Matters of Opinion May 2026: The Human Seal

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May 2026 – As Memorial Day approaches and the hot, steamy weather arrives, all the things I didn’t do during the off season months are suddenly at hand. High on my list every year are swimming and taking off some weight. And that’s when I think of the Human Seal.

Every year I promise myself that I’ll swim more, swim like I used to as a kid, hit the beaches from early morning till sunset; body surf then swim across the ponds until it’s time to return home completely exhausted, fall into bed, and sleep the entire night through. Remember doing all that? Chances are you miss it as much as I do.

Except that swimming, unless you’re hitting a very secluded beach, always involves baring your body to other people and if you grew up as an overweight child as I did, it’s a time that’s fraught with anxiety. In fact, I rarely imagine a summer of plunging into water without a springtime of dieting first.

I find myself conflating the sensual zest of plunging into the water with the dry drudgery of abstaining from food. Yes, I know, diets are not only futile but unhealthy but when you were body shamed for the first two decades of your life, common sense takes a backseat in the media barrage of the weight loss and industry, not to mention all buff bodies on Facebook, Instagram, and all the other social networks.

The good news is that aging has not only made it harder for me to reduce the size of my waist, but easier to avoid old habits. So, when I start to conflate swimming and dieting I force myself to think about the Human Seal.

He is a real person but his name is not easy to pronounce because he’s Icelandic. But I’ll give it a shot, Gud-LAGGER. I learned his story from a brilliant book called Why We Swim, by Bonnie Ts-OY and as she tells it, one winter night back in nineteen eighty four, Gud-LAGGER was working on a fishing trawler three miles off the coast when the boat’s trawling gear snagged on the sea bottom. Attempting to winch up the gear, the wires became taut over the side pulling the boat over so far that the sea began to wash through the railings. The winch jammed. A swell ran under the boat and the entire crew of five was pitched into the freezing sea.

Two of them drowned immediately and the remaining three grabbed hold of the keel. The vessel began to sink. They could not release the emergency raft. The water was forty-one degrees Fahrenheit when the remaining three began to swim to shore. Within minutes, only two remained and soon after only one.

Gud-LAGGER kept swimming. Using the backstroke he kept his eyes trained on a lighthouse and eventually heard surf crashing against the rocks. Thirsty, exhausted, and unable to feel his extremities, he realized he was confronting a sheer rock cliff with no way to climb up. Turning back to the sea he adjusted course and finally hauled himself ashore. Barefoot and covered in frost, he slowly made his way across a snowy field toward the lights of town.

All told he spent six hours in frigid seas and swam more than three and a half miles to land. When he arrived at the hospital doctors were unable to detect any signs of hypothermia nor were they able to discern his pulse. What they did discover was that his body resembled a seal’s. He was insulated by fourteen millimeters, two or three times the normal human thickness. Warm, buoyant, and energized enough to keep swimming, half human, half marine mammal, Gud-LAGGER became a national hero of Iceland. He’s also mine.

So, every time I look at my gut and think I’m too fat to swim, I think of the human seal and realize, I may also be too fat to sink.

I’m Ira Wood…and that’s my opinion.

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Ira Wood hosts The Lowdown, a weekly interview program on  WOMR-FM  featuring authors, politicians, artists, and scientists, as well as cops, addicts, and fishermen. His guests have included the famous, the infamous, and the eccentric, as well as dedicated men and women who work to make the Cape and the world a better place. He served four terms on the Wellfleet Board of Selectmen.

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