Open sea at Brooklyn’s least exclusive beach club

When swimming in city seawater, you have to appreciate the unpredictability. The winds and currents can be brutal, or the salt water can be as calm as a bathtub. And then there’s the game of “what did I just walk into?” – a plastic net? No, that’s a jellyfish. Ouch.

Brighton Beach is also a unique New York experience, as the Coney Island Parachute Jump is a landmark for navigation and swimmers measure their progress in the water block by block. The organization CIBBOWS – Coney Island Brighton Beach Open Water Swimmers – is there to make the huge pool between South Brooklyn, the Rockaways and Sandy Hook feel like home.

I joined CIBBOWS in 2018 to learn the basics of open water swimming and haven’t looked back since. I enjoyed the sights, smells and sensations of the salty lake while keeping an eye out for waders and popular landmarks like the Q-Bahn crossing Ocean Parkway as I make my way to the New York Aquarium and its famous shark tank, with the Cyclone and Wonder Wheel beckoning beyond.

“We want to make it easier for swimmers to make the transition from the pool to the sea,” says Capri Djatiasmoro, one of the founders of the organization, which is now almost 20 years old. “It’s completely different in the sea.”

During the city parks’ official beach season, from Memorial Day through the week after Labor Day, CIBBOWS welcomes paying members ($90 per year) and curious non-members alike to meet at the Brighton 4th Street beach, share tips, and watch each other. Membership grows throughout the season, reaching over 300 in recent years.

Every new CIBBOWS member is given a buoy, an inflatable neon-colored float that is tied around the waist and doubles as a place to store valuables. In-water classes teach newbies the basics of navigation, such as how to identify landmarks during the stroke while swimmers swim parallel to the shore. Swimmers should follow these instructions: Advice The group’s website states, above all, “It’s the ocean. It’s in charge – you’re just in it for fun.”

To conquer Coney, you have to have the courage to swim hundreds of meters out past long rocky piers home to cormorants and seagulls, in cold, choppy or windy weather. Swimmers fear the “treadmill” – the countercurrents are so strong that even with powerful strokes and kicks you can only move forward a few centimeters. Jet skis and other watercraft whiz past, sometimes too close for comfort.

“For most of them, it was their first time in open water,” said Valerie Farber, one of the volunteer instructors, after a session in early June when the water temperature was about 18 degrees. (A swimming pool averages about 27 degrees.) “Some were training for triathlons and swimming. Others wanted to socialize and be in nature.”

Paid memberships skyrocketed during the pandemic after the end of lap swimming at public pools highlighted the lure of open water. Years ago, lifeguards whistled at swimmers who pushed past docks to cover long distances until a Brighton Beach lifeguard named Grimaldo Medrano greeted the regulars who converged on his chair and urged his fellow lifeguards to trust the open-water enthusiasts.

Medrano died of lymphoma at the age of 34 more than a decade ago, but his name lives on with Grimaldo’s Mile, a race CIBBOWS sponsors each July from Stillwell Avenue to his former lifeguard chair. This year’s edition on July 21 is sold out.

Some Brighton residents swim regularly year-round. Diego Voglino, a resident of Sunset Park, counts being in the water nearly 1,400 days in a row.

“Imagine the day you were at home and the weather was so bad you didn’t want to go out,” he said before heading off to day 1,370. “I was here.”

For year-round swimmers, it is a joy to go into the water without a wetsuit, even if the time they spend in the ice-cold water is only a few minutes.

But CIBBOWS doesn’t allow swimming out of season, and summer is the best time for it. During the week, the group’s executive director, Jacqueline Broner, lives in Manhattan and works as a web designer for the New York City Housing Authority. But any day she can get there, she’s in her hometown of Brighton Beach, handing out the group’s loot and answering questions from new members.

She and the board take care of the boring stuff, like storing CIBBOWS caps, beach towels and buoys, and taking out insurance so the community can continue to exist.

Broner lists some of the features that make Brighton such an inviting destination for open water swimmers – not least the continuous, four-kilometer-long strip of public sandy beach that rivals the length of California’s famous Venice Beach.

“We have the community. You can travel greater distances than anywhere else. We have the protection of the Rockaways and Sandy Hook, where conditions are calmer than anywhere else. We don’t have the shark population that would exist elsewhere.”

But the water is very alive. During her own swimming, Broner has communicated with rays, a Sea Robin and other marine life.

“Dolphins swam three to six meters away from us,” she recalls.

The perfect beach day for humans is not always the perfect day for him: “If the beach is crowded, loud and hot, the animals tend to stay away.”

Djatiasmoro is currently training to be an aqua aerobics instructor and hopes to bring the practice to Brighton Beach. She has been coming to Brighton regularly since she started wintering at the Polar Bear Club in 2000, then training for a triathlon. She stayed to help others overcome the fear she felt as she adjusted to the sometimes scary expanse of open water.

“In swimming, conditions can change in a matter of seconds, so you have to be able to adapt and move around,” she said. “You can apply that to life, work and everything else.”