A Vietnamese man praying for refugee status in Australia has had his message in a bottle received. A clear, cone-shaped bottle with the words “I am a Cat” washed up on Wollongong’s North Beach, outside Stuart Park. In the palm-sized bottle are six carefully rolled pieces of
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WHENEVER I consider skipping my swim, I think of Ted’s motto. Ted Hinge is mates with JB (who featured in the previous blog post, “A bit of a legend”), and has been swimming at the Wollongong Continental Pool for 12 years. He jumps in all year round,
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I can hardly believe I swam all through winter with the likes of JB. JB is a Wollongong Continental Pool stalwart who I met on a 13-degree gusty Tuesday afternoon in winter. He was the one and only person in the smaller of the Conti pools that
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YOU never know who you’ll meet on a train. As I embark the quiet carriage from Redfern to Wollongong at 11pm, I am suddenly drawn to an elderly couple with two large suitcases taking up extra seats. The white-haired lady smiles warmly, squeezes her husband’s hand and
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MY 94-year-old grandmother recently fell ill with pneumonia, shortly after suffering a fall at home. She was hospitalised and I flew to New Zealand to be with her. While lying in the hospital bed beside her, I put my headphones in her big old ears and played
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CHERYL Kerr is a darling. And that is precisely how she greets her friends at Wollongong Continental Pool, and later Levendi café after her lap session. “Hello, darling!” Cheryl is five-foot-nothing and bounces around the Wollongong waterfront in teeny-tiny shorts rain or shine. The tanned and toned
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WHEN I get older, I want to be a granny mermaid like Barbara Boreland. The retiree is a daily swimmer at Wollongong Continental Pool, who no matter the weather will do laps with her bestie Maureen Schumacher. If you see one of the two ladies at the
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MY yogi sister Nathalie Dipold is a striking-looking woman – legs for days, big blue eyes and breasts like clusters of grapes. It’s hard to believe someone with such natural beauty ever had self-esteem issues. Natty, as she is lovingly known at our shared workplace The Yoga
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My greatest fear is getting eaten by a shark. So it seems obvious what I need to do… get swim fit and start open water swimming. It took me two months to prepare myself and pluck up the courage to do it, and it’s a challenge I
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ROLF Lokker learned to swim in Wollongong Continental Pool when he was one. Fifty-six years on and he’s still swimming here every day. If you live in Wollongong you should know how to swim, he says. “I have a 14-year-old daughter and I don’t have to worry
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