“I’ve never felt the sea this warm in June, it is quite weird,” said retired nurse Val Hedley as she finished her regular paddle along the picture-postcard golden sands of Longsands beach in Tynemouth.
“Often here you will get a cold bit of the sea, then it gets warmer and then it gets cooler again. But today everything seems to be the same which is unusual … it’s all evenly warm.
“It is worrying but then other strange things are happening like seaweed accumulating in places it doesn’t normally accumulate. I don’t know what’s going on … it must be climate change, mustn’t it?”
Hedley, who lives in Wylam, Northumberland, was speaking on the day scientists revealed an “unheard of” marine heatwave which has pushed up sea temperatures in the North Sea and north Atlantic.
The temperature rise for the north-east of England is particularly striking and it was concerning for swimmers and surfers out on the beach on Monday lunchtime. But most admitted they have yet to fully notice it.
“It has felt as cold as normal, if I’m honest,” said 23-year-old Nathan Henderson, an instructor at Tynemouth surf company who has been surfing off the coast of north-east England since he was nine.
“The sea here does gradually get warmer from April and the hottest month of the year, in the water, is September. That’s just how it works round here. I’ve not felt the sea getting warmer recently but it’s a worry if it is.”
Most people braving the Tynemouth sea on Monday did not dip in above their knees. There was a lot of running in boldly and running out frantically.
One fearless soul was Henry Harvey, a 19-year-old footballer for Blyth Town, who was in the sea with two friends. “It was really cold”, he said. “But it’s always cold. It’s never warm … you jump headfirst in and it’s a shock, but it’s good for you.”
Barry Henderson has owned Longsands surf school for 12 years and is in the sea practically every day.
“We surf all year and it’s always the same. In winter you surf with boots, gloves and a hood on and as you come into the warmer weather you want to take your boots and gloves off as quick as you can because it’s nicer to surf.
“Maybe this year a couple of the younger lads probably had their gloves off quite early but it still has felt bloody freezing. It hasn’t felt massively different.
“Some days I’ve gone in and thought the sea’s warming up. I’ve never gone in and thought, ‘it’s warm’.”
That’s not to say he hasn’t noticed dramatic, apparently unexplainable, changes in temperature over the years.
One August the temperature felt as high as 16 degrees, he said, and then suddenly it wasn’t. “It never came back up to that temperature … it’s strange how it can change like that.”
His surf school overlooks the abandoned wreck of Tynemouth outdoor pool, a place which was notoriously freezing in its heyday because it was filled up with sea water.
Henderson has memories of badgering his mother to go in the pool when he was six. “I think it was two pence and I dived straight in and it was just so cold, my breath just completely left me. It was so, so cold.”
For many years there has been a campaign to bring back Tynemouth outdoor pool, which opened in the 1920s and closed with the rise of package holidays in the 1970s. There is much goodwill behind the campaign with support for many predicated on one central part of the proposal: it will be heated.
