Sink or swim

What kind of port town doesn't have its own swimming pool? Southland Times features editor Mike Fallow checks out the Bluff pool.

Either the Bluff pool has been getting bigger, which it hasn't, or Rosie Wyatt has been getting smaller.

"The deep end's getting deeper," the 70-year-old says.

"I'm shrinking with age. I've dropped four sizes in swimming suits since I started coming."

Her reducing body rises to full stature at the very thought of the Invercargill City Council closing the pool. "When they took Bluff over they did it pool and all. It's their flaming responsibility."

Not now it's not.

Like it or not, Bluffies have accepted the challenge to raise $1.1 million for long-fended-off upgrades, or else the city closes the pool.

More urgently, if the community can't find $500,000 by the end of June, the pool won't reopen in September.

Rosie Wyatt's not best pleased that it's come to this.

"This maintenance once every 10 years is no good. They needed to be doing something every year."

With Invercargill and its flash Splash Palace just 20 minutes up the road, wouldn't she go there?

She would not.

"It's no good for me because I don't drive. I would be depending on other people."

She comes for the exercise.

"I don't swim but I have arthritis and being in the pool does me good. A lot of things I can do in the water that I can't do on ground. And it's only a couple of blocks from home. I can have an hour in here, go home and mow the lawn.

"As long as I can still walk, and the pool's here, I'll be coming until I'm 90."

It's not as if you're going to see Rosie Wyatt diving off the wharf any time soon, though it does get plenty of action around this time of year.

Along with good old beach time, it's the wharf that draws the teenagers, in the fine weather at least. While she doesn't agree with wharf swimming, Bluff Swimming Club president Sandra Johnson does understand the appeal of being able to get away from poolside rules and regulations – maybe do a backflip without some adult telling you not to because you might hit the side of the pool.

"But if you go there and look at those children, they've been through swimming lessons," she says.

"They know how to swim. They have the basics to survive."

This doesn't mean, however, that a teenager who couldn't swim so well, or even at all, could be relied upon to disqualify himself from joining in, for safety's sake.

"Teenagers go there in a group and egg each other on," Mrs Johnson says.

"No teenage boy will tell his friends that he can't swim."

It's no rarity to see commercial fishermen taking their young sons and daughters to their tied-up boats.

"If a child falls off, they're not going to stand up on the bottom. They need to be able to turn on to their back and call out to their father, or at least swim or doggy paddle to the side of the boat."

Sandra Johnson says it emphatically, and it's impassioned – water survival should be no less a basic than reading, writing and arithmetic.

"It's so important children know how to survive."

Know what? Her husband Gordon can't swim. He's a fisherman who grew up nearby at Greenhills.

The pool hadn't opened by the time he left school.

Down there on the wharf, there's no shortage of men with stories like that. But as parents, they want better for their kids, and for the past 36 years the Bluff pool has provided it.

It pool is open seven days' a week, September to March inclusive, apart from public holidays, 34 hours' a week.

It holds holiday activity programmes throughout the September-October and January school holidays.

Usage spans right throughout the community. It can start with the Wednesday and Friday baby classes. ("As a coach," Mrs Johnson confides, "you've got to teach the parent not to be scared first.")

Survival skills aren't just to be learned through 10-lesson learn-to-swim packages. Kids need to come between times and play and have fun and build their water confidence in a safe environment.

"They say they could close the Bluff pool and take the children to town on buses.

"Are they going to provide a bus for a child just to go to Splash Palace and have fun?

"Here we are, open half past 3 to 5 every day, Saturday and Sunday 1pm to 4.30pm, for the kids to just come and have fun. Are they going to provide that?"

Come to that, would parents finishing a day's work at the seafood factory be up for heading 20 minutes down the road, sitting poolside for an hour or two, and then come 20 minutes back down the road and then see to tea?

"Splash Palace is a terrific facility, but it is not going to get bigger numbers if they close our pool," Mrs Johnson says.

Bluff Community School said in its submission to the city council that it would not take its children to lessons in the city. It would be too disruptive. Quite apart from the travelling time there's a bottleneck of schools wanting later afternoon sessions; for good reason, as anyone who had tried to teach a classroom of tired, slightly damp kids can attest.

Water Safety New Zealand last year voiced concern that the closure of school pools meant fewer children were learning to swim.

Its research showed a quarter of year 6 pupils couldn't swim 25m or tread water and its manager, Matt Claridge, said ideally kids should learn water survival skills through their own school or a pool "in close proximity".

To those who hammer the message that the 20 minutes from Bluff to Invercargill isn't all that far, Mrs Johnson replies that it's no further in the other direction, and townies who gave the Bluff pool a try would find it had a good-fun, pleasant, but different feel to it. More intimate, less noisy and honest-to-goodness nobody there cares what you look like.

Southland people need to use all their facilities, not just the centralised ones, she says.

"We are part of Invercargill. Why can't Invercargill people come and use our pool? A lot don't even know we're here. They don't know Bluff's got a pool with a roof on it, and 28-degrees heated."

The water slide is much more modest, true, but the pool boast hard-case features the Invercargill pool does not. The giant inner-tube tyres are mightily popular and the dunking machine – donated by Osborn Engineering and beloved by the locals – is widely envied.

Bluff Community Board chairman Jan Mitchell says the town is energised by the task at hand.

"Everywhere you go, people are talking about the pool and how it must stay.

"I do not believe any town surrounded by the sea, as we are, can put a price on keeping a pool open.

"No price can be put on lives."

Bluff residents pay towards the city library, pools and parks division, and they do it happily enough.

"We don't all use every facility that we pay for in town, but we're not moaning about that.

"We are one people.

"This is just one time when the community has to assist Bluff."

The city council has agreed that, if the community funds the upgrade, it will continue to pay $180,000 a year for the operation of the pool.

The community board has argued that this rise by the same percentage of future rates increases, or by the rate of inflation.

"No other budgetary cost is static – the board considers it unrealistic that the amount be capped," Mrs Mitchell says.

Bluff is awash with pool fundraising projects. You'd need to show up to find out what the "quiz with a difference" at the New Eagle Hotel on March 7 entails, but there's no doubt the swim club kids will be giving it guts at a swimathon on March 28. The New Eagle hotel is working on a musical evening, the RSA ladies, fire brigade and just about every combination of townsfolk you can think of are hitting one another up cheerfully but hard. And good luck getting in and out of the town without encountering a scratchie board.

It's a huge ask, but the locals turn a bit steely when they talk of the need to do their bit as individuals and together, so they can look Southland community funders in the eye.

"People do find it hard, out of their budgets, to give things, but everybody's wanting to fundraise," Mrs Johnson says.

Whether the town has the will to raise the money is more easily answered than whether it has the wherewithal.

The Bluff community that raised $42,000 to have the pool built 36 years ago was bigger than it is now. The Ocean Beach meat works was still open and the town had more people working on the wharf. In the decade to June 2006 the population fell from about 2100 to about 1800.

Fewer children are using the facility now than 10 years ago, but there has been an increase in use by adults and seniors.

In 1998-99 the annual usage was 13,334, dropping to 9371 in 2007-08.

While there are fewer children using it now, the numbers of adults and seniors have increased. Considering the loss of population, usage has been consistent at a little more than five swims per had of population per annum for its seven-month open season.

Bluffies will suggest you look at a map to remind yourself that their home is almost an island, and like any port town they have lost loved community members – children as well as adults – to the sea. Their pool, they say, is not an optional extra.

- © Fairfax NZ News