Ambushed by the river warden!

The Guardian newspaper has stolen my idea! I only posted my first, erm, whadoyacallem? post? on Thursday, and today they have devoted the back page of the travel section to "UK lidos and urban swims". I would now enter a link (as I am au fait with this button), but I think you will find a much better review here in a week's time, so I'll leave you to find it for yourselves.

So, officially the adventure starts tomorrow, but with it being Solstice and all that, I thought it only proper to start the longest day with a wild swim in the gorgeous river Derwent http://wildswim.com/river-derwent-chatsworth-park.

Carla, Louise, Tom and I donned our wetsuits before the crowds arrive and slithered our way gingerly into the surprisingly cold, but silky smooth water. We swam to the weir and bobbed around for a minute, feeling the gentle pull of the current and the calm of the early morning, then, our hat covered heads like shiny coloured balls on the water, we retraced our strokes to the bank.

A lovely river warden gave us a wave as we got out, and shouted across the river that wetsuits are not allowed for swimming there. "Bit late now" I thought, assuming he was joking.

We changed by the river in the glorious sunshine, entertaining the early morning dog walkers with our attempts to get out of a wetsuit gracefully, and trying to estimate distance and water temperature (I guessed at 800m and a good 19 degrees going on the lack of teeth chattering and numbness). We wandered back along the river, oblivious to what was about to occur, admiring the upside down man doing yoga by the water's edge.

The AMBUSH by the lovely river warden happened without warning! He blocked our path with his pick up truck, scared us with his bucket full of American signal crayfish and gave us a leaflet! He wasn't joking about the wetsuit thing after all. Apparently, the signal crayfish are wiping out the UK white-clawed crayfish in the river Derwent, and we could be spreading the eggs on our wetsuits to other rivers which have not yet been contaminated!

Tom wanted to know if you could eat the American crayfish, (Nope! Well not the ones in the bucket. They had to be killed cos of some licence thingy, sorry Tom) and I wanted to know if it was ok to swim there without a wetsuit, (also nope, not really encouraged.) At this point, the upside down yoga man slipped into the water for a swim. NOT upside down. That would be... difficult.

So, the take home story is this: swimming in the Derwent is not encouraged, but as demonstrated nicely by the yoga man, no-one can really stop you. The crayfish thing is important (If you want to know more about it, here's a link http://www.nonnativespecies.org/checkcleandry/)  and nothing to do with lovely river wardens wanting to convert us to truely, Kate Rew-skinny dip style, wild swimmers http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2008/jun/13/uk.skinnydipping.swimming. Ps, and I'm whispering if you can imagine that, I personally think this link's a bit more interesting than the other one, but that's just my opinion.