all the entries to the biggest ocean swim in NSW, as Fairfax Meeja Ltd was styling it through its mouthpiece, The Sydney Morning Herald, which they claimed was “4,000”, and we factored the average cost to enter the event, by their own statement, of $50.

By our reckoning, that tallies $200,000 in entry revenue, which isn’t bad for an ocean swim. On the same entry figures last year, the equivalent event, the Cole Classic, would have taken $140,000, which also would have been extraordinary. As it was, with around 2,000 entries, the Cole last year took probably $70,000. None of this is bad money in terms of ocean swimming in NSW, or even Stray’a. So the leap to $200,000 absolutely is extraordinary. Embarrassingly extraordinary.

Last year, according to pre-event publicity, this event lost $30,000. We heard it was more like $15,000 to $20,000, but that might just be meeja hyperbole. Maybe it was $10,000-$15,000. Maybe it was nothing like that, for oceanswims.com has never been privy to event finances, including those of the Cole Classic, although we do know a bit about how much these things cost. And we know by now that we should never take what the meeja tells us at face value, The Sydney Morning Herald being no exception.

That said, we take the Coles at their word when they say the event had outgrown them. We understand several people connected with the event last season each tipped in several thousand dollars of their own funds to make up the budget.

Follow the sequence of pics from here to a few below ... from this wave start ... As Glistening Dave says, it's an accident waiting to happen ...

Finances were at the core of the Cole’s separation from North Bondi after the 2004 event. Essentially, North Bondi SLSC wanted to see how the club could derive greater revenue from the sport’s blue riband event in NSW. One of the things they felt was that the Coles spent money on unnecessary frills, such as those piddling Cole Classic trophy plates. “People don’t really care about those plates, do they?” a North Bondi identity asked us quietly at one stage. We told this person that, in our belief, yes, they did. Shortly after, we asked a friend, a doctor who also is a member of North Bondi SLSC and who had one Cole Classic plate at home from a minor placing some years earlier. We said, “(Charles), how highly do you value your Cole Classic plate?”, and he said, without hesitation, “Higher than my medical degree!”

So, yes, the Cole Classic plates, designed and potted for the Coles by a lady by the name of Celeste, were not really one of those superfluous frills that the Cole should do without. They had helped lift the Cole to become the pre-eminent ocean swim in NSW, although by no means the most venerable.

Anyway, it is true that the Coles, when they ran the event, bunged on a few frills that other swims did not. We’ve mentioned the plates. There also was the trad jazz band that played on the beach. All the things they did, however, produced an event of unique quality, an event with pizzazz. The Cole was a swim, but it was a bit more than a swim. It was an event, and a good day out. This was particularly so at Bondi, with is pageantry, its colour, where every pedestrian walking their rat-on-a-stick along the promenade is a contributing player in the passing parade.

Their dispute with North Bondi unresolved – and the dispute is a pity, for North Bondi is a delightful club to deal with, from our point of view -- the Coles moved to Manly, another very good club, (and it is a matter of some pride to oceanswims.com that we facilitated the contact between the Coles and Manly through the iron man Craig Riddington, thus perhaps saving the Cole from extinction, for at the time the Cole family felt they had come to the end of the road and there was no future at Bondi, and no future outside Bondi, eastern-suburbs-centric characters that they are).
The problem at Bondi was that the Coles were committed to putting on a good event, but they also were committed to paying North Bondi a fixed amount to help them stage the event, and this amount was subject to regular review.

On switching to Manly, the Coles entered a similar arrangement, whereby they guaranteed to pay Manly Life Saving Club a fixed amount to help them stage the event.

Now, anyone in business should see a flaw in that strategy: that irrespective of how much the swim brings in, they are committed to paying the club that fixed amount. With revenue falling off – for the Cole also lost its long term sponsor, Zip Heaters, and never have found a replacement – they still were locked into that amount for the club.

"Crash!!!" ... is what happens when one wave swims back into a succeeding wave ... see below for more ...

Secondly, the event’s guiding hand, Christopher Cole, the eldest of the three Cole Bros, who took over the event after the passing of its founder, their father, Graham, well, Christopher moved from Bondi Junction to Suva, in Fiji, to take up an architectural appointment. He was removed from things and he engaged a local organiser to help organise the event whilst he was away. They had one organiser the first year Christopher was away, then, losing that one, they found another. This meant that they were then locked into a second fixed amount, which they are obligated to pay irrespective of how much the event brings in.

So, bringing us rapidly to the present, it’s not hard to see why the event was struggling financially, particularly without a sponsor, and why the meeja conglomerate, Fairfax, found some financial issues when they agreed to take over the event.

This is one reason, we dare say, why one of Fairfax’s first moves was to jack up entry prices from $35 to an average $50 ($60 if you entered the 2km event by mail after their absurdly early earlybird deadline, which wasn’t so much earlybird as pre-gestation, even before the egg had been laid). It smacked of arrogance that Fairfax should impose those two quite radical changes on the event without any background themselves in ocean swimming. But they had to do that, they said, in order that the event might survive.

All the "1kms" gone.

All Dave can say is, "Spot's lost his tummy ..." Naah. It's just the angle ...

MCs. When Neil Rogers and H G Nelson became superfluous back at Manly, these characters became the personality of the Mosh Pit Classic. One of this lot kept telling swimmers, in briefings, that they had to swim to Queenscliff, which was a good kilometre farther than the real turning booees shy of North Steyne. Maybe he was new to Manly.

So, jump forward to this weekend and Fairfax Meeja is sitting on $200,000 in entry revenue. They are committed to paying Manly LSC $30,000 – they paid that amount over by cheque this weekend, we understand – and they are committed to paying another amount, we believe in the 5 pre-decimal point digits, to the event organiser, whom they inherited from the Cole Bros. So Fairfax, too, is locked into a bottom line cost of maybe $40,000 to $50,000 even before they’ve despatched anyone a swim cap or a timing chip strap.

In the end, that extraordinary $200,000 has them sitting pretty. Even allowing for the donation to Manly LSC for the excellent effort that they put into staging the event, and the payment to the organiser – we find it difficult to understand why that role could not have been performed by someone from the Manly club – Fairfax must find itself sitting on around $150,000.

Now, you can’t tell us that all their other costs in staging the event would come to anything like $150,000, or even half that. (None of this, mind you, takes into account the revenue deriving from commercial hangers on who would have paid Fairfax Meeja to become event partners, and which would have bumped up the income still further).

For example, how much did Fairfax spend in sending out timing chips and caps by mail weeks before the event? How much did they pay the timing organisation that supplied those straps that came off the leg at the slightest provocation? We picked up one floating a couple of feet down off the first booee in Cabbage Tree Bay. We heard many other stories of people losing their timing chips, and we weren’t surprised.

Glistening Dave tells us: "These two codgers wanted me to register their feelings 'bout the organisation and running of the event." Not quite codgers, we'd have thought. Boofheads, yes.

We wonder how much experience the timers had in supplying timing chips for ocean swimmers? (The timers would have cost Fairfax somewhere between $10,000 and $20,000.) We know that Fairfax had no experience in ocean swimming before this one. We offered to introduce them around, suggested they attend a few swims to observe, but they weren’t interested. They attended the Bondi-Bronte swim, but apart from that we know of no other swim that they attended.
They also insisted that they were not running the Cole as a profit-making exercise. They were under instructions not to make a loss, which is reasonable. Indeed, a Herald reporter even used a line on us the week before the swim that it was a “family swim”. We took him up on that point, pointing out how much it would cost one father we knew whose two daughters swam with him: $165. On Saturday, the day before the swim, the Herald ran a story about the Hansford family, who had five siblings swimming. The story didn’t mention that the Hansford family would have paid between $225 and $275 to enter the swim, depending on whether they were earlybirds.
Hardly a “family” event. In that Herald report on Saturday the term, “family swim”, did not occur. Perhaps it was a subliminal message through the medium of a story about a family of five.
Anyway, the bottom line is that we reckon Fairfax Meeja is sitting on maybe $100,000 that it really is not entitled to and should be returned to swimmers. With “4,000” entrants – we could find only 3,900 entrants on Sunday night and 3,298 finishers – we figure they should refund $25 to each paying punter. Mind you, we did all get a free copy of The Sun Herald.

Failing that, or as well as that, Fairfax should increase the donation to Manly LSC, and/or they should make a substantial donation to Northern Beaches Branch of Surf Life Saving, so that the benefits that we all have raised for them are shared amongst all the surf life saving clubs along Sydney's Northen Beaches.

Blobbers (bloggers to most of us, except the old fashioned friend who insists on calling it “the blob”) are having their go well and truly on the oceanswims blog (click the link upper left to see for yourself, to vote in the oceanswims.com Cole Classic poll, and to leave your own comment on the Mosh Pit Classic), so we will limit ourselves for now to one other observation, which really goes to the heart of event management.
That concerns Fairfax’s decision to mail out timing chips to pre-gestation swimmers. To them, mailing out straps and chips in advance probably saved them a mountain of admin work on the beach on race day, which, in any case, would have been done for them for free by volunteers. Pre-race day distribution is what they do for City to Surf runners, apparently. And that is what the Fairfax people never have been able to grasp: that a swim is not a run. Particularly an ocean swim. That’s why swimmers don’t like committing to a very expensive event so far in advance, well before they have any idea what conditions will be like on swim day.

As her prize for being 3rd laydee in the Cole Classic, Shelley Clark received a Sydney Morning Herald duckhead hat, and a bar towel. Oh, and like all of us, a free copy of The Sun Herald! No wonder she's smiling.

New South Head Road, the course of the City to Surf, is the same in any weather, just a little wetter, maybe with the extra odd pothole. But the Pacific Ocean is not the same in any weather. It ranges from benign to deadly. The problem with mailing out timing chips in advance is that Fairfax then did not provide event registration on swim day. What that meant is that they had no tab on who had turned up for the swim. And when all the timing chips were collected, they had no way of knowing with finality who had returned safely to land. Did they work out on swim day who belonged to the timing chips that weren’t returned? And did they go searching for those people to ensure they had returned to shore safely? Did they know whether these timing chips belonged to swimmers who had swum, or swimmers who had decided to stay at home after all? We can’t see how they had any way of knowing. We wonder who their insurance provider is. They should have a word to Fairfax about this.

Just the previous Sunday, at The Big Swim, organisers went into emergency mode when one swimmer who had registered at the start did not check in at the end. They eventually found the chap at home on the Central Coast, although he’d left gear on Whale Beach. At Gerringong three years ago, someone did the same, and the organisers, after searching for the swimmer, called out the helicopter rescue people. That swimmer, too, eventually was found safe at home. Without a system for keeping tabs on all swimmers, organisers have no idea whether all their swimmers return to shore safely. Fairfax Media, take note.

The blobs will tell you what swimmers thought of this swim. It was a hotch potch, not made easy by the decision to switch venues from Manly to Shelley beach, although that decision was, itself, the focus of many comments. Some of the booees were moved during the swim, so time comparisons amongst swimmers become unreliable.

She's our pin-up girl: Shelley Clark, Mrs Sparkle's touring daughter. Glistening Dave does Shelley justice in this study. Shows you how Dave ended up a finalist in the National Portrait Competition two years back. We still have several of Dave's ocean swims 2009 calendars available, too, if you hurry to order. Click here ...

The water was good, however, and the swim reminded us of the last of the old-style Manly Steyne Hotel Swims, which was run along a rectangular circuit from Manly down towards North Steyne. It was the last of this course before Craig Riddington and his business partner, Snowy Wood, revitalised this swim with a new course out over Fairy Bower reef, around into Shelley, then back around the point to Manly. What made it memorable was that this swim also was run from and back into Shelley, in storm surf. It took us past Manly Point, behind the break along towards North Steyne, out to sea and back again over the Fairy Bower reef to Shelley Beach.

The seas were mountainous. As they rolled beneath you, lifting you to their peak, you would look down on the swimmers in the trough by your side, and they seemed two storeys below. We rolled around like this for two kilometres. It remains one of the most exciting swims we ever had done.
That is the beauty of Manly as a venue. That whatever the conditions, the proximity of Shelley Beach means you always have a venue that can be used. Changing the course on that day, in mountainous seas, was clearly necessary. Changing the course this time was debatable.