My son, the orange roughy

There is always an element of slapstick when my son dons his bright orange dry suit. He wasn’t particularly keen on it when we first bought it, but after trying it out at home and discovering that he couldn’t get wet, it was difficult to extract him from the bath where he flapped about like some fluorescent seal. Evidently he could see the potential, having abandoned the idea of any further fjord swimming after his first experience.

He and his uncle had stood hand-in-hand on the back of our boat, working up to leaping into the sparkling water. It looked inviting under that bright, blue sky. He wasn’t fooled. He knew it would be cold. But if he knew how cold, I don’t doubt he wouldn’t have done it. Finally, the two leapt in. After the initial splash, his small blond head appeared above the water, gasping for air and scrabbling desperately for the boat. He hauled himself on board, every muscle in his body drawn tight and cried, “Help me”!

Now he had a means to swim without the accompanying near-death experience and was keen to do so at every opportunity. So out on the fjord, once the anchor was down, he immediately donned his dry suit and climbed in to the water. It was a little breezy and the water was choppy as he bobbed around, singing and calling out to us, so my husband rowed after him in a rubber dinghy so he wouldn’t blow out to sea. It was an absurd sight – a loud child in an inflated orange suit flailing about in the freezing water and a grown man paddling after him.

The last time he used his suit sticks in my mind as the most bizarre. We had anchored in a quiet spot with friends, who were fishing from the back of the boat. My son was in the water in his suit and my husband after him again in the dinghy as his support crew. There seemed to be a lot going on at the same time when our friend hooked a cod – a really big one. When she hauled it in, she found the hook buried deep in the fish and while she struggled to remove it, the fish flailed in her arms. Meanwhile, my son, doing his own flailing, swam – as well as one can swim in an air-filled suit – back toward the boat to look at the fish. With the hook removed, our friend posed for a photo with the massive cod in her arms like some kind of fishy baby, as the fish – almost done for now – released its bowels in a stinking mess onto the deck. Finally, she slid the spent fish back into the sea. After an initial encouraging squirm – in retrospect, perhaps a convulsion – the fish faltered, rose to the surface and floated there, its pale belly turned ignominiously to the heavens. As we looked on dolefully, my son saw an opportunity to maximise his suit use and launched himself out to retrieve the long-suffering fish. But just as this splashing orange child was about to reach out and grab it, the fish – unable to bear this final injustice – slid beneath the water and was gone.