Open Seas at Brooklyn’s Least Exclusive Beach Club

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Swimming in urban ocean water demands appreciation for the unpredictable. The winds and currents can be brutal, or the salt water as placid as a bathtub. Then there’s the game of “What did I just run into?” — a plastic net? Nope, that’s a jellyfish. Ouch.

At Brighton Beach, it’s also a uniquely New York experience, where the Coney Island Parachute Jump is a navigational landmark and swimmers measure progress in the water block by block. The organization CIBBOWS — Coney Island Brighton Beach Open Water Swimmers — is there to make the vast basin between southern Brooklyn, the Rockaways and Sandy Hook feel like home.

I joined CIBBOWS in 2018 to learn the ropes of open water swimming and haven’t looked back since, drinking in the sights, smells and sensations of the salty brine while keeping an eye out for shore birds and favorite sights like the Q train crossing Ocean Parkway as I crawl my way toward the New York Aquarium and its iconic shark tank, with the Cyclone and Wonder Wheel beckoning beyond.

“We want to help swimmers transition from the pool to the ocean,” said Capri Djatiasmoro, one of the founders of the now nearly 20-year-old organization. “The ocean is totally different.”

During the official city parks beach season, from Memorial Day until the week after Labor Day, CIBBOWS welcomes paid members ($90 per year) and curious non-members alike to gather on the beach at Brighton 4th Street, share tips and watch one another’s stuff. Membership grows throughout the season and in recent years reached more than 300.

Every new CIBBOWS member gets a buoy, an inflatable neon-hued floatie to tie around the waist that doubles as a place to store valuables. In-water clinics teach newbies the essentials of navigation, like how to sight landmarks midstroke as swimmers trek parallel to shore. Swimmers are wise to follow advice on the group’s website, above all: “It’s the ocean. She’s in charge — you’re just along for the ride.”

Conquering Coney requires the courage to go out hundreds of feet, past long rocky jetties where cormorants and seagulls perch, and weather cold, choppy or windy conditions. Swimmers dread “the treadmill” — head currents so strong that even vigorous strokes and kicks yield inches of progress. Jet skis and other watercraft buzz by, sometimes too close for comfort.

“For the most part, this was people’s first time in open water,” said Valerie Farber, one of the volunteer clinic instructors, after an early-June session when the sea temperature was in the mid-60s. (A pool averages around 80 degrees.) “A few were training for triathlons and swims. Some others wanted to connect and be out in nature.”

Paid membership surged during the pandemic, after the end of lap swim hours at public pool facilities made the lure of the open water obvious. Years ago, lifeguards blew the whistle on swimmers who surged past the jetties to go long distances, until a Brighton Beach lifeguard named Grimaldo Medrano welcomed the regulars who met at his chair and urged his fellow lifeguards to trust the open water enthusiasts.

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

Some Brighton regulars swim year-round. Sunset Park resident Diego Voglino has been in the water for nearly 1,400 consecutive days, by his count.

“Imagine that day when you were in your house and the weather was so terrible you didn’t want to go outside,” he said before heading in for day 1,370. “I was here.”

For the year-round swimmers, going in without a wetsuit is a point of pride, even if the time spent in the frigid water shrinks down to mere minutes.

But CIBBOWS does not sanction off-season swimming, and summer is when it shines. 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 that she can get there, she’s down in her native Brighton Beach, handing out the group’s swag and answering new members’ questions.

She and the board of directors deal with the boring stuff, like storage for CIBBOWS caps, beach towels and buoys, and buying insurance, so that the community can keep going.

Broner lists some of the distinctions that make Brighton such a welcoming destination for open water swimmers — not least the continuous two-and-a-half-mile ribbon of sandy public oceanfront, rivaling the length of California’s famed Venice Beach.

“We have the community. You can do more distance than anywhere else. We have the shelter of the Rockaways and Sandy Hook that keeps conditions calmer than elsewhere. We don’t have the shark population you would have somewhere else.”

But the water is very much alive. On her own swims, Broner has communed with rays, a sea robin and other marine life.

“We had dolphins swimming within 10 to 20 feet of us,” she recalled.

A human’s perfect beach day is not necessarily theirs: “The animals tend to stay away when the beach is crowded and it’s noisy and hot.”

Djatiasmoro is currently in training to be a water aerobics instructor and hopes to bring the practice to Brighton Beach. She’s been coming to Brighton since starting in the winter Polar Bear Club in 2000, and then training for a triathlon. She stuck around to help others overcome the anxiety that she felt when she was getting used to the sometimes eerie vastness of open water.

“When you swim, you have conditions that can change in a second. So you need to be able to adapt and adjust,” she said. “You can carry that over in life and work and everything.”

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