The annual swimming race was scheduled for eleven o’clock. It’s not very long, one and a half kilometers from one side of the bay to the other and back again.
I don’t know why I took part. I think it was when I saw the people queuing up outside the Ship Hotel to sign up. The race is strictly non-competitive, and yet the people in the queue were obviously highly competitive: men and women with huge muscular shoulders, who had clearly been training for years.
I think the race should be a family occasion for all kinds of people. So I decided to teach them a lesson.
I had to join the ‘over-sixty’ category and sign a form to say that I didn’t have any health problems. We all congregated on the beach and a girl wrote numbers on our upper arms with a marker pen. I was number 78.
It was a beautiful, sunny day with a light breeze making small waves on the surface of the water. Some of the male competitors started making crude jokes about what the cold water might do to their manly attributes. I, of course, don’t feel the cold. When I step into the sea, it’s like stepping into warm honey.
The starting gun went off and everyone dived in. Some of the older participants wisely stayed back to let the young hotbloods get ahead. They splash about so much – it’s a very uneconomical style from a hydrodynamic point of view. The water should just part in front of you, you don’t need to throw it around.
I cruised along for a while, enjoying the motion of the waves. I had to remember to go up for air now and then – I couldn’t give away my little secret after all. Then I decided to go and see how the young athletes were doing, and I spread my fins.
They are quite invisible. We merpeople are nothing like the mermaids and mermen you see in books. On land we look just like everyone else, but in the water we open out our invisible fins and swim faster than dolphins.
I easily caught up with the last of the strong, young swimmers. He had started off too fast and was already running out of steam. I flicked my dorsal fin and shot past him. Then I overtook another little group that were steaming along in that messy style of theirs. They all tried to accelerate as I went past.
Gradually, I moved up the line of swimmers until I reached two ladies with a nice smooth stroke. I kept them company until we got to the buoy – our turning point – then I flicked my tail fin and shot round it.
There were still about forty people ahead of me. I weaved in and out sometimes waving to the swimmers as I overtook them. Some waved back, but most tried to accelerate, throwing their arms around and kicking up water. I keep my legs together and my arms by my side. I undulate my fins and slip through the water like a fish. Exactly like a fish in fact.
I reached the leading three swimmers and was pleasantly surprised to see that number three was a young girl with such a beautiful hydrodynamic style, I thought she might have a bit of mer-blood in her veins. Number two was a more mature swimmer, about forty I’d say. He wasn’t young, but he had experience and technique. He maintained his pace when I overtook him. The leader was one of the huge muscular men. The really heavy types aren’t usually much good in water, but this one was steaming along using sheer strength.
Like the others, when he saw me, he tried to accelerate. This was a bad idea, because there were at least five hundred meter to the finish. I smiled at him. He hesitated, then actually shouted, ‘Get out of the way! This is a race!’.
Incredible! He thought I was a mad old woman getting in the way. I rolled onto my back and performed a few lazy backstrokes so that he could see my number. He nearly choked, then swam harder. I let him continue like that until he was exhausted and both number two and number three were catching up nicely. Then I dived and swam the last hundred meters under water.
Mr. Muscles came fifth or sixth in the end. He was furious and accused me of cheating during the prize-giving, but nobody believed him. I was particularly proud of my photo on the front page of the local newspaper with my trophy and the headline: “Granny wins family swim.”
