I Spent a Week Training for a Nude Solstice Swim

Tasmania is home to the the annual Nude Solstice Swim, which sees hundreds of people strip naked and take to the brutally freezing waters of Hobart's Long Beach to celebrate the end of . This year, I will be taking part in the event for the first time. I am not feeling prepared.

Dark Mofo

When the reality that I'd be shrinking my bits in front of hundreds of strangers dawned on me, my friend Dani Leever came to mind. Not because I was thinking about her naked. Well, actually, I kind of was—Dani is a life model and has a habit of dancing naked at festivals like Burning Seed. So I decided to call and grab some tips on getting my junk out in front of so many people. This is what she had to say:

"Being naked in front of strangers, hey? Sure, it sounds confronting, but this is why I've found it immensely beneficial and comforting: when you're in front of people naked—whether you're dancing or being drawn or just having a conversation—you have nothing to hide behind. It's the most realistic, vulnerable, and authentic version of yourself you can be. You can't pretend, you can't be fake. You can only be your free and exposed self. They're looking at you with nothing else outside of your body to influence their perception of you. If you have a conversation with someone when you're both nude, can you really tell me it's not one of the most honest and uncomfortably comfortable experiences you'll have?"

She makes a good point.

You wouldn't think of swimming in near-arctic temperatures as something that people do for fun on the regular, but a quick Google search reveals that 'iceberging' is actually a popular, if slightly masochistic, pastime. Matthew Paynter, a veteran iceberger and director of Melbourne's Brighton Baths Health Club, reckons there's no better feeling.

"It's a shot to your endorphins," he tells VICE. "It lifts your spirits and and it connects you back to nature. Swimming in salt water is really good for you because you're not exposed to harmful pool chemicals. Being in tune with the extremes of temperature in both summer and winter is really good for you, kind of like eating in-season fruit."

But how can I go about preparing my body for Tasmania's icy embrace? Is it possible to build up a tolerance to cold water over time? Matthew says there's very little point in trying to prepare. "It's freezing every single time, no matter if you've been doing it every day or not," he says. Oh, okay.

So it's all very well swimming in cold water, but what about doing it naked? I needed to get a qualified nudist perspective on the whole thing, so I called up Phil from the Metro East Nudist Leisure Club. Since 1980, the club has hosted monthly social skinny dipping nights in south east Melbourne. Phil is as hardcore a naturist as they come, but even he had reservations about getting his kit off in the middle of a Tasmanian winter. Still, he reckons that hundreds of people collectively taking their clothes off can only equal good times.

"It's a very liberating thing," he tells me. "People are ten times more social than they are with clothes on. And you're only aware you're naked for the first ten seconds. After that it's so ordinary that you stop noticing. I do not see people naked anymore; they'd have to do something very particular to draw attention to themselves."

Don't people get competitive about their bodies in this kind of context? "Some people are doing it for the athletic challenge, and you might get more of that happening at Dark Mofo," he admits. "But the true nudist does it as a social experience." Cool—what I'm hearing is that I'm about to meet a bunch of wet, naked new friends. The best kind.

I'm still finding it hard to get my head around the idea of being naked in public on purpose. In the majority of scenarios, slipping into your birthday suit in front of a bunch of strangers might get you arrested. Even women going topless to breastfeed their babies can get thrown out of restaurants, which is why nude activists like McKenzie Raymond from Sydney-based feminist group F Collective actively participate in nude swimming events to raise awareness about outdated views on gender and the body. In her opinion, the nude swim is a prime opportunity to make a political statement.

"I've participated in nude swims in the past that have been shut down by riot police," she says. "So it's cool for something like this [the Nude Solstice Swim] to happen. Being naked in the ocean is an amazing feeling. It's also really empowering for people of different body types to get together, and especially for women. For some reason there's a weird age cut off for being naked at the beach—we let babies and male toddlers run around naked, but little girls are conditioned from a very young age to cover themselves. Even if they're ten years away from puberty. Why do we do it?"

Tasmania, we have a nude swim team. Does one person count as a team? Maybe not. So join me—this year's Nude Solstice Swim will be taking place at precisely 7:42am on Tuesday June 21. You can register for the free event here.

This article is presented in partnership with Qantas. Discover your curious side, with more flights to Tasmania available now. You can book your visit at qantas.com