Flags from the swimmers home countries and states fly around the icy pool on Lake Memphremagog at Kingdom Games’ Winter Swim Festival. Photo by Robbie and Robert Bailey
Both Brynn and Moore recently moved to Newport —Brynn from Stowe and Moore from Telluride, Colo. “I saw this other woman coming out of the lake on one freezing day and thought, Wow! There’s another one!” says Moore, who didn’t know of Brynn’s swimming background at the time. Four or five other women—ages mid-twenties to midseventies—soon joined what became a weekly group swim. “We started in Memphremagog and we’ll just keep moving around each week looking for lakes that are not frozen,” Moore says. On Februar y 26, Brynn, Moore, and the others will drop into a 25-meter pool cut into the ice on Lake Memphremagog in the 8th running of the Lake Memprhemagog Winter Swimming Festival. Some may do just one event. Others are signed up to race as far as 200 meters. “We have a team, the Shark Bait Sheilas. Charlotte, who is a Kiwi, came up with the “Sheila” term and I’ve already ordered shark hats,” says Moore with a giggle.
WINTER SWIMMING’S PIED PIPER Newport’s Shark Bait Sheilas. The Fair Haven Jailbirds. The Muffin Tops of Middlebury. The Red Hot Chili Dippers of Burlington. Around Vermont, more and more swimmers (and dippers) are heading into the open water yearround, when the ice isn’t a factor. “I see a growing trend,” says Phil White who puts on the Lake Memphremagog Winter Swim Week. White, 73, sporting a long white beard that makes him a dead ringer for St. Nick, is the pied piper of open water swimming in Vermont. As a former member of
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The hat contest — a lap sporting your most creative design — kicks off the Winter Swim. Here, Karyn Stannard of Fair Haven seems to have found her own octopus’ garden. Photo by Robbie and Robert Bailey
Newport’s Chamber of Commerce and a director of the IROC fitness center, White launched a series of athletic events that became a business: Kingdom Games. There was The Moose bike ride through the NEK; and races such as the Dandelion Run and Fly to Pie. And then there were his swim events, which grew to include open water swims on Lake Memprhemagog of up to 25 miles as well as his summer Kingdom Swim Week where swimmers, accompanied by paddlers, swim all the lakes in the NEK. But the most improbably successful event he initiated was the Lake Memphremagog Winter Swim Festival, an annual late February swim race that takes place in a two-lane, 25-meter ‘pool’ that’s cut out of the ice in Lake Memphremagog “It started as a bad joke, took a wrong turn, and it became an adventure,” White likes to say, with a chuckle, by way of
explanation. “In 2014 I was watching these guys use this huge saw to cut ice blocks out of the lake to use for an ice maze or igloo or something,” he says. “So I took a picture of it, posted it on Facebook with a caption as a joke, saying ‘Anyone want to come swim?’” Remarkably, White got a response. Before long, he had connected with the new U.S. Winter Swimming Association. “They had just formed but didn’t have a venue. We had a venue but no idea how to put on an event like this,” he says. The first year was a struggle. The US Winter Swimming Association contingent didn’t arrive until the day of the event. The ice was so thick White had to find extra long chain saws. The morning of the event it was 10 degrees, and the surface had frozen again overnight. He had to recruit locals to chop the surface with axes. Still, swimmers showed up, coming from as far as Europe and the Eastern
Bloc countries where winter swimming is a serious sport. The next year, White resolved to make the event fun for the less serious swimmer, as well. The first event would be a 25-meter “hat race” —what is now the most hotly contested event of all. “The idea was for people to make these crazy hats and if they wore the hats and did the breaststroke, they wouldn’t dunk their heads in the water which makes it much safer,” he says. He started an awards pajama party with dinner following at the East Side Restaurant. “If you show up in your pajamas, you get a free shot of Barr Hill Vodka,” he explains. “After a cold-water swim so many endorphins are released it’s always a great party.” Awards took the form of beef jerky or maple syrup. Even the safety protocols are infused with humor. Volunteers who walk the swimmers to and from the changing house (to ensure they are not hypothermic or slip on the ice), are “Escorts.” Others who disrobe the swimmers and help them dress again at the other end of the pool are “Strippers.” And during each lap, volunteers walk alongside the swimmers with a pool hook, in case anyone needs to be pulled out. They are, of course, “Hookers.” Brynn and others helped him organize the event and White reached out to other international swimmers with ties to Vermont. The second year, there were around 30 paying participants. By 2020 there were 90 and for 2022, White had to limit the field to 135 and it has sold out. Ages range from Derby’s 14-year-old marathon swimmer Margaret Rivard to Anne Coen, 79, of Canton, Ohio.
